Luke: [00:00:00] You’re listening to a new episode of The Brave Technologist, and this one features Mark Henderson, who is the engineering manager at Shielded Labs, where he obsesses over permanence. He works on the privacy infrastructure, meant to keep Zcash secure for a zillion years. Mark Za Polymath who runs a 4,000 piece art catalog powered by AI visual search, and he treats privacy, art and AI as the same puzzle in different clothes.

In this episode, we discussed how Zcash plans to fund itself long-term beyond the supply cap. What crosslink could unlock for Zcash by combining two different ways of securing a blockchain, the growth of privacy tech and renewed popularity of Zcash in 2025, and the future of privacy tech and surveillance based business models.

And now for this week’s episode of the Brave Technologist.

Mark, welcome to the Brave Technologist. How you doing today?

Mark: I’m doing great. How are you, Luke?

Luke: Doing well, doing well. I’ve been looking forward to this one. at Shielded Labs and, described your specific work at Shielded Labs as kind of obsessing over [00:01:00] permanence.

what does that look like day to day?

Mark: what it means is we want the Zcash blockchain, which is the, the primary blockchain that Shielded Labs works on. Zcash support organization and we want Zcash to last forever. We want it to be a sustainable proof of work, blockchain that, you know, persists and continues making blocks, continues serving transactions and, serving users until the end of time if we can.

Uh, we just want it to last, for, for a long time and our projects are sort of built around that. Now, when I wrote that. That was a few months back, and that was before the Ironwood upgrade, which was, something that a independent security contractor, under the direction of Shielded Labs discovered.

And then all the, organizations, there’s about five main support organizations right now. We said we came together like Voltron and all worked [00:02:00] on that together. so we, we are also taking kind of a watchdog or a gargoyle, role in Zcash two and just really looking out for the chain and its security and things like that, which of course, ties into permanence.

needs to be secure and performant and available in the train, like in, IT infrastructure terms like avail availability, as, as long as possible.

Luke: Yeah, and it’s comparing that against how a lot of technology software is kinda developed, where, you know, it’s, it’s always kind of based on quarterly cycles or faster even.

if I juxtapose this against like an AI company, it would be much more shorter term thing. I, I would imagine you guys are kind of having to think about pretty long time horizons. Is that fair to assume?

Mark: Yeah. In particular, there’s one project called the Network Sustainability Mechanism.

and for, I’ll try to summarize it for people who aren’t super familiar with proof of work [00:03:00] blockchains, what happens is you get a fixed supply cap in your coin, like Bitcoin and Zcash both have a 21 million coin supply cap.

Luke: Mm-hmm.

Mark: and that in terms of like mimetic power.

That number is very sacrosanct to people. You cannot, you know, that’s, you get these terms like one Z equals one z and there’s never inflation, and we’re never gonna have more things. But then. What happens when the 21000000th coin is mined?

Luke: Right?

Mark: Bitcoin has a philosophy, well, we’re just gonna use transaction fees to keep, that going.

But if you look at the news, they’re already talking about adding what’s called tail emissions to Bitcoin, and that just says, okay, well just keep making new blocks, and they’ll be really small and the rewards will be really small. but. it’s going to, it’s gonna break the 21 million supply cap.

What we are proposing, which has pretty broad consensus among [00:04:00] the Zcash community, is to incorporate voluntary. Removal from issuance.

Luke: Hmm.

Mark: People, you know, call it burning, but it’s not quite burning. it’s more like recycling. Mm-hmm. So 60% of transaction fees, voluntary removal from issuance, uh, like tipping the network kind of, and that goes into this.

Mechanism and those are slowly reissued over time. So it creates this sort of flywheel, where Z is removed from issuance and then reissued as block rewards later on.

Luke: Mm.

Mark: Interesting. And if you imagine, yeah, yeah. If you imagine it playing out, there’s a theoretical steady state where enough is being burned per some time horizon, and enough is being reissued and that that’s the primary like.

How far out can we get that to go? Can that be a sustainable flywheel for, perpetually? Mm-hmm. And go for as long as it needs to. [00:05:00]

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Luke: I mean, well, how far out is that? I mean, I, ‘cause I remember like, you know, early Bitcoin days, it just seemed like that 21 million number was often the forever distance.

Right? Like, um, how, how far off is that as far as d Cash is concerned, like in, in the future?

Mark: Yeah. Um, we actually have a chart and a calculation, So instead of Bitcoin improvement proposals, ‘cause Zcash is a fork of Bitcoin. So we, right, we, you know, we have zips or Zcash improvement proposals and if you look at zip 2 34, which is the, part of the [00:06:00] NSM here is.

The money reserve will be depleted after 113.88 years.

Luke: Wow.

Mark: And that was, that was written about two, two or three years ago. So give or take.

Luke: Yeah.

Mark: Uh, so we’re talking about, you know, a hundred years or so is when the final coins will we mine. So that’s how far ahead we’re trying to think.

Luke: Yeah. And that’s kind of what I was trying to get at too with like, you know, thinking in different time horizon.

‘cause you guys are, I mean like, um, you know, especially in today’s, you know, environment, like having to think out like even five years seems like a foreign language to a lot of people. when you talk to them, they’re, they’re so obsessed over when know, yesterday or tomorrow. it’s a different mindset.

And the other thing I want to kind of get into is, You mentioned the, the Zcash support, entity, right? and so you, you all are funded by by donations, right? Like and not by any official company or foundation, how are you guys independent and why does that matter basically?

Mark: Yeah. it’s a really good question. We’re independent in two [00:07:00] ways. and one of them is that we’re a non-US. Based organization. and we were the first one to be non-US based. originally there was the Zcash company, which became the Electric Coin Company. Mm-hmm. Which became so recently. and the Zcash Foundation, and those were both US based.

And during the Biden administration in particular, there was a lot of. Talk about this regulatory risk that Zcash was under.

Luke: Mm-hmm.

Mark: So, Jason McGee, also known as a quiet investor, had a really good idea to open a Swiss domiciled company, a nonprofit, and operate shielded labs out of Switzerland. And hire contractors and solicit donations.

And then the independent part with regards to funding is you need to kind of understand the history of Zcash funding.

Luke: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Um,it has what’s,

Luke: let’s go into it. We got time right?

Mark: Hey, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Luke: [00:08:00] If you don’t mind.

Mark: No, not at all.

Luke: Okay, cool.

Mark: There was something called the founder’s reward, which became the dev fund, which became the lockbox over time, and this was a percentage of the block reward, basically goes into a endowment of sorts or a bucket that, is used to fund development on Zcash.

You

Mark: know, the founders reward was there as a time box thing to, you know, benefit investors and early adopters of the project or the people who worked on it initially. Then the dev fund was for the Zcash Foundation and for, something called Zcash Community Grants, which was, is what it sounds like and the Electric Coin Company.

And then now there’s a lockbox, which is coin holder voted. Retroactive grants.

Luke: Mm-hmm.

Mark: And the Zcash community grants. So there’s like smaller milestone based grants and coin holder retroactive grants that do fund, the [00:09:00] organization still, like the, the Tachyon project, the Valor Group, electric Coin Company, all, are seeking retroactive grants for their work.

but Shielded Labs does not touch any of that. And we do not benefit from the 20% block reward or in any fashion or the lockbox funds. to date. You know, we, we’ve not applied for any retroactive grants or any Zcash community grants. We just rely on, there’s public donations. The Winklevoss brothers have donated, lic, Butrin has donated.

and, you know, a handful of private donors and community donations as well.

Luke: Mm-hmm.

Mark: So, you know. And,

Luke: and for, for those that aren’t as familiar, like, but how, what does that, why does that independence matter? Like for, for what you’re doing at Shielded Labs?

Mark: Um, I think it matters because we, like form follows function, I guess.

So by having our funding be independent, we. [00:10:00] Get to decide what we think is best for Zc and we are able to execute on that. Mm-hmm. You know, nothing we do is, is shoehorning consensus or anything like that. We still see community consensus for protocol level changes and stuff, but the donations that we get are essentially, we trust you and your vision for, and we trust you to protect and to sustain the chain and things like that.

Like it’s very. some, you know, like, donated because of our cross-link project, which we’ll get into, you know, sooner or later. Sure. but yeah, generally we’re independent. We’re not like, driven directly by donors and, the dev fund is kind of controversial.

I still think it’s a really good idea. but you know, a lot of the fud that you see on Twitter is like, it’s a VC coin and

Luke: Oh yeah.

Mark: The minor tax. They don’t call it the dev fund. They call it the minor tax. And, and a lot of the, a lot of the concerns were addressed by, incorporating this coin holder voting.[00:11:00]

Luke: Mm-hmm.

Mark: But again, we just sort of want to be orthogonal from that. We wanna be independent of that sort of out of the fray in a sense, so that we can be nimble and act on things like, like the vulnerability, discovery and things like that,

Luke: which I think is super important. And I also think it’s really cool too, that like, you know, you, you hear this, diversification or, or diversity, right? Like having client diversity, right? Like with, especially with the Ethereum community. But like, it’s really important with the Zcash community too, where, you don’t want to have only one company or, or entity, being the primary anything, for something like what you guys are, are working on.

And, and I think it’s really cool that you guys can have a vision, and also. F fund research and you know, things like you, you guys were doing that kind of led to this whole upgrade that you were mentioning. being able to be independent and say like, look like this is really important to us right now.

I think that that’s really cool that you guys are doing it. And it also shows kind of, maturity in, in the space that to where, there is more than one entity that have visions, uh, around this vision of Zika [00:12:00] in itself.

Mark: Agreed. it’s started with us, you know, there was, there was two, then there was three for a while.

Now there’s at least five. Wow. So it’s really blossoming into a lot of, organizations contributing. We have the Tachyon project, which is working on a scaling and, Recursive proof, the recursive z zk proof solution, for payment protocol and a new shielded protocol. We have the Valor Group, which are working on the UX solutions, and they launched a new node called Zura.

So now we have client diversity as well. We have Zebra and Zura, and we are finally able to deprecate Zcash D, which was the og, like c plus plus Bitcoin fork. so we finally were able to nuke that. So we’re fully in rust in memory safe languages, and we have two clients, which is awesome actually, because there’s actually some, a little bit of competition, like friendly competition between the clients.

Yeah. So the,

Luke: that’s good.

Mark: The quality is just, you know, exponentially increasing across the board. and [00:13:00] yeah. And there’s also this Cipher punk company, which is sort of a Winklevoss spinoff that’s sort of trying to give people. Stock market, like ticker exposure to the privacy market.

Luke: Hmm.

Mark: They’re heavily interesting Zcash as well, so it’s, yeah, it’s, it is pretty neat.

Um,

Luke: yeah. Well, and, and it is been interesting with Zcash too, ‘cause, not, something that’s just kind of came up overnight, right? Like, Zcash has been in production for quite a long time, but also like last year there was just this huge wave it was like a whole new set of people were becoming aware, you know, you guys had this big momentum that kind of started last year around privacy and, you know, everyone was watching the shielded, amounts go up, et cetera.

Yeah. How was that kind of seeing that big mimetic wave kind of kick in? Was it something you guys anticipated seeing, or was that surprising? Or, how was that?

Mark: It was completely surprising. You know, So my, my personal history is I was in the crypto industry at a company called [00:14:00] Equilibrium.

Luke: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Uh, equilibrium Labs outta Finland. And I ended up, I took a kind of a sabbatical from crypto and I was, thought I was done with it. I was kind of fed up with the, it was around the FDX time and I just was like sick of being in the casino, so to speak.

Luke: Yeah.

Mark: Um, and I. Tried to have a normie job and it didn’t really work out.

so I went back and I contacted Jason, again, the ED at, at Shielded Labs and, he, yeah, he invited me to come work at Shielded Labs right in March of 2025.

Luke: Wow.

Mark: So the price is $30, $30, $30. And then right around the time of, of Token 2049 in Singapore, it just started shooting up And, yeah. It was, you know, for, I, I tell that story to differentiate that I’m not like a true trencher.

Like there’s people that have held Zcash and held ZEC for nine years of just down [00:15:00] only, you know, just so mission driven. And so, you know, and you really can’t mess with that. You can’t, like, you know, you don’t understand the mindset of somebody like that, until you start interacting with them. So like.

There to have that type of vindication must be an incredible feeling.

Luke: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Um, and just being part of it from the limited scope that I have, it was great. I’ve always been into privacy. I’ve always used brave,

Luke: oh, thank you.

Mark: Came out I way back in like 20, what, what is it? 20. 16, 20 17, 20 18.

Luke: Yeah, that was, uh, 16 was the first public version.

Yeah,

Mark: yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like onboard then. just fascinated with how private you can be and, and make things. That alone was a great feeling. And then in the privacy wave kind of happened. Other coins like Dash and Monero, Litecoin even, you know, is like part of the privacy bundle now.

And it, it’s a new [00:16:00] tab on coin market cap and there’s all this stuff going on. Privacy’s a new hot thing. so that, yeah, it’s an incredible feeling and it is always been the case that nobody wanted to pay for privacy. Nobody wanted to pay that premium.

Luke: Mm-hmm.

Mark: except in like poorly marketed products, like weird VPNs that don’t actually give you that much privacy or they’re secretly logging things behind the scenes and

Luke: Right.

Mark: You know, the consumer privacy is this weird thing. But true privacy, like having a true encrypted ledger like Zcash has, or, the features that Brave has with like, you know, built in tour, like network level privacy, things like that. It doesn’t seem like people really wanted to pony up for that and now privacy has a price and it has a premium and all this stuff.

So I think we’re headed towards a really good thing here,

Luke: it’s interesting like, you know, I’ve been working with Brave since like, the beginning and , I remember, you know, back in 2016, a lot of people were challenging the thesis that people [00:17:00] even cared about privacy.

And then now it’s like we’re in this whole other. Set of environmental conditions where you, you’ve got there’s a privacy space and now you’ve got like companies kind of, , competing over privacy and, and kind of privacy washing and things like that.

And, having this community that’s. Been so diehard. I mean, I see it with Brave, but I’m kind of curious, like, does that help keep you guys anchored? Is having such a fanatical community that’s willing to kind of go through the, the worst of it. How does that influence when you guys are building or are you guys working with ’em with testing?

is it something that kind of are, is helping to kind of. Keep Zcash like at that leading edge of what like real privacy is, because that’s kind of where I find myself is like, people will asterisk privacy or try and condition it in a certain way. And it’s one of those things where like, if you’re building from really good fundamentals, there’s no room for the asterisk, right?

yeah, that’s an awesome question. There’s, speaking of token 2049, there’s a talk by Sean Bo, [00:18:00] who was there on day one, one of the co-founders of Zcash, and he, he basically walked through that privacy was the top priority when.

Mark: Starting Zcash, so it was mm-hmm. Always encrypted from the, the get go. There was the transparent pool, but then there was the shielded pool called Sprout, and those were all zero knowledge proofs and encrypted, and it took like 10 minutes to create a transaction ‘cause of all the calculations to do so. It wasn’t performant, but it was private.

And then, okay. Mm-hmm. What can we do to get performance gains and privacy was always the foundation. You started there. and then, yeah, the trenchers, like I have basically a contact list called like trenchers and there’s people I know that are completely dedicated to the mission that will, try out any new ideas that you have, will give feedback on stuff, be really responsive because they’re just there for Zcash and you know that they’re there because they’ve been there the whole time.

And there’s [00:19:00] also another group of people. There’s a little bit of a vent overlap of all these different things, but there’s a group of people who will definitely call you out and really know their shit when it comes to like mathematics. Mm-hmm. Um, to privacy and encryption. And if you’re straying off the path, they will.

You know, swat you back onto it and keep you honest, which is really cool. So like,

Luke: I love that

Mark: there’s all these different voices in my head when I’m trying to figure out what we’re gonna do. What’s so and so gonna say about this? Or I can imagine this group, this contingency is going to take issue with this, so we need to address that.

And you know, and again, it’s, it’s trying to stay true to your own vision or to shield the lab’s own vision of what we think is best for Zcash. Combined with the group’s sort of. Group consensus and the community consensus as well.

Luke: Yeah. No, and I mean, that makes a lot of sense and, and is relatable in, in a lot of ways.

Um, I I think, uh, especially as things grow too, right? Like where, you know, you kind of [00:20:00] get this bigger population and I mean, that’s obviously gonna change. Uh, the core audience is gonna grow and, and you’re gonna have different sets of concerns and all of that. Um, I know you mentioned earlier, like crosslink, I’d love to kind of dig into that a little bit more.

Um. Crossing, kind of correct me if I’m wrong here, but, or, or help expand on it. The crosslink mix is two different ways of kind of securing blockchain, right? Like, um, if it works the way you hope, what can Zcash do in five years that it can’t do now?

Mark: Well, it can have finality in transactions.

Luke: Okay.

Mark: And

Luke: can can we go into what crosslink is a little bit?

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, there’s this concept called finality in blockchain. And it basically means once a transaction is kind of enshrined and minted on the chain and included in a block in mind that it cannot be reversed. Proof of work. Blockchains do not have finality. You’ll hear this term called probabilistic finality, which basically [00:21:00] means, oh, a hundred blocks have gone by.

Therefore, that transaction is probably safe. And it can’t be rolled back. Well, it can, it it, no matter what, there, somebody could always show up with more hash power. Having mined a longer chain, who knows? Aliens could show up with a Dyson fear and mine all the way back to the Genesis block. You know what I mean?

Like Right. There’s a, a, it’s a very low probability, but there is a non-zero chance that, that even that could happen.

Luke: Mm-hmm.

Mark: So a finale, probabilistic finale is almost like an oxymoron. and I’m not talking about faster finality, I’m not talking about faster confirmations. I’m just talking about having it as a concept itself.

Now, proof of stake, blockchains have. Instant finality.

Luke: Mm-hmm.

Mark: the best way I heard of describing it is that proof of work, miners are all trying to mine their own block and proof of stake. Validators are all trying to [00:22:00] validate the same block. So they’re all looking at the same block and saying, yes, no good.

Okay, check go. And once that’s done, it’s done. And you can’t roll that back. so we thought actually Nate, Nate Wilcox is kind of the, the mastermind behind this and he said, well, what if we can just kind of attach a little finality gadget? Next to the proof of work blockchain. So this is still going, all the economic activity is still going on on the proof of work blockchain, but there’s this little BFT proof of state guy over here that’s basically just checking blocks off as it goes.

Kind kind of hangs out next to the proof of work chain and says, okay, yep. Up to this point we’re final. Mm-hmm. Now we’re final at this point, and it just written into the consensus rules. Once the Finality gadget checks off a block, it can never be rolled back past that point.

Luke: Mm.

Mark: And you know, it was called the trailing finality layer or the TFL, and then we start, crosslink [00:23:00] was a catch your name.

So we, you know, and the, the two chains sort of link to each other and you get this cross link between the two. and yeah, it’s just a, it’s. In order to really attack the chain, in order to do a, a rollback, in that case, you would have to defeat both consensus mechanisms.

Luke: Yeah, I see.

Mark: So, like, you know, a rollback might cost a certain, it’s, it’s weird to talk about a cost to attack.

It’s, it’s, right. A more accurate term is like a penalty for penalty. Uh, a more accurate term is penalty for failure to defend.

Luke: Mm-hmm.

Mark: So if you, if you, you know, in, in a case where like a, you know, 10 proof of work blocks might cost 10 times x, but then 10 proof of work blocks, plus the total amount staked in the proof of stake system is like 10 times x plus.

$10 million or [00:24:00] something like that. It just makes the, it’s like putting a really fancy lock on the front door or something like that. It’s, it’s, you know, so yeah, that’s what crosslink is.

Luke: where’s it at with being implemented? Is it kind of in discussion phase, or is it on its way to production or in product?

Mark: Oh, it’s not in production. and it’s not even on its way to production. we’ve finished a prototype of it. Mm-hmm. And we’re now running it through an extensive and exhaustive test net period. Where we’re actually getting real, people involved like that aren’t us to run, finalizer nodes and to stake and to try it out.

And we’re just really running it through its paces right now. And we could be doing this for years, until we are confident. We can actually make it a real proposal and then it will go before all the different governance bodies and things like that to see if we can get it, get implemented.

Luke: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Mark: It is a controversial proposal. [00:25:00] State, elite. the

Luke: important ones are usually

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and. Rollback attacks just are happening all the time. There was one on Monero, there was one, not quite a rollback attack, but sort of a rollback adjacent attack on Litecoin, on Firo. and you’re gonna see more of them as, as time goes on.

Mm-hmm. The more GPUs are ended up propagated into the world. You know, they might just decide that some data center. We’re done with ai and we’re gonna just switch over to, to mining now, or, um,fortitude just announced they just bought like 9,000 Z fifteens Oh

Luke: my

Mark: gosh. Or something, you know, like Yeah, yeah, yeah.

it’s. We went so long without it becoming like a arms race for Z cash money. We get through like 16 million of the 21 million coins we got all the way out to that far. Um, but now it’s, now people are starting this, you know, catch wind of this sort of thing. So [00:26:00] everybody’s going. The hash rate doubled in the last year and I don’t see it stopping.

I think it’s gonna go keep going up, which is wild,

Luke: wild.

Mark: Yeah,

Luke: I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s kind of a cool problem set too. I mean, you know, it just, it shows the growth in, in, in kind of the people. One of those, uh, popularity things too, right? Like, um, oh yeah. and this is one of the interesting things too, like, I mean, Braves spent years kind of arguing, you know.

That the current ad tech economy is totally incompatible with privacy. and one of the things that I, I like about, and one of the things I got really excited about with Brave was that, , we integrated Zcash, as part of our wallet solution too, , because of, the need for financial privacy, from where you sit building Z Cash as privacy infrastructure, do you think financial privacy and surveillance based business models can ever genuinely coexist?

Mark: No. No, absolutely not. Yeah, there’s no way. I mean, there, there’s the whole model of surveillance based, like corporate surveillance, like we’ve [00:27:00] seen with all the social networks and stuff. It’s to build like a Cambridge Analytica size dossier about you.

Luke: Mm-hmm.

Mark: And try to sell you crap. And yeah, at best, they’re just at best trying you stuff.

At worst, they’re cooperating with three letter agencies and just passing your data along to Palantir and things like that. So like, yeah, you really need, there’s, there’s a group of people that really talk about how these privacy coins. I won’t say who, um, but people talk about how privacy coins are used by criminals or they’re used to hide your wealth.

Mm-hmm. And that’s not the point. The point is just a matter of your personal sovereignty and who gets to see your transactions. It’s that the choice remains with the user. And in, in Zcash, the feature is called viewing keys that you can share with somebody. So you can show an auditor. Your transactions or show your accountant your transactions.

They like, the [00:28:00] Zotto app has like a tax, export function that I use and I send my bookkeeper, you know, so it’s not about hiding anything and it’s not about, skirting law enforcement. So you can do illicit things online. It’s just you just need to have financial privacy so you’re not subject to all this stuff, especially in the age of ai.

Luke: Yeah.

Mark: You could just be subject to influence. You could just be subject to seeing things online that you don’t wanna see, or that you didn’t choose to see that are, they’re sort of subliminally changing your opinions on stuff. Like there’s a whole bunch of reasons why, and your financial data is behavioral data in the end.

Luke: Yeah.

Mark: And that’s ma massively used to both profile and influence. You

Luke: wait. And I think like right now is a super interesting time too, where you’ve got kind of this, uh, these things coming to head where age verification is and the fact that you might need to ID in certain parts of the world to go to the same website you’ve gone to [00:29:00] for decades in some cases.

alongside like kind of what we’re seeing, at least in the US around. You know, this, these surveillance installations with flock where, people are starting to see like, look like this is what can start to happen when third parties are collecting data about you and your neighborhood. Then, and plugging into, these decades now of, of profiling data that’s been collected on people and how fast that can kind of proliferate.

It’s a really interesting time, I think. how do you, I mean, like. What’s your take on seeing all this right now? are you optimistic or pessimistic, or what, what do you think?

Mark: I am, I’m more optimistic than most. I think I see a lot of the pushback is particularly against flock cameras, like municipalities have taken them down because people have had, there’s been unrest over them.

Luke: Mm-hmm.

Mark: There’s some really damning stories coming out about companies like Flock. You’ll see, uh, the CEOs using the [00:30:00] flock cameras to watch gymnastics matches and stuff. Like, there’s weird things going on, and that’s, that’s the thing that scares me about a lot of this stuff besides Theis, which will like.

To a certain extent, they’re like the Kyle Reese script from Terminator where the, they’ll never stop. They’re just gonna keep looking. They’re gonna keep pouring over stuff until they find what they need. Um, but like, it seems like it’s a human problem too, because all it takes is one particular person to have a bone to pick with one particular other person.

If they’re in a, a position of power, like if they’re an executive at Flock, they can just have a grudge with somebody and then all of a sudden all their personal data is just available at their fingertips. And that’s what kind of scares me on the individual level is, is something like that.

Luke: Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think too, it is kind of exposing [00:31:00] how a lot of these kind of pinky promise things or, or even default settings or implementations have really been kind of poorly executed, um, or, or adhered to or whatever. And, you know, you can’t really trust a lot of these things anymore. Um, not that you should have anyway, but like, you can’t ignore it either, right?

Like when it’s this much in your face. , It’s an interesting time. What was the predict prediction kind of about the future of privacy tech, you know, that you’d be confident enough to bet on?

Mark: Um, I think Z cash will endure, you know, I think, I think that’s a big thing.

I think any, any privacy protocol, um, I’ll, I’ll put signal on this list. I’ll put some features that are in brave on this list, like privacy protocols where you have to essentially tie yourself to the mast and. There’s no, it’s not that you won’t, like I left the pinky promise, uh, term. Like you’re not winking and promising that you [00:32:00] won’t look at people’s data with your hands behind your back, like telegram, cough, cough, but, uh, that you can’t, that it’s built into the protocol that you cannot.

You know, unless you, unless you’re the first person with a quantum computer in a lot of cases or something like that, you cannot break the encryption and you cannot look. And I think that’s the real thing. And it poses a business problem. It poses like a, a problem to almost capitalism itself because. So much of these, they call it a moat, but it’s usually like a choke point.

Luke: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Some artificial choke point that you create and says, you can’t go past this point unless you pay me. You can’t really do that in a truly private system. Like, you wouldn’t be able to charge somebody for access to the Zcash blockchain. It just doesn’t work like that.

Luke: Mm-hmm. So

Mark: that’s, that’s a really interesting thing.

So that’s something I’m optimistic about is sort of, I’m, I’m gonna [00:33:00] sound like a socialist or a communist or whatever, but I’m actually looking beyond that and I want to see what kind of new economic models people can come up with to monetize their businesses and to monetize their, their practices.

And I think a sort of interesting return to almost prim with Zcash being like cash mm-hmm. Is a fascinating thing to think about. yeah.

Luke: We need something. We need something that’s, at parody with like, you know, fungible, me giving you a $20 bill without anybody taking a picture of it.

you know, there’s gotta be something like that. Otherwise it’s just like, uh, where does the freedom go? Right. Like, it, it’s just nowhere, you know? And uh, and that’s one of the things I love about what you guys are doing and, and. I’ve been a big proponent of Zcash for a long time and, and I continue to be, ‘cause you, there, there needs to be these tools out there.

If they’re not there, then you know, it’s kinda game over. And, as long as Zcash is still making blocks, we know that, part of this is still, and the folks that are keeping the blocks moving are [00:34:00] still at work, you know, and it still, part of it hasn’t been totally sold out,

Mark: Right, right. Yeah. Because of the work on Cross-Link, people think that we’re somehow anti proof of work, and I’m not. ‘cause one of the beautiful things about proof of work is as long as there’s one miner out there still running hash power, it’s alive. You have a liveness guarantee that you don’t, you don’t get a proof of stake.

Proof of stake chains can halt mm-hmm. If there’s a voting issue. Um, but yeah, like, it’s, it’s really cool. And I, I. I hope it remains proof of work. Just to get that on the record, everybody, I hope we,

Luke: well, I mean, like, while we’re here kind of wrapping up, like is there anything else that we didn’t cover that you want our audience to know about either what you’re doing at, uh, with Shielded Labs or with Ash in general?

Uh,

Mark: no, just stay tuned. There’s is more network upgrades coming? There’s more, um. I, I do something called the Zcash Engineering Office hours that I’ll plug here. Nice. Yeah,

please

Luke: do.

Mark: And we’re, right now we’re reading [00:35:00] through the protocol page by page, section by section, together as like a study group. And the Zcash protocol, or the Zcash white paper, if you will, is 200 pages long.

Nice. So it’s a hefty thing. we had this really great episode with, this guy Connor Colluding node. And we, looked at it was, it was a prove the null hypothesis. Episode where we said, okay, we’re gonna find the backdoor, we’re gonna find the secret masad backdoor, whatever the hell you people are is in Zcash, we’re gonna go looking for it.

And we spent like two hours going through and looking through the transaction code and we’re like, okay. You know? So we really tried to, to look for it and figure out where it could be in the code. And we didn’t, we didn’t end up finding it. Doesn’t mean it’s not there, but we didn’t find it. Mm-hmm. At that time that we spent on it.

So that’s a lot of fun. So people should, tune into that. Shielded Mark on Twitter just at shielded mark. shielded labs on Twitter, [00:36:00] things like that. So, yeah.

Luke: Awesome. Well, mark, man, I really enjoyed the conversation, like I really appreciate you making the time to, to come on and, and yeah, like, we’ll plug in this stuff in, in the show notes too.

and I’d love to have you back too, like any updates or, or anything else that you guys wanna talk about. We’re always welcome here. And again, I really commend, the work you’re doing, in the Zcash community too for everything you guys are doing to kind of. Um, help keep, one of the big, uh, 10 poles for privacy out there.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. You know, just, you know, note that we did not do the lion’s share of development work on Ironwood. That was Zo Valor group, ion Z Catch Foundation. You know, we, we discovered the bug and kind of rang the alarm bell and helped along. But yeah, there’s, it’s a, it was a. Vast collaboration between all those, it’s awesome.

Luke: It’s one of the best parts, right? Like the fact that like, you know, you can discover it over here and then, you know, everybody kind of puts in together to get it done. And, uh, yeah, it’s been, that was one of the other amazing things to see is that like, , it is a pretty hairy [00:37:00] situation and, and everybody kind of came together, uh, so quickly too.

It was really.

Mark: Yeah, Schrodinger’s exploit because, uh, that’s another thing with the, with the shielded protocol, it was impossible to tell whether or not the exploit had been. Tripped. Yeah. So yeah, so that was a big thing. But then we have Ironwood and the supply is verifiable again, so Z cash wins.

Luke: Wonderful, wonderful. Well, onward man, like I really appreciate it, mark. And uh, yeah, I’d love to have you back and uh, and have a good one. Thanks again for making the time.

Mark: Thanks for listening to the Brave Technologist Podcast. To never miss an episode, make sure you hit follow

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