In this chapter, the hosts discuss how they got into zero knowledge cryptography and Zcash, including their previous project Tahoe LAFS. They delve into the protocol ZeroCoin, the 2013 San Jose Bitcoin conference, and the collaboration between the creators of ZeroCoin and Snarks. They also touch on the introduction of Snarks and their initial hesitation to join Coinbase.
In this special 50th episode, we invite our friend Zooko to the podcast to chat about his background and explore the history of Zerocoin and Zcash. We dig into the inner workings of Zcash, the trusted setup, the sapling upgrade, and what the future of the project might look like!
The Sapling upgrade promises to reduce the proving times of the zk-SNARKs from 37 seconds to 2.3 seconds by replacing the SHA256 hash function with an improved performance Pedersen hash function called Bowe-Hopwood Pedersen, introducing an updated eliptic curve (Groth16/BLS12-381), moving from Libsnark to Bellman, and using a new split circuit design.
We dig deep on this and into what the UTXO model actually is to help us better understand the changes being introduced with Sapling. Hope you enjoy coming on this journey with us!
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