devcon 5 / satoshi has no clothes what about szabo smart contracts privacy and practicality
- YouTube
- IPFS
- Details
Satoshi Has No Clothes, What About Szabo?: Smart Contracts, Privacy, and Practicality
Duration: 00:18:53
Speaker: Ian Miers
Type: Talk
Expertise: Beginner
Event: Devcon
Date: Invalid Date
This talk will explore the possibilities for privacy preserving smart contracts in terms of both cryptography and functionality. It will give an overview of known approaches, including a detailed discussion of zk-proof based schemes such as Zexe (my work) and an overview of other approaches including refereed computation as seen in systems like Truebit and Arbitrum, multi-party computation, secret sharing, and fully homomorphic encryption. More fundamentally, it will explore what a private smart contract really is. Do we need to hide which contract is running? Do we really want privacy in most cases?
- Related
Devcon
Talk
24:20
Satoshi Has No Clothes: Failures in On-Chain Privacy
Payments in Ethereum and Bitcoin are, by default, transparent. Transactions are conducted between pseudonyms with the sender, recipient and value exposed. While this transparency enhances auditability and decentralization, it is a major privacy issue. A growing volume of research shows that these pseudonymous identities are easily linkable. This is a major issue for privacy, fungibility, and a free market. A variety of techniques have been proposed to alleviate these issues. These include but are not limited to Confidential transactions + Conjoin, RingCT/Cryptnote, Zerocoin, Zerocash, Hawk, and Solidus. These techniques span a large multidimensional performance envelope in terms of transactions generation and validation time, size, as well as a range of cryptographic assumptions and data retention requirements. At the same time, these protocols offer markedly different levels of privacy against various threat models. Which one should we use? If performance were the sole issue, then systems without such enhancements would likely be preferred. Clearly some amount of privacy is necessary and the cost of getting it acceptable. The question is thus, which approaches provide sufficient privacy, in what contexts, and at what cost?
Devcon
Talk
25:14
Scalability is Boring, Privacy is Dead: ZK-Proofs, What are They Good for?
The first mainstream uses of zero-knowledge(zk) proofs were for private payments in systems like Zcash and then scalability. In both, we hide data to improve privacy or validation costs. But private payments, unfortunately, have seen limited direct demand. And scalability needs faster proofs but not even zero-knowledge. What are practical zk proofs good for? This talk considers zk proofs + blockchains as a tool both for cryptocurrency and broader applications.
Devcon
Talk
26:12
Keynote: Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again: Why we need privacy
The Web3 revolution seeks to address the sins of Web2. However, in doing so, it’s created an even worse outcome for users - users’ data is publicly available and makes them vulnerable to state-level censorship and adverse actions. This talk will address the philosophical as well as practical considerations of privacy in Web3. Privacy is an industry-wide issue and sits at the heart of all that is Web3. Understanding why privacy matters involves recognizing that it is not an isolated concept bu
Devcon
Talk
31:51
Keynote: Lessons learned from Tor
I will share lessons learned during Tor's twenty years as free software fighting for privacy and human rights. We'll talk about distributed trust and privacy by design, how to help people understand the good uses of your tech, getting allies in both cypherpunks and government, why transparency and community-building are so essential to trust, and successes from other spaces. It may seem like the crypto wars never really end, but we all have a part to play in saving the world.
Devcon
Talk
15:04
Keynote: Glass Houses and Tornados
The Tornado Cash sanctions and criminal prosecutions have challenged longstanding assumptions within crypto about the limits of money transmission licensing, money laundering statutes, and sanctions laws. They've also revealed a longstanding assumption from some in policy and law enforcement circles: that blockchains have always been and must remain transparent. Neither assumption has served us well and the time has come for legal certainty. This talk is about how we get there.
Devcon
Talk
26:29
Lunarpunk Endgame
Global surveillance is a static world where change is surpressed and society cannot evolve. In contrast, an anonymity-enhanced world resembles a forest. New civilizational experiments blossom like flowers, radiating outward from the freedom-fighters of the future. The lunarpunk end game is to enable a new ecology of social orders. This talk will describe the grand vision of lunarpunk: multipolar space-faring civilization, human speciation, and the reproduction life throughout the cosmos.
Devcon
Talk
30:12
Privacy-preserving Smart Contracts at Scale
In this talk we'll describe Oasis, a platform for privacy-preserving smart contracts at scale. Oasis addresses two critical issues of today's platforms: poor scalability and a requirement that all data is public. These platforms cannot support many exciting use-cases which have complex application logic (e.g. machine learning) or require protection of user or application secrets (e.g. data markets). Oasis is a layer 1 blockchain platform that scales to complex workloads such as machine learning and protects data via secure computing techniques. Oasis's scalability stems from the novel separation of computation and consensus in a layered design. This design allow transactions to execute in parallel before validation by the consensus layer, thus alleviating a major source of congestion and enabling new verifiable computing techniques that dramatically reduce replication needed to ensure integrity. Oasis uses a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm tailored for this architecture and supports multiple secure computing models (trusted hardware, multi-party computation, zero-knowledge proof) based on security and performance requirements. We'll summarize the Oasis protocol and discuss real-world applications built on Oasis in as credit scoring, medical data sharing, and blockchain-based games. We'll describe how Oasis enables these exciting applications to run directly on-chain, avoiding the need for off-chain computation.
Devcon
Panel
45:47
How scaling impacts privacy
This will be a presentation or panel discussing the positive and negative privacy consequences of scaling to mainstream use. By considering the data stored on blockchains, now, we can speculate about the use of it in the future and how it can be analyzed at scale. We will explore specific data types and common use cases, including data mining. The goal of this session is to help the community know how privacy will be impacted when cryptocurrency reaches mainstream use and explore the societal consequences of personal data collection and decentralization of systems.
Devcon
Breakout
24:47
Privacy by design in a world with universal SNARKs
ZK-SNARKs are an innovative method of verifying that a computation has been performed correctly. They form the backbone of many proposed scaling and privacy solutions for Ethereum. PLONK is a new ZK-SNARK construction, developed by AZTEC and Protocol Labs, that is 'universal'; only one 'trusted setup' is required, and different ZK-SNARK programs do not require additional trusted setups to be performed. This construction is the first universal ZK-SNARK construction that is practical enough for use in smart-contracts. In this talk, we will provide an overview of how ZK-SNARKs can be used to solve Ethereum's scaling and privacy challenges, and how PLONK opens up a world of zero-knowledge dapps.
Devcon
Talk
11:40
The Commodification of You
Corporate interests monitor and harvest our every contact and click, exploiting the fact that we rely on the internet for nearly every facet of our lives. They delve deep into our digital selves so that they can commodify our identities. For years, they’ve succeeded with only a whisper of pushback. What can we do to know what is happening to us and take back some control from our digital identities? In this talk, attendees will learn: Recent scandals highlighting the danger of the current collect-predict-sell data monetization model; Where technology can and can’t help us as we navigate our digital lives; What we can do to educate ourselves and others to sway public opinion on privacy.