ZK Podcast: Year end and end of an era with Anna & Fredrik

Transcript

[Music] welcome to xero knowledge a podcast where we talk about the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web the show is hosted by me anna and me frederick a big thank you to returning sponsor leased authority they've been a long-standing sponsor actually sponsoring us quite often over the last say six months and so big thank you to them for the support leased authority is a security

consulting company known for their dedication to pushing the limits on how to build privacy respecting solutions they are a team of security researchers cryptographers open source developers and privacy advocates passionate about advancing the security of projects on the blockchain they're known for their security audits like the eth2 specification protocol labs gossip sub protocol atomics library wallet and smart contracts for tesla's foundation block stack's investor wallet centrifuges tin leg 3.0 and more their independent reviews improve the security of the technology by immediately helping the developers of the projects along with the users and when the reports are published the broader community can benefit from this shared knowledge

now this is why leased authority is a sponsor of the zk podcast they recognize the potential for zero knowledge proofs and protocols to improve the scalability of projects and the privacy of users now if you want to follow what leased authority has in store be it security audit reports upcoming events open source contributions and product development initiatives do join their mailing list subscribe at leastauthority.com newsletter so thank you again leased authority now here is our end of year and end of an era zk podcast wrap up episode [Music] so we made it end of 2020 it's uh an interesting year

i don't know it's i think it's a year that when i look at it and think about it like i think it's definitely hit other people harder than it has hit me because i'm like such an introvert anyway and usually don't leave my house anyway and have worked remotely for 10 years like all of this stuff is kind of normal to me but then every once in a while i talk to someone who it's not normal for and they're really suffering and i i feel with those people who've like had to shift around their entire social circle and and the way they work and everything else it's it's been a lot for people

yeah it's funny to like to come you know i just before we started recording here we were talking about last year's episode so we've been doing these end-of-year episodes now this is the third one i guess is it wait is it the third one is it the fourth one i think it's actually the fourth one because we did one like right after we had started in the fall i think we did one with merrick we did one with utah and then last year we did one just the two of us yeah you're probably right as it's the fourth time that we're doing this now thinking back to last year's episode and like where we were at to where we're at now it's been uh i think everyone would say this but it's

like been a journey i don't know if anyone would have really heard much from the podcast though because we were always doing it sort of like from afar like we were we you and i and i don't know if people realized that like we were rarely in the same space yeah uh over the last few years so we we are almost always calling in over zoom and then we're recording locally um so we're quite quite used to seeing frederick in that little window [Laughter] yeah no that's true it's actually weird when we did it in person there there was a time in maybe 2018 that we were in a studio together once a month or something right but um no the norm is remote i mean all our

guests are remote too right so like we ran out of projects interview in berlin we have to start calling people in um yeah so like i said it's it's normal in some ways and and obviously not normal in others but it's been a it's been a good year for the podcast too i mean we've we've hit everything uh much thanks to you and less so thanks to me but we we didn't miss a a week as we've not missed anything since our dedication to going weekly it's pretty impressive three years now without missing a single episode and this past year we did 52 episodes plus a bonus episode we've also had two summits i i did 13

study clubs all amidst a global pandemic i thought that was kind of yeah telegram group it's growing steadily as well has a lot of activity more than i can keep up with i had to tune out at some point just i couldn't keep up anymore do try to check in to see if i'm pinged like if i if anyone notifies me like at me i usually see it not immediately because i don't have the notifications on but i do like go back and look if i was pinged anywhere um good to know but yeah it's it's and tons of good content as well for this year right despite the pandemic a lot has happened in blockchain world in the past year and i think some of the big big like

highlights outside of you know what we talked about on the show necessarily but i mean in your world polka dot launching and we have talked about that already i think in our ama but that was like when did that actually it was like july yeah so it that that's the thing is like when when especially when talking to other people you talk about a launch and it's like oh that that was a day right that was like one big event well i mean yes and no like it started for me in april-ish maybe even earlier like mid-march and it didn't really wrap up until maybe september so that was like a good half year that i was like on launch um because there's

i mean the way we launched polkadot as well with like staged rollouts of various features and blah blah blah it becomes a very long thing and then there's like obviously pre-work and post-work and you gotta do a lot of management around it so yeah it became a like the majority of my year for sure and there were some other projects that came out that we'd talked to over the years like and i'm thinking there's actually quite a few projects that came out new cipher uh near falcoin so there's some of the l1s also some of the l2s that have been sort of hinted at and when you go to the zk space space and we'll get to that actually a little bit later on but like there's been a and this to me was the

year that things that we'd been talking about or things that had been promised finally came due and it's pretty awesome to see them in action even if they're not all fully in action because some of the l ones i'd say are still sort of like in a in a mid state like they they're not fully the i mean even if you look at eth2 eth2 is like in a very very frozen state but they launched so they're out there i mean it's just goes back to the point of like what is even a launch i mean we say that polka dot is launched but it doesn't have parent chains yet so i mean it hasn't really fully launched until parachains exist

um so everyone is doing these staged rollouts now where even eth right they just had their first phase one and it's probably years honestly until it's useful and so yeah like launch isn't this like one big thing anymore it's you know you you provide the the spark of creation and then you leave it up to the community to say okay now take it somewhere um that's actually i think eth was phase zero that was the the term i mean they got in kind of under the wire there i felt there was like somebody had like challenged them to a duel or like bet them uh a beer or something i bet

you won't get it out before 20 to the end of 2020 they did it i feel i don't know i i honestly i feel tired i do i mean i know everyone's very excited that there's a rally and pride like we're getting this end-of-year bounce although we're recording this like 10 days before the end of the year so who knows what's gonna happen in that time but roughly there's some end of your balance and i know there's a lot of people who are very excited i i really feel like it's been a great year but it's been a like it's got it's one of these years that you that you got to take stock of and you got to look back and you got to think these are the good things these are the bad things and this is what we gotta shift yeah kind of going forward

so with these kind of end-of-year episodes i mean one of the things i think we did this last year too was sort of run down some of the topics or some of the episodes that stood out to us yeah and like going through it what what do you have what do you remember from this year's episodes this year i remember less in part because i was more busy more other stuff going on um but also i wasn't involved in all of them right and i think there were some really good ones that i that i wasn't involved in but for me it usually comes back like the stuff that i remember i've talked about this on the show before is where i learned something myself and where like i'm i am have some personal interest in it

and i think all of the like the ones we did on theory level stuff like fractal redshift those are interesting to me but i have a hard time like connecting it to how i'm going to like i'm not going to sit down and use this tech tomorrow so although maybe one day exactly but like that's that's on the like applicability level right where i'm am i learning something that i'm going to use tomorrow um those kinds of things stick very well for me even though i think those episodes are really good i did learn a lot from them something that stuck for me more was like ck games where this is something like oh yeah this is i can play this game tomorrow or maybe

i'll you know code up some game or like do something like this and i like that gets me excited for sure yeah that was such a great one that's the episode we did with brian goo talking about zk game or dark forest i think it's one of my it's one of my favorites we like i was listening to it again actually recently and unfortunately the audio that we recorded wasn't as good as some of our other episodes but i i still think like just that story i remember with speaking with you after after the the episode as well and you were you were like this is the kind of stuff that i've been wanting to see like something that's so engageable and using xero knowledge proofs and i know you've brought it up since then too it's kind of like the yeah the beacon example of of um like an

application where it's actually used for something that people can relate to mm-hmm and they actually i don't know like they went on to do i don't know if everyone has has seen that who's listening we didn't actually have them on the show but uh they presented a new zk game that they created called boat fight at the zk summit to sort of round out the zk summit six it just happened in november um it was like a mini game i don't think it's what they're focused on but i really do hope that they continue to develop that too because it was like just it was a little faster and easier whereas dark forest which i did get addicted to is a grinder like this is this is a life suck in a way like you're gonna lose sleep and you're

gonna forget to eat which is awesome but also yeah not for casual fun gaming it's it's it's the real deal i always felt like that the way to play dark forest is to write a bot that plays it for you like i feel like that's what if you can can you yes you can i guess so eh that wasn't is that what all those leaderboard people are doing damn it i think another one that stuck out to me in on the topic of like me personally learning was the i saw janiece episode because it's like a topic that i've heard thrown around it's something that was vaguely applicable to what i was working on but i never really understood it and i think it was uh

maybe it was because i put more research into it before the episode but i i also feel like i walked away actually knowing how it worked and like um had a good intuitive understanding which is is hard to get i think on that front for me one of the best episodes and one i've cited a few times was the one we did on consensus with itai abraham i found that i mean that clearly struck a nerve it like it clarified a lot of things for me and i think that's probably why i keep citing it i also think he's he's just a really excellent explainer he really thinks about how to explain what he's talking about and it was kind

of a joy to have him on yeah i i think it's good to have sort of quote unquote this same episode a couple of times like we've had at least two other episodes on consensus but it's one of these things like there's you know many examples of this in my life where i've had something explained or something where i was walked through something or whatever and i felt like at the time yeah i get it and then you walk away you forget it or like it didn't really like you didn't really get that intuitive understanding and didn't really grasp it or crock it and then it's explained some other way or with some other intonation and it's it you it clicks and um i think it is good to have the same kind

of topics on on a sort of regular cadence and you know we should never expect that our listeners go back and listen to 300 or whatever there are 150 other 160 yeah we're not quite at 300. there was an episode that you weren't on but that i very much enjoyed doing which was kind of an unusual episode which was like the sushi swap episode which was a crossover episode with hasu's uncommon core podcast and tyrone was also on that one it was kind of an unusual format i think it ended up being like two hours in total there was one episode's worth on the zero knowledge podcast one episode's

worth on uncommon core and then a bonus part because it was recorded like like the day that uniswap was release their token they released it like later that day or the next morning or something and so it was so it's kind of unfortunate timing because at the end of that episode we're all pontificating on whether they should or if they will and we're like nah and then it's like immediately proven wrong before we could even publish it so yeah we ended up doing kind of a bonus on that one but i thought that was so much fun because it was such a saga it was actually a story and there's a few episodes like that in the past too like the sean beau episode or i think there's an episode of zuko that was like very much like a story

trying to remember what oh yeah zuko and his trusted setup story i think so there's like there's a few of those episodes where we really got to like feel the drama despite it being a very technical space we kind of felt that that drama and i think the sushi swap saga had a bit of that one that you and i both did was also quite narrative and i this one stands out to me because josh is amazing but having josh cincinnati finally come on the show was just a lot of fun and he's just really like he's gotta have a podcast yeah i think that was a good episode too and it was a somewhat complex topic that we covered a bit political but

i think we managed to do it in a good way and actually got a note afterwards uh from someone saying that we handled it pretty well with like relative objectivity despite obviously telling it from josh's point of view one thing that actually influenced sort of what i ended up doing was like the trusted setup review so i did this trusted setup review which was just kind of showcasing what trusted setups had happened up to that point and this was in the summer and what's interesting is since then i actually have had a chance to work with two teams doing trusted setups one of which is live now which is plumo for cello c labs but it was actually that podcast and learning about how it worked and then

realizing like there's not that many people in the world who know that and i'm really glad that i got a chance to record it and then also share it because now a lot more people do know it they know what the experience of going through setting up one of these trusted setups is like they hopefully have some sense of like how frustrating it is but also how it's kind of this it's not a labor of love what's the word for like a group of people going through something together whatever that is it's something that people have to go through together and uh they seem to come out the other end you know in a good mood and then there's there's a few projects that i just want to kind of do a shout out to because you know the zero knowledge podcast starting as a blockchain podcast and

evolving into a zero knowledge podcast last year i feel like it was focused very much on the new protocol development the new kind of ideas the new research there was like snark timber one of the whatever one of these but this year it was like projects that we've you know basically the things we've been hinting at or the ideas that have been floated they started to actually come live and some examples of that would be like hermes lupring macy diversify and also projects like elio that are sexy the sexy curve from the ground up and i mean by live some of them are still on test net but like the engineering is happening now and at a

professional level not just at a poc level so i think that's been pretty awesome there's one episode that i can remember but honestly not for its contents i do remember there were some interesting discussions but i can't really pinpoint exactly what they were and it's the episode with vitalik and justin and the reason i remember it is just this setting was so crazy it was at the start of february the pandemic had like i think it had been announced a pandemic but i'm not exactly sure it hadn't really hit the us yet there weren't any travel bans we were all in san francisco at the stanford blockchain conference

and we were meeting up with vitalik and justin afterwards went out to their like big mansion that they had rented with the holy team and we were sitting in this room and metallic was sick i know he was very sick so we're like he coughed a lot i think we cut it out of a pandemic with like interviewing someone who's sick like in their house like house but it's uh yeah i don't know there was some some interesting sort of it was an interesting episode to learn what goes on at youth research that isn't just like oh we're doing this new consensus algorithm like it what they work on is pretty broad and i think that

that's the interesting highlight of that episode i also thought with that one i mean i thought i'd love to have them on again or someone else from that team on again but i think it's really good that we did that that sort of episode as an introduction to what we're digging into i mean actually i would say i have since then you know had macy and there's a few other projects that are deep in the e3 like the eth research team what do they call it the zk working group or something like the zero knowledge team like focused on that research i have had a few of those projects on or i will have a few of them on but i do i would love to have uh justin and vitalik or one or the other come back on and actually continue that conversation

like take it that next level because i do think it was quite introductory and i'm sure we could talk about a lot more stuff so i think that covers a lot of the episodes that we remember but there is a full selection of episodes and the truth is a lot of the time it'll come up in conversation maybe in a future episode and then i'll remember like this key point from an episode i guess what i'm trying to say here is like none of my children are my favorite or something there's like i'm trying to make sure that that everybody knows that i think it's also unlikely that what we remember is what other people remember like i i don't feel like there's like oh this episode is just clearly objectively better than all the others

and therefore listen to that one like this is our subjective list of just random stuff right where if someone else went through all the 53 episodes then they probably come out with a different list of favorites so yeah just hearkening back to that distance between the 2019 episode and this one back then i had you know just picture like i was both of us we were just looking out at this big open year i expected to be traveling the whole time like i had been i also had a few projects lined up that didn't work out one of them or didn't work out last year so one of them and this i've been asked

a few times about this last year there was a planned snarks kind of course a coursera course and it actually was partially completed when the whole lockdown happened and it unfortunately delayed and kind of yeah it pushed back what we had planned now i know that there is still hope for that course and it is something that continues to be like a possible thing to release next year the only thing that's tricky is that zero knowledge research stuff moves quickly and so hopefully when we release it it's still viable we may have to record some of it to make it happen but

for anyone who's been asking and i have gotten a few emails about that that is still in the works i want to apologize that you know it's one of the projects like i'm very proud of the projects that did come through but this is unfortunately one that hasn't yet i do like to deliver on on the things i say i'm gonna do on the other side of that though on a more positive note the zero knowledge validator i think this past year came into its own because i mean just picture i think it started in the summer of 2019 we had our first node in the cosmos like in the set in november i believe so last year it was still a pretty kind of minor project we weren't sure how it was going to go we weren't sure

if it would be well received the xero knowledge validator being the like an entity that i created with will harbour and what we do is we are a validator on numerous l1s that have proof of stake and using the funds that we generate we have kind of various ways of connecting those l1s with the zero knowledge community or championing zero knowledge proof research or development on those l1s and we're looking for all sorts of ways that we can basically focus in on that one topic and be the representative in a way on these different networks anyway i'm very pleased with how that's turned out and yeah i don't know random random side note plug for something i'm doing sorry um i was told this year that i don't chill

which is hilarious because like the moment someone tweeted that at me i feel like i just became a terrible terrible shill and i i'm sorry and i'll do my best to go back to normal as soon as possible but i don't know i also want to be proud sometimes is be proud too lame i don't know how to say that no i think it's it's good to be proud of what you do and feel like you can talk about it like it's not all talking about something is chilling either it is actually like a an interesting topic to talk about shilling because like everyone has a slightly different interpretation of the word and many have a negative connotation but also many don't right i i think that's

you know as i look at crypto communities in particular right there's one community that oddly i respect more than most others and it's like the wall street bets uh type of people who are so upfront with just like i'm here for the money i'm gonna like play this game to gain as much as i can and that's why they're here and it's very honest and open and like yeah they're shilling but you know that they're chilling you know why they're chilling there's no there's nothing else going on and um i think i think as long as you are open and honest and just like know why you're doing something and

being honest with that like chilling can be a good thing for sure yeah i like i actually was just thinking about this the other day which is like this idea of intellectual honesty in this space you feel it a lot people have either publicly or not publicly they have tokens they they have stake in something sometimes like you know if you look at the vcs or the even the angel investors like they're gonna they're gonna be really heavily positioned and that will influence what they think is cool and what they think is lame and depending on how convincing they are and sometimes like how in transparent they are people might be buying into what they're saying and

believing it as like truly thoughtful fact when when there there is there's an interest in in their thought leadership there's like a a reason that they're highlighting something over another but i don't know like the trouble is is like it's so normal it's so natural very human i don't know how and i don't know that i'm not guilty of that sometimes too like i'm sure that i have friends in certain teams that give me bias towards them i i have everyone has biases but i think i mean this is a thing that comes up with like youtube reviewers all the time too right where can i trust this reviewer is he actually going to give an honest review or like he's he got this camera or whatever from the manufacturer obviously he's not gonna be

honest but then like something i've learned from watching youtube reviews is you just need to learn that person and their biases right and i i think uh mkbhdu's very big reviewer has an episode on this where he talks about you know you have to watch his episodes to learn learn what he is what his biases are what he likes and dislikes and then you view his stuff with that lens right i'm not gonna watch an mpk bhd video with the same lens as a linus tech tips video because they're very different people who like different kinds of stuff and have very different biases

the problem in crypto space is personalities and like entities aren't so well developed that i can you know subscribe to a person and then know after a couple of whatever that this is their bias this is what they think and this is like where they're coming from um it's all very sneaky it's all very trying to hide the bias rather than bringing it to the fourth and saying like here's my bias and you know listen to me with this in mind and there's also a lot like shady like actually shady tactics like buying twitter accounts and having puppet you know reddit users although i mean this kind of stuff that was invented in silicon valley that wasn't invented in crypto

yeah sure sure i mean it exists maybe it was invented somewhere else i don't know it's just in other places we have found more or less effective ways of filtering that out right here we haven't really found a way to address that yet yeah and i think there's i mean i think now it's been three years actually more than three years of being in the space three years that we've been doing the podcast i'm actually really pleased with the fact that i don't think we've had at least not many projects on that i would say ended up being real crappy yeah there are there are a few that maybe have evolved a lot and there's some that maybe had tough endings

but the people that we had on i would say for the most part they came in good faith and i don't think we had too many people who i felt like came with some agenda or were like really ready to like towards some goal yeah i think people that we've had i think it's a combo of both being picky and who we choose and like doing a bit of research ourselves and looking at it and critically but also just like it's hard to on a very technical topic for an hour like yeah it gets tricky like it's easy to in 140 characters but uh when you're actually sitting down

and talking about something deeply for an hour it gets really hard so i think we should chat now a bit about you and what you have planned big announcements that might or might not be spoiled by the title of this episode i'm not sure what we will title it but maybe i think we probably should spoil it by the title but yeah the big announcement is i'm i'm leaving the show and we'll see what leaving really means uh i don't think it's my last episode ever but um yeah we've touched on this already a little

bit where most of this year was taken up by launch stuff for me so like back in april all throughout june basically there were a lot of episodes that i've missed already and you've brought in other co-hosts and um [Music] back then it was 100 like a time thing it was just not possible for me to to take an hour and a half a week um but a couple other things that i think people are mostly aware of but like i don't talk about a lot is during that whole same time i was moving to berlin i had a small baby that's slightly over one year now um starting to demand more attention and

like when a three month old mostly sleeps all day i could game or or record an episode of a podcast while she was sleeping gets harder and harder and so i as i'm gaining time back now from launch being done i do want to spend time on that instead and even though like an hour and a half a week isn't that much time what i've found and like as i've tried to get back um into this what i found that i struggle with is if i treat it as that as just an hour and a half a week it's not very satisfying for me or i think for the guest because i don't put in the research that

i want to put in i don't come to it like with enough thought and enough like presence of mind that i want to be in the episode with so in at the end of the day i think it turns out to be a worse episode i think it's unfair to the guests to not really come prepared and if i really want to do it the way i want to do it then i don't know that it's it's the presence of mind thing that's the biggest thing for me it's like i need to like get amped up i need to feel like i really want to do this interview and if i know that i'm neglecting something else then i can't really do that and i think maybe this is also the way that the

pandemic has affected me the most is that because we moved right at the start of this there were a lot of things just in in life that didn't really pan out the way it should have which is like sending her daughter to kindergarten was extremely difficult and took longer and and a bunch of problems there weren't really any parent groups because they weren't allowed to meet anymore so it's been much more taxing on my wife more than me um but that also means that i want to make sure that i actually take the time now to to not have it be that taxing on her

yeah and there's a lot of just life stuff in general as well as like work stuff obviously that that plays into my choice here um yes so i do want to say like this year it was in i think it was around april march april that we kind of agreed that you would that i would do more of the episodes and that i'd also like i kind of suggested it i think i was like there's some other folks that i want to see what it's like doing some guest hosting with them and to me the way that i i mean i've known about this decision a little longer than our listeners um and i'm obviously i feel like it's a bit of the end of an era

because it was three years that we did this show together as anna and frederick doing zero knowledge but i do feel like in the last year it was like you were starting to sort of step away anyways and so it's not shocking and hopefully for our listeners it's not devastating i hope you'll keep listening um but at the same time it is the end of a chapter of this podcast i mean this podcast came up because you wanted to do it you had this idea of having a technical podcast that you couldn't quite find in what was out there at the time we were both working at parity and jack franchum stepped up and basically said

i want to join too we started this as a three-person podcast and then soon it became a two-person podcast and i think most people have only known it that way but i i think of this three-year journey i mean what's i think it's sad but i also think it's timed interestingly like it's a bookend in a way to these three years and if you think back to where we started as people and as as professionals in this space i guess we can call us that like it's been a long it's we've come a long way i think yeah for sure i mean the the difference between not even the first but like the first year of episodes and content um to now

is is for sure night and day both in gear and tech and editing and mixing and post-processing as well as interviewing and and um general content production i think it's it's a big difference and yeah i think it's in a weird way it is perhaps uh a less dramatic change for us because the same thing has happened with the summit right where we did the first summit where i was participating quite a lot yeah you were still programmed it with me though i think yeah but you're still the one like arranging it and fixing all the venue and everything like

um that was actual work but i was involved and then over time i got less involved with some of the last two i think i haven't been involved at all um the study club i've basically never been involved in so the zk brand has grown and it's grown without me and beyond me and so it i think it's pretty natural for us that i step away from the podcast and it's your podcast i i don't know what it will be like for the listeners i don't think i don't think it would be or should be a large upset because yeah we've like like you said we've already done lots of episodes without me i think

we've proven that the content can be great anyway maybe but i would say this like i think there is something about the combo of of you and i doing these interviews and i do hope and i think that we've we've talked about this i think when when the time is right you're gonna be back for for sure for some guest episodes guest host episodes and who knows where you're at in the future maybe there's a moment where you do feel like joining again and obviously the door is absolutely open i think it's been a real kind of pleasure working with you so yeah likewise i do think um looking back at the three years i i do think there is a lot

uh accomplished a lot to be proud of i mean it is definitely no small fee to go weekly on a podcast especially on a topic like this i i remember when we first like at the very first inception of the podcast we were thinking monthly and then i don't know why we switched to weekly it's just this was your idea okay you were like i think you were like it only works like audiences only grow if you do it weekly you would you'd seen this you knew this somehow and i was like what that's insanity how do we fill like 40 minutes per week and now actually most of the episodes are about an hour i did i do remember thinking we would

definitely not be able to like keep it up that we would miss here and there but that's fine but then we ended up not missing anything it was pretty cool i want to ask you a few kind of questions as we kind of wrap up this three-year journey like we started remember we started it was a blockchain podcast it was not a zero knowledge podcast and i actually wanted to ask you i wanna i wanna hear what you're thinking like i don't know if you actually entered it with a ton of optimism of like blockchain's gonna save the world but like over these years like where do you stand on that front do you feel hopeful or do you feel less hopeful like knowing what you've learned

i still feel hopeful but it definitely goes in waves i remember talking about this with the episode with the guy from least authority whose name i can't remember i'm sorry but um i said that i entered the space almost purely out of technological interest you know from a coding perspective working on p2p protocols and consensus algorithms and networking and all this stuff is super fascinating but relatively quickly and actually went more into a philosophical direction i kind of realized as i was working on it then hey actually this can have

a really transformative effect it can have a huge impact on society and then i think over the past three years we've seen more and more instances of these centralized entities abusing their power and every time i see someone abuse their power it's just like no we actually need to fix this this is going to be terrible that's interesting because for when i see those things to me it's more like there's more inevitability like it's not so much oh that's bad and we gotta fix it but it's more like that is going to get washed away in time because it doesn't work it's lost the hearts and minds of people they're not trusting this at all

it's going to be really hard to get people to trust what's coming but like to me it's just like it's actually signs that this is happening yeah yeah i do i do get that feeling every once in a while too like i have this internal discussion of like do people care about privacy one day i'm like yeah i think they do and another day i'm like no they definitely don't care about privacy um and i think it's the same kind of thing here where do people care about whether people whether like businesses are tracking them online or not which is sort of privacy sort of not but then i i do also get back to like no i like i see this problem i think i know

what a technological solution could be like i find it weird and fascinating that browsers are now starting to take the fight on tracking when browsers were the things that a lot like introduced tracking in the first place like if you think about it browsers are the thing that that invented cookies they're the things that lets businesses track you why not just make a browser that bans those things but who's who's fighting it you mean like mozilla or like apple is definitely on the forefront of taking up the fight on privacy like safari has in content like tracking and

it's not great but like it's something and like there's a big fight now between facebook and apple because facebook is seeing what apple is doing as detrimental to their business they can't track people anymore um and so they're really pissed at apple but it's just like annoying that it has to be like this big centralized entity like apple that goes in and says actually our competitive advantage over google is that we we have a business model that doesn't require tracking people therefore we can go strong on privacy and try to attack google that way like it's not because they care about people obviously it's because they it gives them a competitive edge whereas

google's entire business relies on tracking people so they can't offer privacy it's so funny because i think of like privacy and blockchain as sort of i mean i think maybe earlier on i thought they were very intertwined but now i think of them as quite separate and i think of the example you gave of like google and the browsers being in the business model being about trackability but they're also in a way not so much anymore but their whole philosophy was more transparent apple was always more shadow figure and closed and so privacy sort of fits in their motto and i think that blockchain privacy in a way i mean yes every

every l1 that we speak to is like trying to build something in or wants to build something but like i also think there are differing forces here and it's going to be very interesting to see like what i was talking about before with the inevitability i think was more about like decentralized systems are kind of inevitable i feel like i feel like we're going through these cycles of like centralization and decentralization and i get the sense that we're heading towards a decentralization actually but in terms of privacy i don't know i mean i re i'm sort of surrounded by the privacy scene in a way and i feel like that's what i read and follow and stuff like that but i mean the average

person that i know who isn't in the space does not have any real sense of their own lack of privacy so there was this show that came out this summer called the social dilemma on netflix and a lot of people i know who aren't in tech or in blockchain were so excited about it but if you watch it like anyone who works in tech is like this is this has been very clear and obvious for years for like 10 years not like a little bit of time and the fact that people were like what again it's not the first time this has been revealed but they they keep forgetting and they keep needing to be reminded it seems so that's why i

i worry about like just the general public's attitude towards privacy i guess i guess the sad thing is is like bad things have to happen and then going forward people pay attention i don't want to live in a world where it's like east germany either like where everyone becomes very secretive and you know paranoid and worried there's got to be some balance but yeah right now i feel like it's heading more towards more transparency but at the expense of people yeah i think um and i think i don't know if it was an episode this year or last year we had an episode of gobblers together we got an episode with uh tux who talked about selective

disclosure and i think that's it that's the key um where it's not about benedict i don't know maybe both it's a relatively common topic um but i think that is the future where it's not all on or off like that we can't live in a world that is that way but i should have a say in what i reveal to whom um and and then be assured that that's what's gonna happen that's a problem right like oh i actually do feel like i can give my data to google because i don't really care if google sees it the company

my problem is that i know google is going to sell that and i don't know who they're going to sell it to like that's my problem and if i can say i am fine with sharing this with you but i don't want you to go and sell it to whoever you want then if we can crack that then then i think that's the sweet spot but i also think like blockchain and privacy definitely don't go hand in hand like they they are not at all related yeah originally it just happens to be that the people interested in one is usually interested in the other and actually i think like the zero knowledge proof in a way in a weird way is a bridge bridging point between those things and

that's what could enable this selective disclosure but i'm still excited about blockchain tech as a like i think what what people mostly don't realize or don't talk about is how underlying like bottom level layer thing it is like it shouldn't be known that something is like people don't know that they're using tcpip like in the same way they shouldn't know that they're using a blockchain but blockchain is still that underlying you know provides a peer-to-peer network that is free from people listening or free from centralized actors being able to sensory and providing those sort of very core layer stuff and we had that we had that in

in the 90s we had p2p networks we have the p2p networks in other places it's just that they usually don't work they don't scale there's a bunch of problems with them and still from what i can tell most of those problems stem from not having an incentive layer and so merging those old technologies with an incentive layer that's what provides an actually functioning scalable like human scalable core that then we can build stuff like privacy and other things on top of but it's also i think a problem with the blockchain space is that so many people are you know quote-unquote mainstream you know hunters where they'd

oh i'm working on this blockchain application it's going to be mainstream no no it's not like it's ridiculous notion then it would be mainstream whatever anyone is doing right now um you really think that that's so far off i mean you said you serve like we've talked about privacy and like facebook invading people's privacy for 10 years and the mainstream still doesn't really get it like they're starting to get it now it takes 20 30 50 years for mainstream to actually start understanding and using something that's it's a different time scale than people expect and we are kind of 10 years into this now so it's not like oh we have another 50 years to go but

um and tech usually like adoption usually accelerates over time so maybe we're only 10 or 20 years away but i still think that's the timeline we're looking at and i don't think you can sell a blockchain application as anything mainstream today like you sell whatever is like two three layers above that like that's what is mainstream for sure but i also i agree with you that i think the this this concept of what's happening underneath while it may be financially triggered like there might still be a connection to a almost like a share or a stock or something like that that i mean the token could still be there but like the that at some stage it's so

over like the layers are so high that maybe it's not it's not like a standalone project the way it is right now where we like know the l ones and we like talk about them as these full-on products even though they're really still kind of supposed to be the foundation for all these other things yeah so i think this sort of brings us to the end of this recording this episode and uh i think i've already said it but it's been a really fantastic three years i have made a executive decision as the now soul runner of the podcast of the zk podcast that i want to take for the first time in three years a week off

of the podcast which means well earned next week uh which is the beginning of january there will be no zero knowledge podcast but that does not mean it's not coming back but i do think that i don't know if i've already said this but it's like year one to year two with us figuring out what the hell this thing was like the podcast and focusing mostly on blockchain then it was zero knowledge proof research and then this past year has been zero knowledge proof application it wasn't necessarily planned out that way but that's how it landed and going forward i want to spend some time and that's actually what i'm going to be doing over the next few weeks is i want to spend some time thinking about where does the curiosity and this this

sort of like line of thinking go what kind of topics have we not had a chance to really dig into where are you know new kind of questions that mostly that just get me inspired and make me want to meet the people that are doing these things so that's what i'm going to be spending some time on and i'm very excited to have you know to have actually in a way expanded the zero knowledge community also with a lot of the guest hosts i believe you'll be hearing more from them in the new year as well and so stay tuned uh see you in a couple weeks i'm quite excited for this little little mini break um and uh i don't know if there's anything

else i guess it's just uh i can't believe we made it through this year and here's hoping that next year is for a lot of people a lot more fun a lot easier and for the folks that had a good year hope you keep on going the bull run won't last forever but enjoy it while you while you do or maybe it does last forever who knows yeah maybe probably not maybe all right thank you again frederick yeah and to listeners thanks for three years of listening thanks for listening [Music] you