ZKPodcast: Zcash community & more with Amber Baldet

Transcript

[Music] welcome to zero knowledge a podcast where we explore the latest in blockchain technology and the decentralized web the show is hosted by me Anna and me Fredrik [Music] in this week's episode we sit down with amber Bal de we chat with her about her background the Z cash community her role at the foundation and more before we start we would like to say thank you to

this week's sponsor no I fund no I fund is building an e rc 20 compatible and open source technical environment enabling tokenization of real-world assets assets like equity in a company or real estate they do so by implementing protocols that bind off chain assets with their own chain representations no a fund is currently looking for a DevOps engineer to help them support their infrastructure development as well as introduce and implement new solutions check out the job offer at no-fun org slash careers or review now funds github at github comm slash my fund so thank you again and now here's our interview with amber so today we are sitting at Zeke on one in sunny

Croatia with amber Baldy hi amber hi great to be here and we're also here with Frederick hello so I guess I'm kind of curious how do you guys like Zeke on one so far it's very good I mean this is just a second day but exciting so far a lot of good talks yeah I mean Zeke on 0 last year was probably the best conference I went to all year just from a collection of people and kind of heterogeneity of ideas and people working on things despite it being kind of a narrow focus the types of projects people are working on a super diverse and so I'm really excited to do that again this year what's your relationship to Z cash well at this point I'm on the board of the Z cash Foundation which was a public election that happened last

year although in action by the board it was really more of a recommendation to the current board which they chose to go with the public recommendation so Ian Myers and I were added last year that's the official connection now previously when I was at JPMorgan I had worked on a project where we were adding privacy to an enterprise blockchain and so Z cash the company which is now the electric coin company was working on what was called zsl there's zero knowledge security layer and so we added that in as the first kind of real implementation of an enterprise-grade zero knowledge system previously to that I actually had known Zuko for a number of years I think going

back to you know hanging out at Def Con ages ago so that's kind of where we knew each other from I'm actually curious about the Z cash foundation board because it's kind of unclear to me like how many people are on this board what's the function of it what's the purpose and yeah like you mentioned a little bit about the election process but who else is on the board and how did they get there there's five people on the board it's all public info upon the the dot work site which has migrated it used to be a Z cash dot foundation or something that was horrendous to remember so now it's just dzifa Norg so there's five people that chairs Andrew Miller then there's Matt

Greene there's Peter Van Valkenburg there is myself and Ian Myers and Josh Cincinnati is the executive director technically the the board's role is really just to fire Josh if he's doing a bad job we don't we're not involved in day-to-day operations of the foundation at all you know when when they're putting together say a batch of grant proposals or approvals you know the the foundation will decide what they'd like to propose as the approvals we'll give it a final once-over and say yeah this looks rational we don't see any red flags here go ahead but it's not our job to kind of comb through and micromanage the foundation you kind of mentioned you meant to go back back in the day what

were you working on before all of this like where I'm really curious like what angle you came into the space mm-hmm well that's a very different tangential story specifically the reason that I had met Zuko at the time was that in 2013 I gave a talk at Def Con about crisis intervention and suicide intervention for hackers because I was taking training in doing and suicide intervention and kinda hotline support and things as that was moving online it was something that I was interested in and at the time I was also there happened to be the suicide of Aaron Schwartz in relation to the JSTOR

files and all of that which was incredibly unfortunate and really made the security community much more vocal about talking about mental health in the community and so it was pure coincidence that I happen to be able to kind of share some of this training which is really in 60 minutes you're not going to give people a whole lot of medical training but how to support friends how to recognize risk signals how do we even begin this kind of conversation there can be higher rates of mental health issues in these kinds of communities specifically where you have people that have trouble working within established mental health systems because they're seen like if you go in and you describe your daily life as an information

security professional you can sound paranoid because you are dealing with real nation-state actors sometimes like sometimes they are out to get you and so it can be very difficult but at the same time people are very reticent to talk to their friends we're in a privacy community you don't share things it's seen as vulnerability and so it's difficult to navigate and zuko has always been very open about his own kind of you know he's if you read his Twitter he's kind of an open book right and so it's something that he also has been passionate about and we kind of just connected about the humanism or humanity within this quote-unquote space and I think that you know that this space did not exist back then but the bleeding together of cryptography security

politics economics like it's simply you know Bitcoin existed you know back then but it was just kind of this funny thing for hackers to mess around with we didn't really think it was going to become what it has now I mean I remember being at JPMorgan and searching on their intranet to see if there was some like effects desk that was doing something with it in a small way I didn't realize that would be this that that would be a major kind of PR event if it ever happened I just thought oh well of course they'll do that but it kept being like zero results zero results on the internet and so I realized you know nobody's looking at this or using it and and maybe it is just going to be always kind of this side project and then there was this team that you know I heard some of my

favorite engineers we're all kind of like going to work on this skunkworks thing I was like cool well that's more fun than the client-facing single dealer platform I'm building now like let's go see what's going on there and they weren't just working on what at the time they're like it's not Bitcoin its blockchain and I was like what are you gonna do with that but you know they were also working on you know API stuff and cloud stuff and cognitive stuff and whatever so I went over actually worked on a machine learning project first and then ended up kind of working with the blockchain team which at the team time was a handful of people working on stuff on dev laptops it was really a process to bring that to the wider company and make it a thing that had a lot of like

momentum and force behind it but you were you were already working at JPMorgan at this time yeah yeah I worked there for a number of years before the new product development team was created what's your own background and in that I mean you're kind of touching on a lot of subjects here between like information security cryptography machine learning like there's a large space there what's your training what's your like main thing that you've been working in yeah I'm not a cryptographer I guess I could play one on TV but I definitely to be clear I'm not a cryptographer mathematical applied or otherwise but let's see so I went to school for political science and economics I was always interested in that kind of crossover however I just on my own was kind of doing development things as the

internet was kind of becoming a thing I guess since I was a kid at the time we didn't have all this like girls in stem kind of programs I didn't realize something that I should or shouldn't be doing it was just fun I assumed everybody sat at home and like created websites and wrote scripts and did stuff and like you know it wasn't super high level but I knew what was going on and then when I was working as kind of an assistant on a trading desk when I went into ended up going into finance really because not because I wanted to get banker bonuses but because I was really interested in the political and economic power structures that kind of seemed to drive everything and it didn't make sense to me to go to a start-up where you're completely on

the other side of the wall you're shut out you're trying to figure out how do you get in like how do you disrupt quote-unquote I wanted to just be close to the people who are making the decisions I didn't ever expect to be in a position where I would be able to divert or change or impact that it didn't seem like something one person did and I could not have manufactured this kind of zeitgeist we have now if I wanted to I just you know it's not so much that I happened to be in the right place at the right time because certainly I spent my entire career like I guess I veered off there but you know I ended up becoming a developer of some trading assistant tools because they needed them and it didn't work they couldn't reconcile their books I so I

built them an accounting system and then I said maybe I should just go and be a developer full-time did that for a while and really hated having other people tell me what to build so I ended up moving more towards product management and that meant I worked in different areas of financial financial technology and no longer was just you know doing trading tools then I could work on you know treasury services or in investor relations or custody you know so having kind of a broader view of what made things work was something that I didn't get as a developer because there you're just like you know execute this very small portion of the thing and part of my purview at various points was making sure that all of the security kind of risk was managed and mitigated and you

know we were doing various types of testing and all that so it all kind of came together in that way I'm a bit of a generalist and so I happened to be in a place where when they needed to explain blockchain to some executives and you got two responses you either got a developer walk in and try to explain hashing or you got a consultant to come in with a PowerPoint that was just told they're in charge of the blockchain who would then try to explain hashing and like both of them were just different types of a mess so I was able to kind of just relate what this meant to them in context at a higher level and I guess that was unique at the time that's actually something that we've talked about on this podcast before like how do you introduce the topic of blockchain

and it's incredibly complicated like I've tried all those approaches that you just mentioned and failed at all of them in the it's sort of like you can come in try to explain the technical stuff for come in and explain like super high level vision and like OD centralizing everything does it doesn't mean anything general well were you building with in those early days in the Box chain world like it Fork of Bitcoin or something from scratch or what was the tech stack there were a number of things that that early team was working on a per a variety of legal things I can't really talk about ahold of Thatcher but you know there was an in-house kind of block teeny type project which was really something that

looked more like git than like a blockchain that team since went on and founded cadena then there was another team that was looking at aetherium and whether or not they were going to be able to solve some privacy challenges there there's some early work and then when my co-founder now Patrick Neilson had come in he had kind of applied a lot of the principles of PGP to solving some of the how we could add private state trees in addition to the public state trees of aetherium and that was kind of where the Nexus of that kind of thing really took off but then it was also our job to evaluate pretty much every other staff out there anything that was runnable you know you would run in in your lab to make sure that to value it you want to make sure that it was a huge

market to just see what we should be working with we haven't really talked about quorum on this podcast before we might do an episode in the future trying to dig into it but it is a project that comes out of JP Morgan is this something that came out of JP Morgan when you were there yeah it was one of the projects that the teams that I was working with was working on early on they're a very small number of people and we were handling both you know use case analysis as well as development tasks and now they're really kind of two distinct teams I think they even had you know quorum has its own team now entirely and then kind of the use case progression is separate but it was simply the attempt

to explore what privacy on a permissioned ledger would look like because privacy and scaling were the two major challenges that would prevent this technology from being used with an enterprise so after your work at JPMorgan you left and founded your own project tell us a little bit about what clover is sure so clover is working on the kind of well a whole number of challenges but one of the things that I realized in attempting to deploy and make real this technology within enterprise settings was that there's not you can't really use a lot of the existing DevOps for lack of a better

word kind of tool chain in order to deploy manage maintain upgrade these sorts of networks there are some stabs where people are trying to make that work now but I find that they are and I hate the word but centralized in that they kind of take away the power of the businesses that are attempting to run these permission networks I know we don't normally think of businesses as being ones that need to have power in these networks we're always talking about users as individuals but in a permission network your businesses are like your individual users and if you have another company that comes in and maintains all the configs and maintains all the infrastructure and maybe it even only runs in a single cloud then you know you're not really achieving

probably what you set out to achieve which from a business perspective is often to free themselves from a lot of these very sticky vendor contracts that they have and you're also introducing future risk around a single choice of platform or infrastructure or provider so we're solving some of that and then there's integration challenges of hooking the stuff into your existing systems and then the ease of use from a developer standpoint to build applications on top of that let alone distribute and access the way you handle in interfacing enterprise authentication systems with these I mean just none of that exists so we're working on all that but also in a way that if you were an individual or hobbyist startup small

business you might also be able to take advantage of something that has been built to run in a very large robust way but in you know it's still cool enough to use to two public chains and four like your awesome individual projects was it quite dramatic to leave a more corporate environment and go off on your own or do you feel like it was kind of you were ready I was ready at that point I mean I like I said I don't didn't expect to be able to kind of have the impact that I did at the time but there was definitely and kind of 80/20 return principle sort of happening where once we had say pushed out this code on github and had done the

initial projects like the next 20% for them is a lot of work and it was becoming very bureaucratic and so it was you know they're also a bank is not a technology company as much as as every bank these days or every company goes out and says we're a technology company now fundamentally they're not they're not used to they don't support users who dial in and say I'm using your technology product and so a lot of the work that has to be done is low level is not going to demonstrate a return on investment quickly from a corporate level perspective and it there it's they're not incentivized to work on the challenges that need to be addressed right now so did you feel it was freeing to leave in that I can make my own

decisions certainly it's it's more freeing but certainly when you make some difficult decisions it's nice to sometimes not have that responsibility on your shoulders so it's always a double-edged sword I have a friend who went from being a start-up founder met like many times over to working it for a company and actually loved the fact that he he was kind of like you know when something breaks over there at 3:00 in the morning I don't have to worry about it yeah it's true and you know what I realized though is you know there are types of people so you're at different points in your career at different times and there are times and maybe you want to leave not have to think about what's going on elsewhere go home play with your kids and put them to bed and not

have stay up until midnight worrying about somebody else's problems but there are also people where no matter whether you have that responsibility or not you're going to be thinking about how do you improve the organization what could I be doing here you know I was still but way before I was on the blockchain team I'd wake up at 5 a.m. and think I could improve this process if I like tweaked this thing over here and so I would do that whether I was working at a large organization that I was not actually responsible for or my own startup so I might as well be benefitting from it at my own startup all right bringing him back to Z cash and the board a little bit we already talked about it a bit obviously easy cash started from the company started with the Z cash company anything was

called now called the electric wine company the board the foundation was added later and there's been a long struggle to make it recognize that these are two separate entities but if I feel like it's really getting there now like the people know that the electric wine company and the Z cash foundation are different but I still don't think people really understand what the different functions are like where they differ but just like looking at this adding this foundation after the fact how has that been in your eyes and sort of why why was it done well the foundation was added after the fact to begin the process of diversifying the governance of not just the coin but of

the protocol which might have other uses and the foundation has a wider mandate around supporting privacy digital privacy Internet privacy financial privacy it's a much broader mandate one of the things that I was very insistent on when I had said I would like to be on the board was that we needed to work on making sure people understood these are two very different things and that the Foundation's mandate is around digital privacy and Internet freedom it is not to support the price of Z cash certainly you know it's called the Z cash foundation like we believe that that protocol is an important component and right now the best in class best effort

thing to get us there and that means that we absolutely support Z cash but it you know it's our job to also be critical of it and to push them forward to identify gaps both in usability and in features we often call out you know there's not enough the address to Z address you know it's it's our job to provide a bit of a check and balance it came from or was funded by the founders reward which i think is an awful name and has gotten them into a lot of trouble but nothing was changed in the protocol to direct part of the founders reward to the foundation it was actually the people who received that right now who voluntarily decided to contribute part of what was being given to them to

create a separate entity that actually has oversight over them and I think people should be aware of that now there are there is discussion now to kind of change it so that it's it's more clear in the at the consensus level exactly how this where the money is coming but that's where it came from initially that actually was a question that I had when I was thinking about the foundation was like how is it funded a lot of times if you look at you know companies that ran icos during the boom they would have created these foundations to be able to receive these funds with like you know great tax benefits but in this case this is a foundation it's not based in Switzerland is it it's it's a us-based 501c3 which also means a couple additional things one is that we are

bound by a commitment to public good which means that we're actually not supposed to or and have to prove by a certain amount of time that we don't just get all of our funds from say a single source or a couple of rich guys like nonprofits in the US need to demonstrate a diverse donor base and so founders reward or not which there is a mathematical ending to when the founders reward will stop but we need to move to a more standard donation model anyway and that means that we have to treat this like an outreach program and make other people vested in the success of that foundation beyond just the C cash protocol that's interesting and not being the legal person maybe you don't

have the answer but is like if you were to get block rewards and in some form in the future is that considered one donor because technically you're like taking money from all of Z cash users I don't think the legal person any legal person has a great answer for that right now that's a little out of the purview but sure I would love to got it that way but also being a 501c3 means that we don't engage in any lobbying activity and also being a us-based there's a fiduciary obligation there's a variety of other kind of reasons that it's here because we're not like trying to create a Swiss foundation so that we can just go do some interesting things and call it a foundation it's meant to

provide some oversight and and and provide that kind of check in a way where people can trust or know what they're getting and people are very familiar with the concept of a 501c3 in the blockchain space I guess the foundations have developed some sort of style there is you see it kind of repeating the Tesla's foundation the theorem foundation where three foundation often it'll be about like giving out grants and finding projects in the case of Zee cash like I don't I actually don't know the volumes but does the C cash Foundation have that sort of capacity to really really put out money into the ecosystem or is it still dependent on the company to also fund

ecosystem projects well both are funding ecosystem projects but we have different motives different incentive models the electric coin company is a for-profit entity the foundation does have a grant program we're committed I think this year to giving out over five hundred thousand dollars in grants which is considerable I think last year it was two hundred and fifty thousand which also included some matching so it's grown every year the difference with the foundation is that some of these grants are more we try to strike a balance between things that are like solid research that we're quite sure is going to have a deliverable that is useful and things that are more high-risk high-reward and maybe wouldn't be funded by somebody that has a limited runway in

an investor base in a profit model and so also we don't have to focus on things that are exclusively a benefit to Zee cash as a protocol but can be more privacy research in general or zero knowledge kind of more broadly is of course as a focus area but it means we have a bit of a broader mandate so as you mentioned the company has taken some of its founders rewards and giving it to the foundation and that's sort of how the initial funding has happened that also means that the fund like the company actually wants to remove itself as the souls or entity in the space what's the

motivation behind that and how is that working out like why don't they just keep going with whatever they're doing yeah a number of things have happened over the last year so they transitioned the community forums are now managed by the foundation instead of the company there's discussions about a what they would call multi-sig but that's just a in group way of saying kind of shared governance over the trademark called Z cash there's also the foundation is creating and has released now a completely separate implementation of the Z cash protocol so no longer is the Z cache company which uses Z cache D that's the that's the note that

everybody runs right now you can now run a rust version of that that's called zebra that has a variety of security implications and is good for the health of the network and everyone recognizes that having this kind of diversity is good the company recognizes that having that kind of diversity is good because they want Z cache to succeed and part of that is public perception of the willingness to not be the center of the universe part of that is their own understanding of the risk that that imposes they all chose to work there because they share that philosophy and they absolutely have been putting it into practice that doesn't mean that there's not drama sometimes that there's not decisions or proposals that gets everyone riled up

you know it's a bit of an experiment nobody's done this before but I think a lot of it has been in in good faith I think that shared trademark thing is interesting because it really does mean that both parties have to agree to a set of changes to the protocol to be able to call it Z cash if one party doesn't agree to this set of changes then they're not going to agree to give the trademark to whatever that thing becomes if one party forked off then they couldn't call it's a cash anymore yes and that's more than just the the trademark see cash is interesting in that there is a specific actual specification that is considered Z cash and then multiple implementations

thereof until now with the second implementation the code has been the the code is law you know but the the code is canonical to the spec now the spec is hoping to take precedence over that with the two implementations being subjugated to it there is a new thing called the zip process much like the bit process or the EIP program the IP process do we call that the process I don't know but the the Z cash improvements proposal process where which is now upstream of this Ukash network upgrade process so that everything every proposed change is circulated in the public for at least

two months to provide adequate time for feedback to solicit more kind of contributions and more engagement and then would be implemented in both places right now there's two implementations but like is the Z cash foundation encouraging more yeah absolutely but you know if you look at Bitcoin as well like there's like twelve or maybe even more different implementations but if you actually look at what's running only in over 95% of the network is running Bitcoin DS so you know I think aetherium is is actually a little better there's a I don't know what the percentage of parity aetherium knows is now but it's non-trivial for sure and you can see how having those two

communities has increased conversation whereas it's different when you have a number of implementations but only one that matters yeah I think that's that's a very good point so the what I typically say is it's a consensus relevant node or not and yeah there exists many implementations of Bitcoin I can like Bitcoin it's simple it's pretty easy to write an implementation but it's very very hard to convince miners to use it or even to convince users to use it those two things are also very distinct cases and like if you look at aetherium there's maybe something like 20% of theorem notes that are used by users but if we look at miners its majority parity notes and so

like there are two like very evenly distributed implementations among the miners so both are consensus relevance to the highest degree in like alright like there is no canonical version of this spec as defined by code because there isn't a single implementation that would be able to define the protocol yeah and it really changes the tenor and the types of conversations that have happened in those communities and across the kind of micro sub communities they're in but there's always this argument especially within the Bitcoin community that you hear it if you don't like it you know taking go write your own implementation but when you look at to your point like how much it's used it's not simply writing it and they will come there's a huge kind of momentum and

network effect issue and sometimes they do you know have splinters that are meaningful but it's it's not just like you know one person can just go off and still that you're you're choosing to leave that the main community if you do that right now do you think that now because of two implementations the power of a minor changes because before the minor maybe didn't have any choice this is very complex sorts of conversations that are gonna get me lots of flames on Twitter so I would say there's within G cash mining conversations there's been a lot of discussion also of ASIC

resistance recently and over the last year and I think that it's ongoing conversation so we'll see what happens but within the foundation we also kind of have that flexibility to say we did fund a major project to both examine the actual effect of ASIC resistance on the current network on which I think ended up being like 20 to 30% of network traffic was coming out of the expected out of out of ASIC miners although they're from a very small number of pools which are the majority of transactions etc but getting to fund that kind of work and then also like like I said we can kind of take that flyball on something it might be riskier and say let's work on developing

or maintaining a sakra Sisseton since um way that might be futile but you know we can throw some money at that and that does kind of having that kind of choice changes minor behavior this is a sort of a side thing you called the second implementation see cash zebra implementation yes that was the name that was given to it it was actually developed by the parity team and then kind of handed over and now there's a full-time technical resource that is paid by the foundation we have a technical team now I think for people that are actually amazing amazing qualifications and credentials really great team but so that is maintained now by the foundation and they named it zebra because I guess we have a zeal as our mascot

prayer shirt which is a collection of zebras yeah it's a that was an interesting process I mean it started a long time ago talking to Josh the executive director and parody is interested in building block chains like that's what we do so got in touch with them and they asked if we were keen on on building this first version of it like get it to where it's able to sync the network and then the foundation could take it over and I think that's been super success all around let's deliver two months early so props for that yeah and yeah so I'll hand it over a renamed zebra super

excited see where it goes and and yeah I am curious like even though I know some of this background story might not the audience might not and so I'm curious like what was the motivation behind like finding someone else to do it rather than just start from scratch ourselves or like you know why rusts why why any of these things and not just so this is where I can say as a board member I was not involved in that decision early on I was told later this was a thing they wanted to do and I said awesome I loved that team sounds great good job but at the time as you're well aware

onboarding and ramping up a technical team to begin an implementation of that from scratch would have been complex it makes a lot more sense especially when we have an existing relationship to leverage that I think rust is a great choice now and I can see technically why people wanted to move that direction of course the parity team that is their area of expertise and so kind of the stars simply aligned there and now it is what it is have you been following the sort of explosion of rust in this ecosystem I've been aware of an explosion of interest in formal methods in general and people being attracted to determinism in a way that we see a lot

more engineers here who have backgrounds in Oh camel rust haskell Scalla what-have-you and so you know we joke mostly about like you know if now's a great time to be a high school developer you can actually get a job in it and you know I forget who it was but they were kind of complaining that all the great Haskell talent is now being dedicated into this one area of research and you know is that actually a great thing but yeah it's it's it's great to see yeah I think from my observation the turning point seems to be that there's this huge area of people who just have not had a different choice than C++ because they

need the performance requirements and like memory layout and very specific behavior of their program like if you're writing cryptography you need to very precisely control how things execute and you just can't do that in something on a classical and so they've been stuck to C++ and now rust sort of came along in the scene for the for many years everyone was saying we can't use it because there's no library so you can't like we don't want to rewrite everything in the whole world from scratch just to use a different language like it doesn't make sense and we've come to a point where there is enough library support there is enough like community and enough tooling enough back that writing something in Russ today is like a rational choice compared to the

C++ yeah it's important to also remember that these things are componentized and that your whole stack doesn't have to be one thing and in trying to appeal to a broader base or sell into an enterprise environment which still sees this stuff as completely exotic that you need to identify which portions of what your building needs specific types of security properties like you're talking about where where your SDK might be different like where you can make other choices that help you appeal to kind of the broadest base and you know I'm kind of against evangelism of any sort but definitely I mean I think we're seeing some stronger products and some products

that will not fall over in ways that others are because of these kinds of choices yeah I found last year at C Conn's zero it was very much for me he's like it was incredibly inspiring and what I saw after Zeke on Xero is sort of like a lot of these projects come to fruition or start to be implemented now where does econ 1 we were sort of seeing a little glimpse into the future of what could be happening around the Z cash foundation around the Z cash protocol what do you seen from where you're sitting as the future oh I think that a year feels like a long time sometimes it feels like a short time but in the the space of academic research it's in an extremely short period of time and one of the best things about all of this

money and crypto economic incentives etc has been the influx of attention and research to an area of study that has often kind of languished in the basement and in like-new practical applications of cryptography that's been around for some time but when you look at some of these tools they've been they've existed for thirty years you know now and they're just now being used practically and at scale and so when we look at research that just came out last year you know maybe it doesn't need 30 years but maybe it still needs 15 years and especially things that are quote-unquote zero knowledge the the challenges and the

shoes with them can be extremely subtle and there is a very small number of people globally that are qualified to audit these systems and so it's great that a lot of people are trying to figure out how to use them and build with them but that means that the eyeballs of the people that can audit them are ever more strained and a lot of times the people that audit are the same people that build and they look at each other's projects but I think of the kind of Swiss voting system that came out a couple months ago it came out that there was an issue in the way that they were shuffling votes and they were also using kind of some sort of I don't remember the exact details of it but there was a piece of zero knowledge kind of voting in there that was supposed to provide

some of the anonymity properties but then they were shuffling things and it just turned out that the way that they were doing it and it had been audited previously and passed flying colors that there was something wrong with it and with it when you do something like that with an election and then you call it a secure election and then you say it's been mathematically proven it becomes ever harder to falsify or say this is this was not aboveboard so we need to be cautious with how quickly we rush to embrace these things let alone to say you know everybody stands up their project and says hey it's it's so much greater come look at this thing because we do XYZ better but they're not mentioning that oh well here's the trade-off that we made or the assumption that we made and it's for

academic research that's totally fine but we need to be pragmatic and realistic about how much we should push and and really put things in production before they should be there going back to that example of the Swiss voting system using some sort of ZK and then like how was how was that discovered actually I was Matt green and Sarah Jamie Lewis they were literally I think as often like I think a lot of voluntary audits are rage inspired so I think that there had been some statements made that just seemed a little too good to be true and and we were very lucky to have their kind of expertise take a look at it and

there was some good press around that could that be a threat in a way to the excitement around the space like when things like that were found should it make people feel more confident or less I mean I think if most regular people understood how broken and what these constant security cycle is the software they use like they would never touch an electronic device so I think it's good that you know not knowing about a bug doesn't mean the bugs not there it's like the bugs you don't know about that our problem so I think it's of course fantastic but it was a good reminder or cautionary tale of what happens when you push something novel forward perhaps before it's ready especially so you can put in your press release hey we did this thing with zero

knowledge I always like there's always this tension between you know like you say pushing something and then if it doesn't live up to expectation it can fall flat and just die from there so like Enterprise luckily not cryptocurrency but like VR like VR in the 90s ER in the 90s was super pushing you had these headsets and like arcades and everything it was awesome but then it kind of sucked and like everyone left it it completely died no one kept pushing the research no one did anything and then like resurrected 15 years later you know we could run into that we're like there's just so much rumor so much awesome things being said about zero

knowledge proves it'll solve all your problems there's a string of like you know exploits and then everyone goes well this is all shit's completely just dumps it and then we'll have to wait 15 years for it to come back to you yeah and we run the risk also of people I hear people all the time now just throw out like oh well we're gonna zero knowledge that I'm like what the heck about but they've decided that this is the only way to achieve privacy as though it's like not just a silver bullet but will become the de-facto way we compute everything and you know it's especially it goes along with like the take back your data idea like back in you know the 90s I had a computer it sat on my desk and all the files were inside it and all my data was mine so there are

plenty of ways and models to have to have different data models to have different privacy models to understand different threat models and it's not so simple as needing to say we need to put zero knowledge around every computation that so I don't think that should be the goal what do you think could be next after your knowledge in the enterprise space it's all the cognitive is now the thing right so we went from we have if-then statements to we're doing data science to we're doing machine learning to AI to now cognitive and neural right and they just said like I'm like these are are not nouns but now we're just using them as nouns so so beyond that I assume next we'll be like singularity or like some sort of Enterprise Kurtz I don't that to

your current Java stack but that's that's what's next in my opinion cool all right amber thank you so much for sitting down with us thanks for having me thank you very much and to our listeners thanks for listening thanks for listening thanks [Music]