S17 E27: Kieran Mesquka on Railgun & Building Privacy

Kieran Mesquka is a contributor to privacy projects, best known for his work on Railgun for Ethereum. He is also an advocate for freedom-maximizing technologies and a connoisseur of Zero Knowledge privacy.

In this episode, we talk about what it's like to build shielded pools and anonymization tools in a political landscape that actively fights against it.

Time stamps:
00:01:10 - Introducing Kieran Mesquka

00:02:21 - Kieran's Early Crypto Involvement, GPU Mining

00:03:54 - Discovering Bitcoin

00:06:31 - Transition to Ethereum Smart Contracts

00:10:24 - Motivation for Working on Privacy

00:20:33 - Comparing Tornado Cash and Railgun

00:26:30 - Why Tornado Cash Developers Got in Trouble

00:29:10 - The "Kieran is Satoshi" Joke

00:31:07 - General Online Privacy and Naomi Brockwell

00:33:25 - The Surveillance of Smart Devices

00:43:43 - The Problem with Subscriptions for Hardware

00:46:35 - Building Privacy for Mainstream Adoption

00:51:04 - Podcast Sponsors: Orange Rock, Cake Wallet, SideShift.AI, Layer Two Labs

00:54:49 - Technical Similarities Between Railgun and Zcash

01:00:26 - Opt-in vs. Default Privacy

01:02:37 - Why Bitcoin Lacks Advanced Privacy

01:10:32 - Railgun's Multi-Chain Presence

01:15:05 - The State of Ethereum and Privacy Demand

01:19:13 - Railgun's Elevator Pitch

01:20:47 - Railgun's Transaction Filtering System

01:29:20 - Trusting Zero-Knowledge Proofs

01:36:18 - Future of Privacy Technology

01:40:37 - How to Follow Kieran's Work