Sean Bowe and Jack Grigg: Encrypted Money at Planetary Scale

Sean Bowe and Jack Grigg aka str4d are both cryptographic engineers working on the Zcash protocol. Sean’s latest project is Tachyon, intended to bring encrypted money into the hands of 8 billion people.

Topics we discuss are well captured by the timestamps below.

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Timestamps

0:00 - Project Tachyon

10:20 - Privacy can’t be an afterthought for a protocol

15:24 - Encrypted Bitcoin

22:11 - Soundness bug in original sprout pool

30:15 - Sapling

33:00 - A decade of progress

39:04 - Zcash’s anonymity set

51:29 - Using private money as a passthrough doesn’t work

56:04 - The importance of ledger indistinguishability

58:30 - The ultimate privacy stack

1:05:58 - Tachyon removes all cryptographic bottlenecks of encrypted money

1:08:16 - What’s next after Tachyon?

1:15:25 - Weightless blockchains?

1:18:24 - Ragu

1:19:44 - What the next 12 months look like for Jack and Sean

1:31:22 - “Everything worth doing is worth doing on ambitious timelines.” — Sean

1:32:16 - Sean’s advice for young engineers

1:34:18 - What got Sean and Jack into Zcash?

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