Is ZK Net-Positive?

Transcript

All right, I'm going to take a moment uh to get a little political to make everyone uncomfortable cuz that's what I do. >> Okay. >> Um when we think about these technologies, we can talk about the technicals, which is very important, why they work, but we also have to think about how they're used as well as the world of tomorrow, right? And a lot of what people are worried about and one of the reasons that people embrace Ethereum, they embrace Bitcoin is the control you have over your money that you don't have with centralized currencies. But you also have the fears about censorship, the fears about the surveillance state that's being developed in different places without me being specific. But what's important

when we consider about all of these things is how these various technologies, zero knowledge proofs and the entities that create them and manage them uh what their ethics are, how they are compliant while also staying true to the communities that use them. So my question is kind of hypothetical. it comes around to a use case I can think of for zero knowledge proofs and let's say we have this world of tomorrow could be the whole world it could be a certain state it could be whatever but we have an individual could be Edward Snowden right and he wants to give a talk to speak on the subject of government surveillance information being released

so on and so forth and he has to prove to someone who is going to interview him that he is who he is >> but at the same time protecting himself without revealing his location, without revealing certain factors about himself that would incriminate or you know put him in danger. Right? So take Zcash, take any entity that might in the future create certain technologies to protect such an individual in such a situation. How do they balance a mission that protects the ethics of someone like that or creates a use case for someone like that who we as a community might identify with because they're trying to do something good, you know, but at the

same time trying to be compliant with people who make the rules who might be doing something bad inherently. That's my question. >> Okay. Well, I I don't get the the framing. I got I got I got the snow warrant which is like talking about a use case but you started off with the political side. So do you have like a direct question there? So I could like >> that that's basically it like honestly like this subject a lot of people get really wrapped up in it because it becomes political right because to support someone like Snowden are you inherently against the government that might have its own interests right and you know it could be any political parties or whatever but they support the state. It becomes kind of a question of that when you're really saying like this person should be free to share this

information. This technology should be able to be used to um create some kind of situation where this person can create value for others. Um in the same way that you have something like tornado cash. It has a dual use. You have people who are literally just trying to be private with their transactions. You have people who are literally stealing money from people. >> Yeah. So um on the political side I think every technology will be used by the both sides. Let's call them both sides. Transparency is being used maliciously or nobody is calling the people who you know annotate everything that you've done on chain to be able to sell this

data or to be able to like you know compute this data and sell it or profit from it or use it to track you or use it to like you know alienate you from certain services because they notice that you made a donation to a certain course that doesn't like and automatically blacklist your wallet or something like that. So nobody's chasing after these guys and based on the definition of uh the other guys, they're also bad guys. So I think every tech would be used by um the two sides effectively.

But one of the most important part of ZK is that you could do something called selective disclosure. So you don't necessarily have to be fully private or handon. I think it just gives you the the right to be able to disclose to be able to make the decision to disclose what you want to disclose. Not just to say for example now going into the use case um Exodian or any other uh person wants to prove that they are who they are. There are so many means aides I don't want to go into government because it might not be related across all cases. It could be voice or they could annotate their voice on chain,

create a PGP key for their voice. It could be based on the sound spectrums and all that and um it could be their iris like word ID. It could be it could be anything. So the point is to be able to uh I think but the most general one is like your passport or your IDs. And I think even if we want to use passports if it's applicable in this case the ZK passport for example you could uh take your phone install the app just tap your passport to the back put some particular information that you want to share and uh they get to see only the information you share. They don't get to see the color of your passport. They don't get to see your picture in the passport if

you don't want them to see it. They don't get to see your date of birth if only what you want to show them is your ISSR or R >> or maybe your location when you submit the >> G. So they don't get to be able to you only choose what but they know there's an attestation on the passport that means it's valid. So um and that's one there's your IRS if you use the um world ID hub. I have personal beef with them but that doesn't matter. It's a great tech. If you use that to scan your iris, you do proof of person and it is encrypted on chain and there's a ash key that shows that this is you. And anywhere you put this ash key, they can't they can only verify this is you. They can't actually

see your eyes color or or your whatever. Do you understand? They only get to see that particular set of information. So I think select selective disclosure is also so if you don't want to be and then there are a lot of products there's privacy pools they have um the they are the good guys of tornado cash so they have compliance privacy compliance features not directly linking to the government just based on your wallet transactions with particular addresses that's been indexed and if you want to use them good if you want to literally our tornado ash right now. Create an instance by yourself and send a transaction to somebody. Good for

you. So like I think that's also the beauty of the blockchain and beauty of privacy. Everyone gets to decide how they want to use it. Everyone gets to decide which product they want to use. Um I wouldn't support using a product that is not open source because that's when they could be, you know, they could claim things on their website and they're doing opposite. So far it's open source. So far I don't even care about the founders most of the times. I have opposite beliefs with the founders most of the times but I can see their code. I can audit their code. I can see the product itself. I know it does what I want it to do for me then I'm fine with it. So yeah I think so going back to the political side people would use everything for people could use microphone to harm someone could use it

to speak. People could wear shirts to protect themselves. People could yeah you could so there's always going to be two sides of it. It just uh I think one of the most important parts which is giving uh the decisions for this for your personal data privacy is a right like it's not just a property is not a future a feature rather and um you know you having the decision you having the ability to be able to decide who gets to see this data or who doesn't get to see it it's a very very important part and that's the role ZK is playing >> I appreciate that answer and also bringing it back to what you said as well about you know you may not know who someone is right like we we had that

period of DeFi summer even myself I was like anonymous you know but it's like the code speaks for itself there's merit behind the code and if you don't understand the code there's plenty of people you can trust who are also looking through this people who audit it so on and so forth and there's always so many ways even if like you don't like the ethos of someone behind a particular project or something whether it's forking the code or just realizing we're decentralized we're bigger than our founders right Our founders are so egotistical that they have such a controlling interest in their communities. They're probably not the project that they are anyway, like Zcash, which is clearly like bigger than just one founder. Exactly.

>> Um Yeah. And and also just to kind of clarify what you said too, um it sounds essentially like what projects like Zcash and others, you're really collecting the most minimal amount of information to prove something. So you don't even have to be in that ballpark when it comes to dealing with a a compliance issue where you have to choose between protecting the privacy of your user or or giving information to be compliant. It sounds like you gather the least amount of information and put the user in control of what they need to verify. >> Exactly. And I think one of the um one of the magic part of ZK is the fact that I could um prove ownership of a particular property, but the person I'm actually sending this data to doesn't

even have access to it. It's not on their database. Do you understand? It is encrypted. >> They can't even decrypt it. But using >> prop um Z MPCs or stuffs like that, they could do computations on the encrypted data. >> I think that's like super beautiful. It means that you don't have to rely on the founder just waking up the next day and being like, you know what, I'm sending all your data to this particular organization or this particular organization or anything like this set of informations are literally encrypted. you won't have the problem that happened with Coinbase for example where customer support leaked the data of like you know millions of people and it has been on until nobody knew that you understand on

the dark where people are selling it so >> and uh yeah I think that's one of the you know the most important part or very very vital part also >> yeah I love it that's why I don't support centralized entities so >> all right awesome thank you >> you're welcome