After Years of Secret Work, Decred Adds a New Feature: Privacy - Ep.134

Jonathan Zeppettini, international ops lead and chief evangelist for Decred, aka "Decred Jesus," announces the launch of the coin's privacy feature. He first describes how Decred came out of some developers' frustrations of trying to work with Bitcoin Core developers, and how that led them to realize a couple of issues with Bitcoin's governance around the funding of development and giving other stakeholders a say in the development of the coin. He explains how Decred addresses those issues, how governance in Decred works, what tickets are used for in the system and why it uses a hybrid POW/POS system. We discuss the comparatively high participation rates in Decred, how it's resistant to contentious hard forks, and what Politeia is. Plus, he gives the scoop on Decred's new privacy feature, how it works, why it was developed in secret, and how the plan to make it more decentralized in the future. Plus, he talks about how Decred plans to decentralize its own governance. 

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Episode links:

Decred: https://decred.org

Jonathan Zeppettini: https://twitter.com/jz_bz

Decred in brief: https://decred.org/brief/

Jacob’s 2015 post on the challenges with Bitcoin: https://blog.companyzero.com/2015/11/bitcoins-biggest-challenges/

Placeholder VC on why it invested in Decred: https://www.placeholder.vc/blog/2018/5/12/decred-investment-thesis?rq=decred

Smith and Crown's Decred report: https://sci.smithandcrown.com/research/decred-report

Voting in Decred: https://storage.googleapis.com/smithandcrown-asset-engine-prod/images/voting-cycle.original.png

Politeia: https://blog.decred.org/2017/10/25/Politeia/

CoinDesk article on Politeia: https://www.coindesk.com/one-of-investors-favorite-governance-blockchains-is-handing-over-20-million

DiceMix “paper”: https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/ndss201701-4ruffingSlides.pdf 

Brave New Coin post: https://bravenewcoin.com/insights/decred-price-analysis-a-sustained-increase-in-mining-activity-2 

Coinbase may list Decred: https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-continues-to-explore-support-for-new-digital-assets-4d2ecbcbd38c 

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