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Ep2 - Privacy Power Hour with Yenachar of PIVX
Recorded: Dec. 2, 2025 Duration: 1:18:09Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion at the Telus Privacy Hour, key insights emerged about the importance of privacy in cryptocurrency, with PIVX's innovative approaches and partnerships being highlighted. The conversation also touched on trends in privacy technology, funding mechanisms, and the need for robust privacy protocols in the evolving crypto landscape.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. GMGM, how are you doing everyone?
Let's get started in a couple of minutes.
You're going to try to test your microphone?
Do I have you?
Yeah, sure. Hi.
How are you doing, bud?
Good.
We'll just give everyone another minute or two
and then we'll start up.
Sounds good.
Good. and then we'll start up. Sounds good. Thank you. Awesome, let's get started.
Today at the Telus Privacy Hour we've got a very special guest, Yenachar from PIVX.
PIVX is a project that I've been following a while. It's a store of value type cryptocurrency that is very focused on privacy as we are at Telos.
So I thought it would be great to have them on.
We've been talking in the background about a lot of different privacy related topics
and how important it is actually for all of us privacy-related projects to come together and kind of support,
you know, this movement is really integral.
And we'll get into some of the details of why in this session.
But first, I want to give Yenichar, and sorry if I'm not saying your name correctly.
You're nailing it. Perfect.
Yen for short is fine.
Okay. Okay. Awesome.
Well, I'll give you a chance to introduce yourself.
And also, I mean, maybe tell us how you got that name.
Oh, sure. Sure. Yeah. Well, thanks.
And thank you very much for having me on and for having PIVX on.
You know, privacy is important and we appreciate it.
So I'm Yenichar.
I'm part of the PIVX community.
And I contribute through writing and through technical advice to PIVX.
And PIVX, it's a cryptocurrency focused on privacy.
It's proof of stake.
It's a masternode cryptocurrency,
which means that there's special nodes that run.
You need to contribute or commit a certain amount of the cryptocurrency
to run a masternode, and then that pays rewards and allows you to vote on how treasury funds are spent.
And treasury funds are a certain amount of PIVX that are available every month
to go to projects that are voted on in a blockchain-specific way.
It's a very nice process for funding the project.
And importantly, the privacy and security of PIVX are secured through a technique called
ZK-SNARKs. And I think that's, as I understand it from seeing your roadmap, that's the path that
Telos is on also.
Is that right?
That's correct.
So it's really good that we can get together and talk about ZK-SNARKs and related privacy
techniques.
And how I got my name, it's actually my handle. It actually comes from a
short story written by Jorge Luis Borges, who's a very nice short story writer, where
the name of the story is The Secret Miracle. And there's a fellow in there looking for,
he goes to a library, and all the librarians are blind from
looking from God. It's, you know, it's in the Latin American style of magical realism.
They've gone blind, looking for God in the library, trying to find him on a character.
And the main person in the story actually finds God. I think it's like on a period on a map of
India or something. But anyway, the Yanachar comes from like searching for a character
in that short story, which is, you know, looking for God in the context of the story.
Very, very interesting. I do want to touch on something, and it's not privacy related,
but you mentioned your, I guess, like work of proposal kind of system.
Yes.
I'm just kind of curious, because that's something that we've tried in the past,
had some positives, had some negatives.
How is that going for you guys?
What are some of the lessons learned?
Yeah.
Is it going good?
Is it going bad?
Or is it somewhere in between?
Yeah, sure.
Well, I actually love the system.
And, you know, there's sure to be people who don't.
But I really like it.
And the way it works is there's a certain amount of funds, like set aside.
I mean, people think of it as like 10 PIV.
PIV is the unit of currency in the PIVX system.
10 per block. You know, PIVX system, 10 per block.
PIVX has one minute block time.
So it works out to be about like 40,000 PIV per month that are available.
And they're not actually spent unless they're allocated through the master node voting process.
But people can put in a proposal.
People can put in a proposal, and there's usually some, it's kind of worked out, you know, before they put in the proposal, they often, like, you know, through chat and through, you know, other techniques of communication, kind of back channel, not part of the blockchain, it works out, okay, I'm going to submit this proposal, here's what I'm thinking. You know, and they get feedback through forums and the like before putting in the formal proposal.
And the formal proposal is for funding that will be paid out. It's done monthly. There's,
we have something called a super block and a super block allocates these funds if they're
voted on by the masternodes. And, you know, it wouldn't be quite
right to say it's perfect. You know, there are challenges with the system. For one thing,
you put in a proposal and then bang, you get the funds, right? You don't get the, you know,
if it were like a business in the outside world, maybe you'd get 15% up front. And then as you
progress towards your goals, there'd be progress payments and so forth.
You know, that's standard practice in the business world.
Here, you know, bang, you get it.
So if somebody could get it, they could walk away with it, right?
But they don't, typically, because they execute on that, and then they put in another proposal.
So there's a reputation maintenance aspect of it that makes it work.
And so I really like it.
I really like it as a process.
You know, it pays out.
I mean, the voting is anonymous.
And the workers are anonymous.
You know, they just get paid PIV to an address they post.
So I think it's a good process.
Yeah, that sounds interesting.
I think there is one difference to how you guys are doing it
compared to how we did it that might lead to better results.
And I think that is that you're utilizing sort of representative governance
in that you're using the master nodes
who are voted by the community
as part of like the process of governing this
and deciding on, you know, which projects get granted.
We did also do a milestone, which you guys are doing,
which is excellent.
But, yeah, maybe that representative governance is helping you guys.
So how did you do it?
How did one get a vote on your system?
Yeah, good question.
So for us, it was everyone voting on the specific proposals to approve or deny.
I see.
So if you had Telos crypto, you could use that to vote, basically.
Yeah, exactly.
You stake it and you vote.
So I don't know.
I guess it has some positives and negatives.
It's really cool to have the whole community basically being able to vote
directly on the proposals but then at the same time it's like something that sounds like a good
idea uh on paper is all good and well but if you don't do that research that due diligence on or
is this person actually going to deliver? And often they wouldn't deliver.
Maybe they were, like, actually just, like, a complete scammer and just put something that looked really glossy and nice
and made all these promises, you know.
So having that level of representative governance,
maybe you're getting, you know, your master notes, you know,
who are, like, maybe involved in your ecosystem day in, day out,
they're more likely to be on that ground level enough to see who's going to deliver,
who's not going to deliver. Is that the case? You know, I actually, I think so. And there's,
there's some, this has actually come up in PIVX and I'm sure it comes up other places too. The
idea of, if you, you know, if you have one unit of cryptocurrency,
can you stake it and vote?
And that's basically the way, the system you had.
And it comes up and you're exactly right.
It looks really good on paper and it seems fair, right?
And it seems like it's pulling everybody in.
But the reality, just as you point out,
is like voting the best way
takes multiple things to get it right you need to have
the incentives aligned and you also need to have like the time to do the investigation
to vote in the right way it can't just purely be incentive because then what you don't even
know what to vote for and it can't be just knowing because then you might somehow vote not in the best interest of the cryptocurrency.
So it's a balance.
And having people, in the case of PIVX, you have to stake like 10,000 PIVX.
We kind of got that.
We were a code fork of Dash, and Dash has that concept.
that concept. It puts a little bit more of a burden. You not only need to have that chunk
It puts a little bit more of a burden.
of the cryptocurrency, but you also need to invest the time and energy and resources to figure out
how to run a masternode and get it to keep working. So it's a little extra hurdle that I
think is probably a positive. Now, there's a lot of investigation into better ways to vote. There's
like delegated voting and so forth. So there, you know, I don't know that maybe just masternode
voting is the be all and end all. There's probably ways you could, you could like delegate
and incentivize people to actually do very deep research. But I think that it's enough to work.
And sometimes just simple token voting isn't enough.
Yeah, very, very good points.
It's actually like it's a very interesting topic that's come up this week.
I wasn't following the thread of what was happening on Twitter,
but I think Vitalik was saying something about voting on ZCAD.
Yeah, he made a derogatory comment about token voting, didn't he?
Yeah.
But then what is the alternative?
I mean, so what does Telos do now, for example?
Well, we do have token voting, just not for the grants aspect.
We mainly focus on having a committee inside the foundation that makes decisions on grants.
So it's still like a little democracy.
But actually, the governance of the foundation itself is like voted by the community holders.
They vote in the guardians who are like sort of the board members of the TELUS Foundation.
Got it.
And then the guardians then sort of elect team members to basically run the foundation as an organization, support the network.
as modernization and support the network.
So you've got that aspect.
So you've got that aspect.
And then on the node aspect,
it's a delegated proof-of-stake system, essentially.
Yes, like EOS.
You're a code fork of EOS.
Exactly.
We utilize Antelope, which is the same software stack
for our base layer.
We're actually moving away quite soon in in that model in respect
to at least delegated proof of stake we're adding a proof of stake element um so currently basically
voters uh you know they can vote for up to 30 block producers. And, you know, so that's how you get, you know,
your top 21 block producers who produce the blocks, etc.
But we're adding another element where, like,
you can actually get more votes by staking to your own block producer.
So you have that combination you have this combination of
the users having a say but also ensuring that um the the node operators are putting skin in the game
because i the one issue with like delegated proof of stake is that like you literally don't have to
have any skin in the game in order to operate a note and and being a key decision maker that's arguably rightly arguably like a bad thing
that you don't have that um so yeah i think that it could be quite interesting and quite good uh
when this changes so is the idea so you you have these 21 like block producers will um
will they like if they have staking to them will they get more time will they get more blocks
to produce or will they have how will they what more will they get from having that state
having that state good question so there's there is an incentive as well so if you stake more you
will get a higher proportion of rewards so we've got what kind of algorithm we're using to work
that out but it does create like a curve of how much you earn. So there's an incentive to stake more.
So, yeah, it puts them up the list.
But in terms of producing, at the moment, the amount of blocks you produce is kind of scheduled at the same amount.
Got it.
Got it.
Yeah.
Yeah, sounds great.
Yeah, I know.
I really like your roadmap.
You've got, you're really thinking things through.
And I like the way you're moving towards privacy. I like the fact that you're, I mean, you know, you've got the EVM going.
It's really exciting.
It's a very challenging undertaking, but it's exciting to take that on.
And I like that you're doing it without,
without using TEAS, you know, trusted execution environments, as some others do. I, I, it's a hard
task. So I, you know, I'm, I appreciate resisting the temptation to use TEAS because, you know,
TEAS are a vulnerability. It's, it will be great to do it without them if you can.
it will be great to do it without them if you can.
Yeah, exactly.
We did take a look at TEs, but like you,
we did find there were certain vulnerabilities
that were the trade-off.
It's something I'm still researching.
It might be maybe they're good for certain use cases, but it might be not for, you know,
It might be maybe they're good for certain use cases,
making private transactions or shielded transactions.
You know, the type of transactions that both Telos and Vivix are wanting to do.
I think there's maybe some stuff with, like, creating a trusted execution environment. And, you know, this isn't my forte,
but like it does seem like maybe there's some advantages in certain areas,
but not in the types of things that both of our networks are wanting to do.
Right. I'd say exactly. They have their place.
I think they're great for like protecting digital rights on movies and stuff,
you know, but it's really hard to say that, okay, here I can
make this hardware, and if it's in somebody else's hands, they can't access this. That's just really,
really hard to do. You know, they do that, like, big time with weapons systems, right? They've got,
like, all the resources of the Department of Defense to make it, and even those they don't
consider really secure. They're just slowing people down if a weapon system gets in the wrong hands. You know, they've got, like,
the bus is encrypted, and they've got materials, so if you try to open it up, it destroys the
circuitry. They've got all these things going, and it's still considered imperfect. And if you're
doing something like on an Intel CPU, you know know it's just really yeah it needs to acknowledge
that it's vulnerable given enough resources but that's the catch you know it's it takes the
resources to get access with microprobing and all that to the to that to the you know the chip so
that you can access it but it's just just like you say, it has its place, but it's important to understand the
line there. I see you're moving to ZK-SNARKs, which I think is really good. And one of the
things I know we were planning to talk about here is quantum resistance. It'd be nice to touch on
that. And is that like what you're doing,
what you're doing there beyond ZK-SNARKs,
which gives some protection.
Yeah, I'm still kind of figuring out the full roadmap.
But like you say,
like you do get that initial protection of using the Zk snacks and what but it's only if you are shielding your you're using
shielded addresses right so like users are basically going to get that advantage when they
uh you know add a private address and they start you know holding some of their crypto
on the privacy layer,
which is like an excellent thing, especially like, I mean,
quantum is moving so fast, right?
Right.
Like that added bonus protection that you get of shielding your addresses and everything is totally worth it for most people, especially like,
I mean, you and I check into you know uh respective
communities and the broader web3 community every single day so we know like if there is like some
quantum risk that you know if that moves forward really quickly we'll be probably ready but a lot
of people just want to like purchase some tokens and hold them and then at some point like so so for them it's like
they might miss the boat if if that risk suddenly escalates and it will escalate eventually we just
don't know if it's like three years four years ten years so right for most people, it just makes sense to take on that extra shielding, that extra quantum resistance, just as a safety net.
Is that something you kind of agree with?
And I imagine this is the same case with PIVX.
You do get more hardening if you use the shielded layer as opposed to you do.
You guys have like a transparent layer as well, right?
Right, right.
Exactly.
So with PibX, the transparent layer basically has like vulnerability similar to Bitcoin.
So the idea with Bitcoin is if your public key is exposed, And maybe I should back up a little bit just for
all listeners. So, you know, quantum computing is a different modality of computing instead of
like ones and zero bits. It uses qubits and qubits aren't just one and 0. It's like a probability of 1 and 0, and it's even a little more complicated than that.
There's a weight on 1 and 0 that is like a complex number.
If you go back to high school math, it has a square root of 1 in there.
So it's almost like the weight on each 1 and 0 is not just a probability magnitude.
It's also a direction.
So we have these qubits and you can build, people are trying to build a system with these qubits
that tap right into the fundamentals of quantum mechanics to be able to solve problems.
And there's already algorithms that solve certain cryptography related problems. And there this and it doesn't there are no known algorithms
for other things so that's kind of the space we're looking at there's these quantum computers coming
and there's already algorithms to run on them once they get made that will immediately solve
things and the big one that everybody likes to talk about is is ECC you know elliptic curve cryptography and also like RSA which is
based on factoring big numbers so so there's already this algorithm it's
called short algorithm as soon as they build a computer, they're going to hack these things. And so Bitcoin has a vulnerability, a direct vulnerability, if you know the public key.
And there's certain UTXOs out there, there's certain funds available that have this immediate vulnerability. Some of them are from the
early days of Bitcoin before they started like hashing public keys to make addresses. So like
all of Satoshi's coins are this early stage stuff that's immediately vulnerable and others too from
that era. You also have exposure if you reuse an address. So if you spend a Bitcoin
and you get the change back to the original address,
you've exposed the public key
because you do that when you spend it,
even if you're spending from a hashed address,
which is the way most addresses are today.
So to not be vulnerable,
you need to have an address, a Bitcoin address,
that hasn't been spent from and uses this hashing technique, which most addresses now use.
And PIVX is the same way for the non-shielded addresses.
If you just get it, you're protected by this hash because there's no good cryptocurrency algorithm for getting past that hash.
And you have some protection.
And you even have a little bit more protection than Bitcoin because even if you're behind a hash address, you have to share the public key to spend it.
address, you have to share the public key to spend it. And if somebody had a quantum computer that
would run really fast, I mean, this is either further down the line than breaking the, like,
ECC, you'd have to run really fast, like in 10 minutes, you post your public key to spend the
funds, it hacks it before the block is even processed, and gets another transaction in with
higher fees to, like, steal your money. That's what it would take. And the block time Bitcoin is 10 minutes. The block time on PIVX is one
minute. So it's got an order of magnitude advantage even there. So PIVX is in good
standing relative to Bitcoin, or relatively good standing. It's all going to fall eventually,
but relatively good standing compared to Bitcoin,
even with its unshielded addresses.
But the shielded addresses are protected by this ZK-SNARKs system
that we're talking about.
And ZK-SNARKs, it has ZK in it, which is zero knowledge.
And zero knowledge can mean different things to different people, and there's often assumptions that go into it.
And sometimes people talk about ZK where they assume that ECC is uncrackable, and that's the case with ZK-SNARKs.
There's assumptions that are going into it.
going into its functioning. But importantly, that assumption doesn't play into the privacy
It's functioning.
aspect of it. If you do it, as you say, if you get it on a shielded address, a shielded address
to shielded address when you don't tell anybody your address is generally accepted as being like quantum robust, even like Zuko Wilcox came out and said that about Zcash.
And, you know, that's where PIVX gets its privacy technique from Zcash sapling protocol.
So it's generally agreed that the past privacy is quantum, you know, post-quantum robust. But the security is not,
you know, because there's assumptions made about using elliptic curve cryptography.
And like, if you could crack it, you could forge proofs and you could, you could commit money, you could take money from the system. So it's not
fully robust. Something has to be done before quantum computers come, but it at least protects
the privacy, which can't be said of like Monero, for example. So that's kind of where PIVIC stands with, and presumably Telos, too, since it's like adopting ZK- it will eventually be crackable, ZK
Snarks are this, like, it's this, you know, very complex.
You can tackle like ECC on its own or Peterson commitments and kind of understand what's
going on.
It's really hard to dig in and understand ZK Snarks.
They've got these polynomial equations.
They have to be satisfied
and stuff. But it's generally believed that that's going to be a lot harder than cracking
a private key from a Bitcoin public key. I'm talking like orders of magnitude or two harder.
So anyway, that's what ZK Snarks offers. It offers enduring privacy protection and like harder than cracking Bitcoin on the security side.
Thanks for going back. And that was a really great debrief on the background of this. Really appreciate that. Sometimes I forget that not everyone is like making everything.
And also, I mean, I'm not as technical as you, so that was
really beautiful, you going into
bad detail.
I do want to
ask, how much extra
time do you think it will give
us, you know,
I should rephrase that.
How much extra time do you think it will give users
who choose to utilize like the shielded addresses let's say until also you mean it'll be like 10
years or is just like one of those things you how long is a piece of string like how much time over
between when bitcoin falls to when zk starks, exactly. Or another way of asking it is how do you think this will go down?
Like once quantum starts breaking certain things, what will break first?
And like, yeah, how do you feel that situation will go down?
that situation will go down well people often i mean the the challenge is like i mean they could
put together a there's post-quantum algorithms so you could go right out and you could make one
today let's say for bitcoin and like if anybody's interested like nick carter just had some recent
really really good articles on this where he said, you know, there's algorithms today they could adopt and they would work.
Why don't they just adopt them and run with them?
Well, one of the reasons is the key size is a lot bigger.
So it takes a lot more blockchain space. So if, for example, Bitcoin wanted to keep its same, you know,
one MB block size and wanted to move over to one of these post-quantum algorithms,
it would drop its transaction per second count by like an order of magnitude. It'd go from seven transactions a second to one. And that would be
really hard to absorb, right? I mean, an order of magnitude difference. And that's why people are
kind of moving it this slowly, because the existing algorithms take up a lot more block space.
And in the hierarchy of vulnerability, I think that
Ethereum is actually higher than Bitcoin because most people don't, at least in the modern,
like what's going on right now with wallets, they usually send the change to a new address.
So most people aren't reusing their addresses. And so the public key isn't out there.
So it'll be vulnerable for 10 minutes
rather than sitting, you know, vulnerable for like months
and years sitting out there.
And by the way, it's generally believed that like this,
you know, it'll take a long time
for the first quantum computers to crack these private keys,
you know, like hours or days even.
True.
But I guess the hack is that's the right word.
I don't know which keys are worth cracking, right?
Is that a big element to this?
Like knowing which...
Well, yes, yes. but I wanted to add one
additional point. So that's a good one. But before we do, Ethereum, on the other hand,
has exposed public keys almost immediately. You know, you reuse addresses with Ethereum,
you've got this account going and you're approving things. And so it's all out there.
So it's generally thought that Ethereum is more more vulnerable than bitcoin but you're exactly right people will look out and
they'll say okay you know what's the biggest target here and like there there's some big
targets out there that have reused keys like by exchanges and so forth that you know have
thousands or tens of thousands of bitcoin on them or you know comparable values of ethereum and that
if they were going to tackle one today that's what they would do is they would go after
after those those big accounts that have like reused a key and um and are already out there
and and many of those here's one big risk with cryptocurrency a lot of those like satoshi's
coins we don't even know
you know is satoshi ever going to touch those again is he even alive we don't know and so
it's not even like you could put together a new system and count on somebody to move those over
instead you're going to have a situation where there's a whole bunch of vulnerable accounts out
there and people come in and hack them and then, you know, sell those coins. So you could even, you can do everything right,
get a new system, get people moving over and still have, have like a system crash because
all these coins are suddenly brought on for sale, right? And it drives the price like
disproportionately down. So there's, that's the,
you know, the challenge that the industry is facing is there's not really a great solution
out there right now. Yeah, there isn't. There's going to be a lot of effort, I feel,
There isn't. There's going to be a lot of effort, I feel, to eventually transition.
It's going to be like a Y2K-like experience where a lot of different communities need to kind of transition over to new address structures, new cryptography.
it's going to be a crazy mess. How big of a mess do you think it's going to be
It's going to be a crazy mess.
compared to something like Y2A? Well, I mean, one thing is there's like disagreement on when
it's coming that makes it hard to prepare for. As you mentioned, it could be three years,
it could be 30, really. I mean, one of the
things that factor in is people projecting with these, I mean, there's even, believe it or not,
there's a Nevins law that says that the capability of quantum computers are growing at a doubly
exponential rate, which is mind-boggling. So we're taking these rapid growth projections from like kernels of breakthroughs that we have now.
So there's a lot of uncertainty in when it's coming.
And that uncertainty will lead people, I think, you know, to some of them to dismiss the threat when they shouldn't.
You know, it could lead people to like embrace the threat earlier than they need to, maybe to.
You know, there's a case to be made there and they'll move over to something that's, like, clunkier than it needs to be too early.
But I think that that uncertainty and when it's coming, it will make it a lot harder on the industry.
You know, whereas Y2Kk everybody knew the day right everybody
agreed and it was just um just a matter of addressing like what were the flaws in the code
yeah that's actually a really fantastic point we we all knew y2k was happening
and the exact day it was going to happen and it made coordination a tremendous amount of
things.
I guess like just to play devil's advocate, the fact that you will start to see certain
things break first might give us some insights.
I don't know it's it's hard i don't know exactly how that will go
down but obviously some week of cryptography will go down before others and that will be
a forcer for many entities and projects to spend more money on this that the projects that are less
and projects to spend more money on this,
that the projects that are less vulnerable
will benefit from in a way.
But I don't know.
It also creates a lot of mess and more chance,
I think, that things will get forgotten potentially.
I don't know.
It's tough.
It's a very messy situation, right?
Right. But it's a good point. Maybe like what Telos and PIVX are doing, it's a good strategy.
Use ZK-SNARKs that give some protection.
And so neither coin is the low-hanging fruit.
hanging fruit and if it takes like several years to get quantum computers to where like um sea
cake snarks are are vulnerable over bitcoin that then um there will be clarity for those three
years for the telos and pibx community to act totally i mean and you another good point that
brings up is like it gives people an out.
You know, it's so the crypto world is so interconnected and it's going to be even more interconnected.
Like the ability to like swap from FIVX into, I mean, from Bitcoin into FIVX, if there's an issue and change stores of value, if that's's necessary then people have that option to protect
themselves to to trade their assets instantly uh same with with telos you know there's a lot of
there's thousands of layer ones and layer twos doing smart contract uh like transactions and
you know most of them aren't even focusing on privacy for some reason I have no idea and
most of them don't have any plans for the quantum either so giving people that option to opt out of
those ecosystems that maybe have died or just haven't adapted quick enough is a good thing
but you know value can transfer or change fast if that makes sense
That's that's going to be a saving point for many people potentially
Right. I think that's a great insight. It's it and I think it's exactly right to look at the whole cryptocurrency
Like ecosystem is more connected than it was in the past. It's not just like Bitcoin or Ethereum.
You can do atomic swaps, right?
Or you can, or non-atomic swaps.
You can move back and forth and people will, as the threat becomes closer, people will
rush to more robust cryptocurrencies, won't they?
cryptocurrencies, won't they? That's what we would expect. I mean, we don't know exactly how it will
That's what we would expect.
play out, but that certainly seems like that will be part of it, at least.
So, and that opens the question in all of this. I mean, even if you put aside for a moment,
like the risk of quantum computing, the real risk of quantum computing to cryptocurrencies, there's a marketing risk, even if there's just the perception matters.
So there's an element of getting the word out that if you want to feel safe,
you know, you may want to move too.
You may want to move now and have this model in your mind of how it unfolds
and how you're positioned for it.
You're in marketing,'re in um in um in marketing right that's i cover all areas
that's definitely one of the areas that i do cover yes so what is what's the um what is the
the right approach there how do you um how do you position to um for for position for the coming concerns, both in privacy and with quantum?
And with the coming AI, which puts even more importance, I believe, on privacy.
Because AI is a way to work with big data and exploit it.
Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up.
I was just about to segue to AI.
And these things, these risks, they all go together.
And I really look at marketing as just communication, right?
It's educating people about what the problems are and providing the solutions
networks like civics and and telos and i i want to talk a little bit about like an article i'm
actually writing up right now it's into like this this issue with with ai it doesn't really touch on on uh the the quantum
angle but that that is also quite relevant i think um so i i feel like the big issue that
we've all fallen in like everyone is we've all walked into this like 1984 style dystopia right where we actually have created
like a surveillance state and we don't even haven't even realized that yet because when
you break it down like so websites projects web2 apps are already collecting like so much sign up information
you know they they collect your your your first name last name date of birth your credit card
number which is basically your private key which is kind of insane
but your your your public slash private key serves both roles. Exactly, exactly.
Public private key, which is ridiculous.
That's even just the start.
You know what I mean?
They're also, they've got cookies.
They're tracking what sites you're going to.
And so, and they also trade this information.
know right both you and i probably signed up to a hundred different websites right and there's uh
You know, both you and I probably signed up to 100 different websites, right?
advertising networks and between all of these hundreds of parties the government they have
like all the information and then sometimes this information leaks right uh you know the the big
sony hack there's been like so many different hacks. LastPass got hacked.
So many different issues.
So basically when you think about it,
we're entering an AI age.
So not only is the information already out there,
either companies have it on their servers
or you could like download the hacks,
you know, off the dark web,
like all the data.
And you have AI now, which makes it worse because you can query that information, right?
Right.
So I could ask AI, you know, where does person X regularly shop or what websites do they regularly visit? And at a certain point, or maybe even now,
if you did these things, you would get very detailed information from that AI by picking up collections of hacked data, essentially, or data that's stored legally or technically legally by all these different, you know, companies.
So it's kind of crazy, like the situation we've put ourselves in.
And this is why I think like networks like Telos and PIVX, who are like moving in this
direction of like allowing people to pay for things privately,
not give up all the information whilst interacting with, you know,
a vendor at least that's, that's part of it. Right.
Because that's an X, that's a piece of information you're not giving up.
And, and yeah,
I think like AI is going to make crazy things possible, right?
From, you know, tracking someone down, you know, knowing all their habits and then being
able to like potentially kidnap them.
You know what I mean?
So I just wanted to get your thoughts on this.
Right, right.
So I agree with that 100%.
I think AI is a centralizing force. It makes it keeping of power away from the center.
And if the center gets, like, whether it's a corporation or it's the government, gets
the information that's empowering over individuals, it's, like, undermines our happiness and well-being.
Looking forward, I mean, you can even see, like, you know, in all of history, we have
individuals that like accumulate power for themselves, right?
You can imagine, you know, presidents or dictators today, or even like Roman emperors thousands
of years ago. They
try to centralize that power, but they always rely on the people around them.
And that's played critical roles over and over again. From time to time, the guards of the Roman
Emperor would assassinate him when he got out of control. And to this day, you know, dictators, they have to appease the immediate people they work with.
That's the source of their power. So it diminishes their power. And you could imagine a scenario
where the center becomes more and more powerful, even to the point, you know, if you extrapolate
out to the limit, you don't know, you know know exactly how it would unfold, but you could envision an extrapolation out to a limit where one person has all the power.
And they're surrounded by AI and surveillance and empowerment that enables that.
And, you know, we don't know how things will unfold, but if that vision of that extreme limit where one person controls everybody else is worth considering in our striving to prevent centralization of power.
We don't want other people to have power over us.
It's not a healthy situation.
We want the power decentralized and distributed to individuals. And that has to be
enabled with privacy tools and other techniques that keep that away from the center. And so I
think that makes private cryptocurrency especially important at this juncture of looking forward for how society
becomes what we want it to be. I mean, we may not have perfect control over what path humanity
takes, but I think it's pretty clear that decentralized power is what we want. You know, we should strive to try to get that rather than
letting the center take all the power. So I agree completely with your assessment. We're seeing
surveillance. People don't even realize the degree to which they're being surveilled and how it's all
being tied together because it's like tying multiple pieces of information on us together
behind the scenes brings value. So it's happening, right? There's incentives to do it. And people know a lot more about us than I think most
of us realize at the center, either in companies or in the government. And we should fight that.
Yeah, amazing points. I mean, I trust, I mean, I wouldn't say I trust government, but I like government. I'm not anti-government, but you brought up some crazy risk factors that we need to protect ourselves from. So yeah, amazing points. We've got Sterling here from Polis Labs. I wanted to see if you wanted to add something.
But Polis Labs, I just wanted to see if you wanted to add something.
Yeah, thanks for inviting me up, guys.
Excellent discussion.
I'm really happy to see that there's so many more people that are talking about privacy.
And more spaces like this are emerging all the time.
One thing I want to speak to when Yin was talking about the issue with power,
one of the problems that, of course, we have to deal with
when you have a monocultural regime
or you have a top-down based centralized power structure
is that also creates a scenario
where all of the game theoretic dynamics
in society get skewed, right?
Because the incentives get completely warped.
And when that happens, of course, we're not able to build and
to create and to innovate in ways that make sense toward building a brighter future, to creating
more stabilized institutions. And that is a real shame of the current situation. And of course,
it feeds into this surveillance state regime in the current scenario that we find ourselves in.
So it's definitely very important that we continue trying to create the protocols and the tools that largely not only decentralize our ecosystems,
but also create more privacy-preserving apparatus within the context of these societies.
And I think that, or I think something important to mention and something that really disturbs
me is that there's a lot of companies and institutions that are coming out saying that
they support privacy, they support anonymity, but the reality is that they're issuing back
doors that play into the surveillance apparatus, right?
They're playing into the KYT, the AML, the KYC apparatus, and I think that is not a direction that we should go.
Maybe some folks here disagree and we could have a debate about that.
But certainly the concern is that when we have a mainstreamization of privacy and anonymity, there's also a risk that our ecosystems can get hijacked.
And currently when people talk about decentralization,
there's also just a shit ton of decentralization theater
because there's too many aspects of Web3
that aren't as decentralized as they absolutely should be.
And this creates a risk vector, right,
or a threat vector within our
ecosystem. So I definitely think we should continue to promote the idea that we should have real
cypherpunk technology, real privacy technology, real anonymizing protocols. And I still feel like
there's a dearth of that currently. So yeah, I guess that's where I would kind of start the conversation. I won't call out any specific actors, but I was recently at DevConnect in Argentina, and there's just many people that are wanting to promote protocols that aren't actually privacy-preserving and privacy-guaranteeing.
And to at least say that this isn't, like, quote-unquote real.
I understand why these folks are doing it.
There's institutional reasons for it. They want to play within the context of the legacy system. But if we have
an appetite for doing that, we're just sacrificing our altar at the edifice of the state, which isn't
great. So maybe we can speak to that a little bit as well. I don't know how you guys feel about it.
Yeah. So are you thinking that there are some companies worse than others doing this, or are you thinking it's just like the incentives are broad and pretty much all companies are doing this?
No, no, no.
Definitely not all.
There's a lot of organizations that are actually trying to create real, true privacy-protecting protocol.
We also, of course, have the cryptocurrencies that are actually private and or anonymous.
Monero is a great example of that.
But there are ones, and I'll go ahead and just call it out.
So privacy pools, right, a means work.
So they effectively have a backdoor where they do KYT so that they can be compliant with the state apparatus.
with the state apparatus, of course, they characterize this, and this is worthy of discussion.
Of course, they characterize this, and this is worthy of discussion.
They characterize this as being important because they don't want to have bad actors and terrorists
use their protocols. And that's a legitimate concern. But the issue is, is that becomes a
slippery slope. Like, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, right? And what
are they going to do? They're just going to play into the OFAC rules that the United States has. They're going to play into the BSA and the AML rules. And so what
they're doing is just they're supporting a regime that hasn't always had our best interests at heart.
And this speaks to your point, Yen, where the more decentralization that we actually have and the
more privacy that we actually have in these protocols, the fairer that society actually,
I mean, we know with 100% uncertainty
that the banks globally have not been great actors, right? HSBC was caught laundering
to the tune of billions of dollars of cartel money. This is something that we need to actually
exit, right? This is why we have this idea of exit ideology, exiting from these systems and
building systems that create the new world that we want to live in.
Right. They launder and they also debank politically.
I mean, that's come out. And I think, yeah, those are very good points.
And I would add, you know, like, yes, they bring up their things.
Terrorism is bad, right?
Nobody wants that.
Like anything that exploits children, nobody wants that.
So it's all like really good points of things we want to prevent as a society.
But what's always failed to be taken into consideration is the price.
You know, sure, there's something good to be had there, but what is the price? And we limit things all the time based on the price. Like in the US,
we don't let police without a warrant come into our home. You could easily argue, oh yeah,
if police could go into everybody's home at any time, it would lower crime. And it
would, right? It would lower lots of bad things. The price would be too high. And I think that's
the way to look at all these things. You know, somebody's backdooring or the KYC, you know,
the price of KYC is really, really high. It exposes, like, the people who give their information to hacks by who they're giving it to.
And it requires a lot of friction in a lot of industries where you can't do things that
would really be good to do, good for society and humanity in general. So in all cases,
when people start talking about, oh, we're going to implement this
thing to prevent this bad thing, you also have to ask, well, what is the price of preventing that
bad thing? And could it be that the price is actually worse than the bad thing?
Yeah, that's an amazing point that you guys both bring up around you know the price of of not allowing people to
be private essentially uh it's i don't know what the solution is i mean i well i think the solution
is that we can't give up privacy for those reasons it's you know like bad actors will always find a way, you know, there's already bad actors use fiat or gold or many different methods to get around, you know, like using the banking system and being spied on by the government. You're not going to stop these bad things no matter what you do. But yeah, the situation
of going or continuing down this path that we're already on where everything is under surveillance,
whether it's the government can surveil or private companies or bad actors downloading this data and
putting it all together with AI, that is an extremely bad situation
that can be much worse than the current already existing reality that there will be bad actors
and bad actors will do bad things. And yeah, it does suck that bad actors probably do use
like QVX and Zcash and unfortunately we'll use Telos' upcoming privacy layer.
I don't know what exactly we can do about that.
Obviously we don't want to attract those parties, but yeah,
I also think it's important that we progress down a path where we claim back privacy
because the current state of things
is looking quite bad, I think.
When anyone who has money is at the risk of getting hacked,
I mean, sorry, not getting hacked.
Well, yes, it's easier to lead someone to getting hacked
if you have more information about them. That's certainly true. But even worse, getting kidnapped and killed, you know, getting hacked. If you have more information about them, that's certainly
true. But even worse, getting kidnapped and killed, you know what I mean? Or threatened.
There's just so many bad things that can happen if we continue down this path.
Right. Agreed.
Yeah, a few thoughts on this. So I know it's easy to roll in this space together. And one of the things because people feel like they don't have any kind of hope.
They don't have agency.
They don't feel like they can actually create change and create a forward, positive momentum
into the future.
But I think what all of us are working on right now in this space where we're trying
to protect our privacy, we're trying to push back against the surveillance state. I think we live in a very good time, a strong time for creating these tools and technologies
and creating a brighter future simultaneously.
It's not, I mean, look what everything that's happened.
There's a lot of innovation and a lot of really good work happening around zero-knowledge
cryptography.
There's a lot more work happening in decentralized data storage, which also is an area that will definitely help protect our ecosystems and our infrastructure.
We have all this parallel society, network state, cyber state ecosystems that are emerging.
We're creating the infrastructure and the edifice for being able to protect ourselves in ways that we haven't had the ability to do in the past. Yes, there's always going to be a tug of war. There's always going to be a cat and mouse game, an us versus them kind of
setup. But I do think at the end of the day, the way that we're developing forward into the future
with this technology is going to largely liberate us in ways that we haven't been able to do in the
past. Yes, the system is going to currently come after us,
but by the same token,
the mind share that we have in the privacy ecosystem
is developing at such a rapid rate,
and there's so many more people coming into it
that I strongly believe that we're gonna be able
to create an ecosystem that is surveillance resistant,
that is anti-fragile, and that ultimately protects us
from these really awful actors.
And we'll also be able to, you know, it's kind of funny when I think about when people say,
well, what are you going to do about all the bad actors?
It was, I think about Timothy May, right?
The guy who wrote the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.
He said, someone asked him, what are you going to do about all the pedophiles and the murderers
and the thieves and the fraudsters?
And you know what he said?
He said, deal with it.
Deal with it.
I think that's a very aggressive take on the subject.
But these problems of the bad actors, that should be handled on the social layer, not the technical layer.
Right?
Why should we have to worry about – we're worried about human rights and civil liberties.
That's what privacy and anonymity-enhancing technology is all about, about protecting that.
And we should be steadfast and ardent defenders of that ethos.
That's where I stand on the matter.
Let's care about that stuff, but let's care about it on the social layer.
I like that, and that's a positive vision too.
I like that a lot.
Yeah, likewise, likewise. I do have a,
it's kind of the same topic, but I'm, I'm kind of curious.
What do you guys think of all the networks out there that aren't like diving
into privacy at this stage?
There seems to be like thousands of layer ones and layer twos.
They all offer public transactions, transparent transactions, which is great.
And I'm not against having transparent transactions.
I think there's a lot of reasons to have them, like having public markets.
There's certain situations, like say polymarket, where you want to see what everyone is trading, what bets they're taking.
It adds value to the experience.
But at the same time, we've created thousands of these networks.
There doesn't seem to be a lot of demand for them.
What do you guys think will happen with the hundreds or thousands of existing networks that don't seem to have taken interest in privacy?
It's worth acknowledging that even the non-private cryptocurrencies do have things to offer, like at least so far, you know, censorship resistance, for example.
So, you know, if you have Bitcoin and it's perfectly transparent what you're sending, but you can still send it.
Right. So that that has there's value there without the privacy.
But the privacy adds a lot of value.
And I think tying into the upbeat theme we've been talking of, people moving towards privacy, we're seeing that.
Over the last several months, we saw a lot of interest in Zcash, and it bled over into other private cryptocurrencies.
private cryptocurrencies. And Vitalik, if you've seen his messaging, he's talking about adding
privacy to Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies that had privacy, right? Decred has added some
to get privacy and Litecoin's added it. So it's some of those, like as there's increasing pressure and people want privacy, many of those will add it.
You know, there's mixing. You can use mixing with Bitcoin, right? It's not perfect, but no,
really, no technique is perfect. You just, it's good enough for a certain application.
So some of those will go through like add-ons and mixing. And as came up before, you can swap back and forth from chains, right? So maybe a chain has value to get privacy. People just swap over to Telos or they swap over to PIVX and they get privacy that way.
Yeah, I have one last comment. I'm going to have to head over to another space. This has been amazing, guys. But I will say that there's this quote, right, where it's transparency for the powerful and privacy for the weak.
transparency, especially as it's related to some aspects of a good that is related to perhaps a
treasury, like in a Dow situation where you may want to have some type of transparency.
But certainly it should be very clear that those ecosystems exist with full transparency and that
people can opt into them and use them as they see fit, right? I mean, the whole idea behind privacy
is it's the ability to selectively reveal oneself at one's own leisure, right? So in those cases, it's fine. But then there are some contexts where you want to be
completely private. And in those contexts, like in the case of Monero, that system should be
private by default, right? Because if it's not private by default, then it leaves those pools
open to surveillance potentially,
where if there's a certain amount of funds that get moved around,
you would be able to de-anonymize the actors that are involved in that particular space.
So anyway, I just wanted to make a few comments.
Guys, I'll join you again on another space, and we can chat about this.
Happy to connect and be connected.
Excellent topic.
Keep up the good work.
Thanks, Dolly.
Have a good one. Really appreciate it.
So, Yinsha, we're coming up to an hour.
Actually, we've passed an hour. Is there anything else you wanted to cover before we wrap
this up? Well, I think we've covered a lot of
really great points. Oh, we did. We did.
Yeah, it's been fantastic having you on and your,
your technical insights into the situation and really diving into quantum and AI.
And, uh, it's just been, it's just been fantastic. And I think we need to have more of these
conversations, uh, because yeah, it's, I'm, I'm just like every day i'm just like my mind is blown because i realize
just like how important this is what we're working it's very important yes yeah it's been
been a great discussion thank you um any thoughts on i guess like one final question before we wrap things up.
You can share your socials and everything.
But what can we do, I guess, to get, like, governments on board to realize the importance of what we're doing?
Because there is going to be, like, I guess, like, some struggles, I think, in the future as the pushback from government potentially around adding privacy.
You know, obviously, I think for positive reasons, the government want to track transactions.
It obviously helps them, you know, detect bad actors.
But what can we do?
Is it just education or do we just need to keep pushing forward?
Do we just need to keep having more spaces like this?
Any ideas on that?
Well, that's a great question.
And I think the answer I would give to it, I think it's a marketing question.
And marketing has two aspects.
One is where's market fit?
What product do you offer? And then, you know, what niches do you find to get started and so forth? And then the other side of that is, well, how do you get the word out about that product fit in those applications? as when done right, very much a creative process. I mean, the great marketers, they discover new
like channels, right? Where's a channel nobody's seeing? That's when marketing's done right,
that's the way it's done. Finding things that are unseen and coming up with creative approaches
for both getting the product out there and getting the word out about it.
So I guess it's not quite a direct answer to your question of, you know, where, how do we go about
this? It's more of an indirect answer that I think we need to be creative and keep seeking out new
channels wherever we find them. You know, so it might in some cases be political. And I think that cryptocurrency is wielding a lot of political power these days.
So it might be political in places.
It might be, as you mentioned, educational in places.
Really, a lot of people don't understand the degree to which they're being surveilled.
They don't fully understand cryptocurrency and how it can impact them positively.
So education is really important.
And, you know, in other things that we're not thinking of,
I think the important part of the answer to that question is finding creative
ways to get the word out and creative ways to find product fit with private
cryptocurrency.
Yeah, I totally agree with that.
The key is like creativity.
I think there's all sorts of different types of content, videos, for instance, that can
maybe help to educate people on the dangers of the existing path we're on.
I think they're compelling to just about everyone.
There is not one person who will not be affected by this issue
we were talking about earlier of mass information availability,
AI, and just continuing to give up information that puts us all individually
at risk in so many different manners.
You know, we talked about like the safety concerns for individuals, but even like, I
mean, basic things like the current banking system is already breaking down.
Like the current banking system is already breaking down.
Like my, I make a transaction sometimes and, and I get blocked and it's not even an odd
or weird transaction.
Really?
There are so many issues with the current like web to infrastructure.
It's like a wire transfer.
No, just a regular like transfer to my wife to cover half the mortgage.
Oh, wow.
So I think that is a very obvious sign that, one, the old infrastructure is broken.
It is.
But there's so much information out there that makes hacks and things possible that we need this transition to Web3 and we need this transition to privacy.
Otherwise, you know, these banks and other institutions are going to continue to be skittish.
You know what I mean?
It's just totally breaking.
And that is something that is affecting everyone, I think.
I don't think there is an example of one person who's not being affected by privacy-related issues right now.
And AI is just going to make it much, much worse, I think.
For sure. So, yeah, if we create this content that speaks to all these different individuals, all these different use cases that they're going to be affected by, like that could be quite compelling and get everyone on our side, I guess.
Right.
Imagine the phishing attacks that are coming with AI and with credit cards that we mentioned earlier, the public and the private key are the same.
Like you mentioned earlier, the public and the private key are the same.
You know, it's all, the system is going, it's already breaking,
and that's going to strain it further.
Totally.
So just to finish things off,
what's the best way we can become part of the PIVX community?
What's the best way to follow you and your thoughts?
I'd actually love to join more spaces with you or just like hear some of or read some
of your articles.
You've proven incredibly insightful.
So, yeah, how can we get in touch or hear more from you and PIVX?
Well, there's a, yeah, we should maintain contact.
Q&PX has a Discord community that would be good to be involved with.
We also are involved with, we're one of the permanent members, if you will,
of the Privacy Roundtable, which is multiple private cryptocurrencies.
multiple private cryptocurrencies, Particle, FIRO are also involved, that just take an approach of
not focusing just on our particular coin, but also on privacy coins and techniques in general.
So I think it may be nice to come on there or be involved in that in some way.
Oh, that sounds fantastic.
Yeah, this has probably been my favorite space we've ever had.
So thank you so much for joining us.
I've enjoyed it a lot, too.
Thanks for all the good insights and for having us on.
Yeah, thank you, Tim.
It's been a pleasure.
All right.
Okay.
Thanks, everyone.
Yeah, thank you.
I appreciate you all going.
