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NU5 just activated on the #Zcash testnet! Upgrade to zcashd 4.7.0 and run with -testnet to play with Unified Addresses and the new Orchard shielded pool.
In response, zooko: This is an historic moment. I expect to see it mentioned in history books. First time (correct me if I’m wrong!) that setup-free zero-knowledge proofs were deployed that are efficient enough to produce the proofs in the palm of your hand on your phone.
Pointing to “If a solution was found, a much better, easier, more convenient implementation of Bitcoin would be possible.”—Satoshi Nakamoto
Zooko also stated, This technology fulfills one of Satoshi’s last wishes. When the original scientists who discovered the theoretical possibility of Zcash proposed to integrate it into Bitcoin at the San Jose Bitcoin Conference in 2013, the Bitcoin core devs rejected it and suggested implementing it in an altcoin first.
Zooko tried to clarify why NU5 on Zcash Testnet is so important:
Humanity is leveling-up past the infancy phase of zero-knowledge proofs (trusted setup requirements, and requiring huge servers to produce the proofs) to the mature phase where ZKPs can be used for computational integrity/security/privacy in all applications.
Bitcoin cannot be politically-neutral money. This is because its information architecture gives an asymmetric advantage to the attackers—the bigger and more powerful organizations that want to leverage the monetary system against smaller users.
The users are all the individuals, businesses, organizations, and governments around the world who require politically-neutral money for their everyday economic needs.
Bitcoin’s fully-transparent ledger is a terrain that gives the asymmetric advantage to the attacker. Offensive tech (Bitcoin tracing and control systems) has evolved much faster than defensive tech (“mixing”/obfuscation) in the 14 years since Bitcoin’s launch, and that trend will not be reversed but instead will accelerate, because bigger and more powerful players are now paying attention to Bitcoin, and because of the inherent asymmetric advantage to the attacker created by the transparent ledger.
When I learned about Bitcoin in 2009, I expected—based on my background in privacy/security tech—that this would turn out to be the case. (I’m the author of the first blog post about Bitcoin, and Satoshi’s original Bitcoin home page linked to my page along with two others.)
That’s why in 2015, when I learned about the first technology that could fundamentally give the asymmetric advantage to the user, I decided to commit what would probably be the rest of my life to making politically-neutral money available to everyone.
