devcon 6 / scalability is boring privacy is dead zk proofs what are they good for
Duration: 00:25:14
Speaker: Ian Miers
Type: Talk
Expertise: Intermediate
Event: Devcon
Date: Oct 2022
Categories
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?
Satoshi Has No Clothes, What About Szabo?: Smart Contracts, Privacy, and Practicality
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?
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.
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.
Tending the Infinite Garden: Organizational Culture in the Ethereum Ecosystem
This presentation will discuss the findings of the academic paper "Tending the Infinite Garden: Organisational Culture in the Ethereum Ecosystem" by Dr. Paul-Dylan-Ennis and Ann Brody. Our study examines the decision-making processes fundamental to Ethereum's protocol governance, drawing on interviews with Ethereum's core developers. We identify a central worldview in Ethereum known as the "Infinite Garden" and discuss how Ethereum's social layer is crucial for upholding cypherpunk values.
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
Keynote: How to Properly Open Source Software: Lessons Learned from the Linux Foundation
It can be challenging to properly open source software: there are licenses, IP, security reporting, and many other issues that need to be addressed. In this talk, we will discuss the best practices for open source software development learned from almost 25 years of experience at the Linux Foundation. Attendees will learn about how to set up their projects for a variety of potential goals, including things like maximizing security and community building.
Protecting your Privacy within the Blockchain Ecosystem
Robertas Visinskis gives their talk titled, "Protecting your Privacy within the Blockchain Ecosystem"
P4: Private Periodic Payments Protocol
P4 aims to solve the problem of subscription services offering end-to-end private cryptocurrency payments. This protocol introduces periodicity to cryptocurrency payments through an ongoing relationship between the merchant and the customer without unintentionally disclosing personally identifiable information. We are creating this protocol to allow us to offer a truely end-to-end private subscription data storage solution built with Tahoe-LAFS. By sharing it, we hope that other subscription services will implement our protocol and further the adoption of cryptocurrency payments in real world retail use cases. Although this protocol is currently a work in progress, we have already specified some design decisions. For periodicity, we are avoiding a payment pre-authorization design to keep the user in control of their keys. And for privacy we are utilizing Zcash shielded transactions and the coming improvements in the Sapling release. This protocol is being created by the Least Authority team with support from the Zcash team.
The State of Whisper
Whisper is the Ethereum Foundation's secure communications protocol. It has been designed to ensure darkness, i.e. guarantee that neither a message's content nor its metadata can be captured by an attacker. With the release of version 6 last spring, it is now also used to prototype the switch of the P2P stack from DevP2P to libp2p. This talk will start with a summary of the protocol, followed by in-depth coverage of two upcoming features that will improve its usability: 1) insights into the libp2p switch, and 2) compiling it to WASM to run directly inside a browser, thus bypassing the confusing RPC interface.