The Plan to Make Bitcoin Private | Misha Komarov & Clara Shikhelman

0:00 Bitcoin being resilient to changes is what gives people this feeling of trust, feeling of safety, that it's a safe harbor, it's nothing going to happen with it, and it's all going to be fine. The fact that somebody sold or somebody bought is nobody's business. And when it comes to the next wave of who's supposed to come to Bitcoin, who's left to come to Bitcoin, who's like, we have all of these conversations, right? It's governments. And imagine tomorrow you hear that the US government started putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet. Guess what happens next?

0:32 Everybody tries to front round it. Everybody on their mother tries to front round it. There will be countries who will be trying to front round the US Treasury. So, welcome to the show. This is going to be, I'm not quite prepared for how hard this is going to be for me. I've read little bits about what you've done and I'm not going to lie, a lot of it went over my head. So I want to start from a very high level in terms of what you've built. But let's start off by just introducing the two of you. So Misha, do you want to start? Yeah, I mean, hey, I'm Misha. I'm kind of a co-founder of like the research lab, which basically published the Shildenbeckon research. So yeah, like, you want me to like, you want me to be more specific?

1:17 However you want to introduce yourself is totally fine. Yeah, I mean, that's what it is, I guess. And I'm Clara Schickleman. I'm the head of protocol research at Allokinit. And Shielder Bitcoin is pretty much what I've been doing night and day for the past couple of months. Well, this looks very exciting. So the idea is here, you've come out with two announcements.

1:39 There's pipes and then there's Shielder Bitcoin. Yes. And I want to get into the details of them because I want to understand it as best I possibly can. But can we start off with, in terms of for a normal Bitcoiner, someone like me out there who's listening to this show, What are you bringing with Shield of Bitcoin?

1:55 I think in the heart of it is the ability to send Bitcoin, our regular good old Bitcoin, just without revealing the sender, the receiver and the amount. You can do it to parties of your choosing. You just don't have to broadcast it to the whole network. And so the idea here is you're bringing private Bitcoin transactions to Bitcoin and you're doing this without making any protocol changes.

2:24 There's no fork required to do this. Yes, absolutely. Effectively, Zcash style privacy of Bitcoin. And when you say Zcash style privacy, is it taking stuff from the Zcash project? Let's talk about this, right? Like the initial design of like what became Zcash eventually, like currently, right, was born way before Zcash became Zcash.

2:48 It was a zero cash as far as I remember the name, was it right? And initially it was supposed to be a thing to be deployed on Bitcoin. But unfortunately, like, you know, the collective of authors like Sean Bowie, like, you know, a bunch of other people, right? like Zuko, etc. They were not able to implement it on Bitcoin.

3:07 And Ellie, also Ellie Bensasone, one of the founders, one of the co-founders of Zcash, kind of publicly admitted this. So effectively, they were not able to do this on Bitcoin back in the day. So they were kind of forced out to do their own L1. And now it became this thing. But indeed, we're kind of taking the design of how it evolved over time.

3:28 As they say, you know, I kind of just said recently this morning, like everything is a testnet for Bitcoin. So like we're taking a design, like how this testnet has evolved effectively and we're bringing it back to Bitcoin so it could work via Bitcoin pipes on the Bitcoin as it is today. Well, I think that's the cool thing about this is that as Bitcoin, as we've always said for a long time, like we want experimentation to happen elsewhere and then anything cool, let's bring it to Bitcoin.

3:52 And so privacy and Bitcoin are two things that have not gone hand in hand so far in Bitcoin's history. And the trade-off is obvious. it's that you want the verifiability of on the Bitcoin blockchain. Yes. So how do you bring privacy to Bitcoin without touching that? Okay, so let's talk about that, right?

4:10 Maybe jump in and correct if I'm wrong, whether I need to. There was a bunch of proposals on how to bring privacy to Bitcoin just over time, right? Like initially, one of the first maybe proposals was a GMAX with like the coin join and everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was one of the first ones, right?

4:30 And that proposal kind of involved having somebody who would actually kind of do that for you, like who would actually join something with you and whatever. Right. So there is a party you need to do for like with this. There is a party you need to interact with. There is a party you might be required to even like give the Bitcoin like to control your Bitcoin to control.

4:51 So and there was a bunch of proposals like this. Like there was a ton of them over the years. There were wallets which were implementing this. there were like more recent proposals which were doing something like you know if you lose the thing of a sidechain or like an l2 or whatever you lose your bitcoin this style this style stuff also doesn't like sound like something i mean it's cool but like you don't want to like lose your bitcoin because you lost your state of something or something right of course and those earlier things you're talking about when it whether it was like a centralized mixer or coin join with a coordinator like they were all workarounds they weren't privacy on bitcoin yes

5:26 yes yes so effectively what's going on in here is indeed we were lacking uh verifiability on bitcoin we were lacking this way to get rid of this person whom you would trust whom you would get your custody whom you would get your bitcoin like you know kind of like into this custody like we don't need this person you like don't give your bitcoin into custody like at all right like self-custody is the king you just you know do it yourself so that's the thing and we were we hadn't have a way to replace this person, this operator, with something which would at least conceptually, at least on the protocol design level, right, would be able to just do that for you. And because of Bitcoin Pipes, because of, you know, witness encryption, Bitcoin Pipes V2 effectively, we

6:11 do have this way, at least like on the design level, conceptually, it's there. And, you know, that's kind of what allows to make it happen. So Misha, was it you that started Alokinit? Yeah. Okay. And Clara, you joined later. I did. We'll start with you, Clara. But why did the two of you decide that Bitcoin privacy was the thing you wanted to dedicate this period of your life on?

6:35 I think that it's very, very clear that people want it and need it. And it's privacy on demand. And the reason I can say that the reason I decided to jump in is when I talked to Misha and Scott and others there. it was just done right it's and this is something i really appreciate you don't slam in an operator you don't put in some unneeded like assumptions and so on you do things the right way and this is what really got me excited and i was like okay yeah i went in you were you work on privacy on other blockchains before this more like just cryptography research like i've done a of stuff all over crypto at this point, I guess, like starting from like the old bit message thing.

7:26 Remember bit message that it was a 2013 project, bit message. It was a Bitcoin style messenger, with some proof of work for each message and whatever. It was like, you know, a project which still kind of is alive a little bit, but there is somewhere maybe a CPP implementation out there on the internet still, like, you know, just laying around there. Like it's these hands probably.

7:48 So still there. So like starting from this, like there was a ton of stuff I've done. It was like, I don't know, like all the Stimit stuff, you know, kind of these experiments about how do you monetize the attention somehow besides the goddamn advertisement. Like there was a ton of stuff around Ethereum because, well, it's just kind of the cryptography research at a point in time was most applicable to trying to like expand the block space we had back in the day.

8:13 And, you know, after that, it's obviously kind of we had this Kimber and explosion proof systems around kind of all the other kind of, you know, ones and projects, etc. And the obvious question came up with that. Can we take all of that and apply it to something which lacked technical attention, like the attention from the research side of things, just the academia side of things for so many years?

8:37 Bitcoin, for some reason. Why? but i'm interested because clara you were obviously a chain code for a long time yeah you've been a bitcoiner for a long time but misha you've been in sort of crypto world why why come to bitcoin now because first of all we just had so much drama around bitcoin right i kind of stopped paying attention to bitcoin back in 2016 because of all this kind of block space that's when i started paying attention yeah yeah well it's like a journalist versus scientist a bit yeah because of all of this kind of block size drama and i was like okay well guys this is this I don't know, just decide, we'll see what's going on next.

9:12 Like, whatever, I'm not participating in this. And so effectively, again, like, as I said, after that, everybody kind of, you felt it, right? Like, maybe you felt it, Clara, you do remember. Everybody kind of just got disappointed and, like, a lot of people left Bitcoin. Even, like, you know, Paola stopped trying to, like, make Tether work around Bitcoin, etc., etc., right?

9:36 So a lot of people just stood up and left. And it kind of was dead for so many years. Like from a developer perspective. From a developer perspective. The asset itself, absolutely. Like, sure, absolutely. It's like, you know, you can't say anything. But from the developer perspective, from the research perspective, it was not really moving too fast.

9:57 And now when we had all of this, as I said, like, you know, developments, game-bearing explosion of like all sorts of cryptography, all like all over crypto just in general, there was a question about, okay, well we have Bitcoin. Nobody's looking at it. Why nobody's looking at it? We have all of these things which already have happened elsewhere. Like for example, witness encryption, like it was invented like long after Bitcoin itself went live.

10:27 It was like 2013. Proof systems, like we were talking about privacy on Bitcoin via ZKPs via proof systems since very beginning. like we hadn't had practical or like well defined well built proof systems until ethereum actually poured a ton of capital into that ethereum people poured a ton of capital into that because of it we got all of these developments we got all of this everything everything everything which now makes it possible to take all of that and bring it back to bitcoin and maybe maybe maybe make it better and we have seen that sort of explosion in bitcoin over the last few years with l2's like bitvm and citria and botanics all these projects that try to do this sort of stuff and I want to get into

11:08 exactly what you're building what do we need to understand first do we need to start with pipes or do we start with shielded shielded bitcoin like where do we need to start to make this make sense for the audience we can start we can start with pipes I think and then we can get to shielded just to have the full chronology okay so so tell me what pipes are okay so bitcoin pipes effectively is a way to induce covenants and pessimistic zqp's verification on bitcoin without touching without changing bitcoin itself via well pretty you know pretty as i said like weird and novel but still primitives uh like with this encryption or like you know the v1 was more like a theoretical concept functional encryption so yeah like i need to try and break this down because you're a cryptographer

11:52 you're saying a lot of words that okay i only understand because i've read about this in the last few days um so witness encryption is the big thing that this is kind of the the differentiator between how you're doing this and i was asking a few people i i called uh carla from chain code and asked her about this and i was trying to get to explain what witness encryption was yeah and she described it as like this is the the shangri-la of cryptography it's very hard we don't know if it necessarily we can do it yet but if it does it's it's brilliant is that a fair summation of it it is it is i don't know how much of an explanation it is but yeah but i think i think it's fair yes okay so so clara tell me what witness encryption is i think the easiest way to think

12:35 about it is that you have it gives you the ability you have a utxo but nobody has the private key for it. And then we have a piece of code, the pipes, that if you show it some information, the witness, a proof that something is correct it will give you the private key for that utxo so this is this is what with description allows and then what can you show to the pipe to for it to release the private key there's this is where all of the options open up so i'm sorry i'm going to be really stupid here but i want to i want to just try and understand it as best i can so the the pipe is like a place where you can do different things like covenants or is that right yeah and the witness encryption is the way of like entering the pipe witness encryption is the general theoretical term and

13:36 then pipes is an implementation or a real world solution that does witness encryption okay yeah okay so then what are people's concerns around the words encryption because i've seen a lot of people writing that this is i mean there's been a lot of pushback where it's like how have we got to this point where instead of just you know forking bitcoin if we want to have privacy added why are we doing this crazy novel thing that we don't necessarily definitely know it works i feel like this is a question for somebody that works in sociology but yeah but honestly for for me it's just it's a fact we're not forking we're not doing soft forks in bitcoin in very, very rare cases.

14:19 And now this is what we can do without doing soft forks. The who and why, it's less of a mathematical question. Bitcoin is a hard asset. It took discipline to build your position and the platform you use for Bitcoin-backed loans should have the same discipline. That's Ledin, the lead sponsor of What Bitcoin Did.

14:39 When the next opportunity comes along, a Ledin loan puts liquidity in your hands without selling what you spent years building. Loans are funded in hours, not days. There's no monthly payments. There's no penalty for repaying early. And all the rates are published up front. The larger the loan, the lower the rate.

14:54 Eight years of protecting client assets with a perfect track record and over $11 billion in loans have taught Ledin what really matters. Your Bitcoin stays custodied. It's never lent out to generate interest and Ledin doesn't ask you to take its word for it. Every month, Ledin publishes its open book report with all metrics independently reported.

15:11 It's proof over promises. Hard assets, higher standards. Check your rate at leden.io forward slash WBD, which is L-E-D-N dot I-O forward slash WBD. Bitcoin-backed loans involve risk. Do your own research before taking out a loan. APR, eligibility and terms apply and may vary by jurisdiction. In the world of Bitcoin, security isn't just a feature. It's the entire foundation.

15:34 And that's where my new sponsor BitGo come in. For over a decade, BitGo have been the backbone of the entire industry, securing billions of dollars of Bitcoin for major funds, exchanges and institutions. following their 2026 public listing on the new york stock exchange under the ticker btgo bitgo are now bringing that exact same enterprise infrastructure to individual bitcoiners self custody is still the gold standard but as your stack grows it's worth thinking about whether diversifying your custody can make sense bitgo pioneered commercial multi-sig and their cold storage combines distributed keys offline key generation and geographically separated vaults head to bitgo.com to get started with institutional grade custody your bitcoin secured like an

16:12 institutions. That's Bitcoin. If you're a taxpayer in the US, you need to talk to your CPA about Bitcoin mining before the tax year ends. Mining equipment may qualify for 100% bonus depreciation. That could mean deducting the full eligible cost in year one, and that's before any of the Bitcoin they mine. With Abundant Mines, you own the miners and keep every single sat they earn.

16:32 Their team handles the setup, hosting, maintenance and repairs, all for a flat fee, and you keep 100% of the Bitcoin you mine. And here's what really sets them apart. If one of your machines goes down, their Hashrate Redirect covers you with Hashrate from their own fleet to keep your Bitcoin production going. To count this year, the equipment generally needs to be placed in service, meaning plugged in and running by December 31st. So you need to move quickly.

16:54 To find out more and get a free consultation, head over to abundantminds.com forward slash WBD. And What Bitcoin Did listeners will get a free month of hosting with your miner purchase. Check them out at abundantminds.com forward slash WBD. It's like, you know, there are always two things, you know, there are things which are nice to have and there are things which are must have, you know.

17:15 So like, for example, you know, what would need to happen like with Bitcoin in terms of must have in like the coming years or whatever, right? Like PQ. PQ, like post-quantum resistance, like post-quantum signature scheme is something which we would need to have like for Bitcoin to push through, for Bitcoin Core to push through, like for us to come to a consensus and get that into like the core implementation.

17:41 That's what we need to do. Why? Because this is a must have thing. If you don't do this, like the fundamental value prop of Bitcoin just disappears. Yeah, assuming quantum computing ends up being powerful enough to break the, yes, yeah, yeah. But there are things which are nice to have. It's like people whining on Twitter about, oh, why don't we do BIP this?

18:00 Why don't we do BIP that? Why don't we do BIP number, whatever, like 228 or like whatever the hell, you know, 1448 or whatever for 420. Why don't we do BIP 420? What the hell? Like just random number 420 360, like, you know, kind of backflip on rates. So, I mean, because it's not necessary, because it doesn't, because it doesn't, it's like, if we don't do it, it doesn't destroy the basic value prop of Bitcoin, right? It doesn't destroy the why Bitcoin is interesting.

18:32 Like, it's just a nice to have thing for some particular use case which might never materialize. So why are you trying to like change the core of like, I'm sorry, almost a $2 trillion asset at this point, why are you messing with this? Yeah. And also you then have to go through the nightmare of years and years trying to gain social consensus.

18:49 And we've seen like with everything that Jeremy Rubens tries to do, like this stuff is hard, takes a long time and might never happen. So instead you just decided to build this. But when people say we don't know how sort of resilient the cryptography is in witness encryption what are they talking about okay so yeah do you want okay i'll take it yeah i'll just say that cryptography is always a leap of faith um and then and i think misha will elaborate on this but the way cryptography meets reality is by schemes being proposed and then attacks being found and then being edited and so on. It's a long and very scary process that at the end of it, we're sort of, okay, we're ready to jump and we jump. So it was, I don't know, it was true with music that became

19:43 music 2 signal had their uh fair share of implementation here implementation there but this is just the name of the game this is how it works and so is the thing that really matters when it comes to cryptography the the amount of time it's basically been around like the longer it's around the more attacks you assume it's had to withstand and therefore the better it is i think it's more of a proof of work how much of work went into trying to attack it scrutinize it and then but yeah so and and i mean sorry do you have something to add that uh i also just wanted to say that it's a function it's a function of work it's true but there is also a little bit of thing that honestly it's not that many people in the world can actually kind of you know try to

20:28 attack this and i'm not saying that this is a good factor no it just means that you know effectively it's a pretty small community which we basically just need to go around and present them enough of proof, enough of evidence that something's good enough. Also include a bunch of chatbots into this list now as well.

20:47 We need to convince the chatbots. We're being very successful at this point for now, at least the chatbots. Anyway. So when you say good enough, I understand you're talking here as a cryptographer. I think that phrase might worry bitcoiners because like when you're talking about this thing securing potentially hundreds of millions billions of dollars like good enough sounds a little bit of a scary phrase like okay because you want we want to know something is secure can you ever know this is secure uh you can never know that any cryptography is secure cryptography relies on something being difficult like elliptic curves or back in the day rsa and so on you're just assuming that something is difficult and then you start building upon it but you never know you never know it's uh

21:38 and so you said this has only been alive since did you say 2013 this was yeah yeah and and so it's had some track record not a huge amount how secure do you think it is today uh okay let's talk about this right like just a little bit of like historical perspective of what's going on there initially witness encryption was introduced by such a guard back in 2013 uh like effectively we're working with him as well on our side to, you know, kind of make sure that our stuff is secure, like the stuff we propose is secure, right? So there was a bunch of theoretical constructions.

22:11 How do you, like, how do you instantiate with subscription for certain statements, for certain use cases, for certain, for just certain situations, right? But the thing is, until recent times, we never had even a chance, even a whiff on how to instantiate it for, on how to instantiate for something you could at least implement.

22:31 Like it was all in the realms of that, like, you know, exabytes for ciphertext or like you needed a Dyson sphere to like even think or compute something, right? Like it's just, no, forget it. And because we had all of these kind of, again, as I said, proof system came by an explosion over the last several years, like just in general, because of crypto, crypto-funded academic research.

22:49 There we go. Because the rest of like crypto-funded in this academic research around proof systems, now we have at least this with this, chance, this idea of where to push, how to at least potentially make witness encryption implementable, functional, and effectively secure. And that's what our kind of ADB witness encryption published also earlier this year. We've been working on it for a while. It's a proposal like hey you could actually do this and and so like you say like this is going to be it will be people will try and attack this and and the incentive is only going to grow as more and more money ends up on these protocols how like how do you prepare for that like obviously you could do

23:37 things like bug bounties but you know if you're putting a bitcoin up if someone can attack it the incentive is relatively low like if we end up in a few years time with a billion dollars on this thing like the incentive becomes insanely high like how how do you try and protect this so beyond like bounties are you mentioned it it's the obvious because usually you if there is funds to be taken now you usually don't want to take the risk and wait for 10 years and somebody will beat you to the punch yeah um but beyond that there are more like contemporary tools like formal verifications that's definitely something that would like to check the circuits and so on but I think that the cryptography will have a lot of attention but in light of the recent breaks that we've seen

24:28 around at the end it almost always boils down to the engineering and this is where we'll need to be even more careful than people were before. So yeah. I would also say regarding the cryptography itself, like the way you usually test out the cryptography, right? Like, well, A, you try to reduce it to some known hardness assumption.

24:51 The problem these days is that D log, for example, is not anymore being considered as a good hardness assumption. Cause like everybody's panicking about quantum, right? So that's like, ow. So you're trying to reduce it to some known quantum, to some known hardness assumption. That's effectively what we're kind of, you know, going towards.

25:09 And again, as I said, the whiff and like the smell, the kind of, you know, the spirit in the air that it's going to end up being something mid-rank-ish. Like Amit Zahai recently also published a paper where he explicitly says there exists a witness encryption from general group model for like mid-rank-ish, like some like mid-rank-ish witness encryption from general group model.

25:32 So we're thinking we're going towards the right direction. It's a process. If we're not able to reduce it, then there is always another option, which is, you know, you just exhaust all the possible options of how do you attack this? And you construct all the distinguishers you can for like, you know, kind of the data inside of a circuit, hidden inside of the, inside of the ciphertext effectively.

25:55 You try to like go through all the possible, through all the possible just theoretical ways of how do you how do you how do you break this Right And we kind and we dedicating a lot of resources to that We working with like just broader academia And like again this is an we're talking about this as well, but like a bunch of other people helping us with this.

26:12 Different people submitted theoretical attacks to our open challenges, which we started hosting since EuroCrypt like back in May this year. So we had a ton of submissions. We had four or five submissions at least, right? Like one of them was actually valid. And now I kind of, you know, because of that submission, we actually got to like publish a new version.

26:31 It's fine. You know, it's like a normal process. Well, that's what you want. You want people breaking it before. Yes. Yeah. And in terms of like the roadmap of where you're at, you obviously you announced pipes and shielded Bitcoin. What's what's real as of today? In terms of the implementation. In terms of rather than like a research piece, something that you can actually do.

26:52 Okay. So what's going on in terms of real? So we did have, and we kind of do have, I would say, the implementation of like just ADP witness encryption, just, you know, kind of for us to test out that, okay, well, this is, we haven't made a mistake in theory. Like you can actually do this. You can actually do the code there, right?

27:10 You can actually run it. So that's like, that's like what we have. Brent has it still, right? Yeah. Yeah. So good. And we're working on updating it according to the last effective state of how we see things. so that's what that's what's real uh there is a well like bare bones i would say for a for for for shield of bitcoin itself uh you know it's kind of bare bones as i said we still gotta grow veto that uh like uh yeah so that's what that's what's real kind of today okay but we've got no like no shield of bitcoin as of right now but how long does that take for you guys to build out like How long will it be until someone like me can just use a shield, do a shield of Bitcoin transaction relatively easily?

27:56 Well, the current idea is, I mean, again, it's all the timelines are constantly moving. So like, you know, don't take this as like a hard promise or something. The current idea is that by the end of this year, we're going to be able to open source everything we have regarding pipes. Like so just people would be able to, you know, we will lock some Bitcoin behind it.

28:14 We're going to be like, oh, if you break it, it's Bitcoin is yours. Right. And obviously it's going to be like on-chain challenges, as we call them. So it's going to run for half a year, a year, however long we need it. Like however long we need it until we're sure this is secure. Because we will not be recommending people to run any code of our authorship if we know there's something funky there.

28:35 No. That's the thing. That's just the basic requirement. No. I mean, we see that in Bitcoin all the time. Even when Lightning was new, it always came with huge caveats of don't put too much Bitcoin on there for a long time. like reckless hats and all that yeah so so we'll go through that period but in in terms so that's the pipes part yeah that's the pipe and then is the shield of bitcoin an entirely separate thing that you're working on alongside this it's using pipes as a tool and then it has it's also its own infrastructure so to uh peg in and peg out of shielded you need pipes but then to transfer inside of shielded it's it's definitely there's no witness encryption um yeah it's it's much more

29:19 standard and so on and i think there's we have like a toy thing yeah yeah but not not something that is ready to be out in the world okay i know we did this a little earlier but i want to go through in more detail tell me how a shielded bitcoin transaction would actually work in as playing a language as possible okay so um you use we talked about the pipes earlier so you lock funds to a utxo and then um can i be really pedantic here what do what do you mean when you say you lock funds to a utxo okay um let's talk about the transfer then first and then peg in peg out because transfer is a bit easier. Let's start at the point where you have some shielded Bitcoin. What does it mean to have shielded Bitcoin? It means that you have a private key associated with the note. This

30:15 is the note nullifier kind of base structure that has been studied well and we're building upon. so what this allows you to do is and let's say you want to send it to me so what you need to do is first of all to prove and we'll say who are you proving to and where does this appear that you own this note that you're using it right now so you're adding it's like this should go into the nullifier tree and then that you're sending this note to me and maybe you're creating a new note sorry that is uh that is for me so i have the private key to use it later and maybe you have like a change note that you created that goes back to you now all of this together and then like you need to prove that the amount that came in the same amount that came out and all the standard

31:12 things. So what you do is you actually put on Bitcoin's blockchain, you put everything that an outside person that has nothing to do with me and you needs to update the set of notes that were used or the null affairs set. So they should be able that if you'll try to use this note again, they should be able to tell you no it's already yeah and then there's there's the proof that can be checked and so on and then in there there is also information for me having the relevant private key to go like oh i got this lovely note i can go ahead and send it to misha and so on and so forth so where do those notes live because they're not on chain they're not on chain so they can live on your computer or so on,

32:14 or you can just reconstruct them. You can always, if you lost... I think I know what your question is really doing in terms of if we are putting, if we are somehow putting these nodes onto Bitcoin itself. It's not even necessarily. What I'm trying to understand is, so if you're using cashew, for example, if I put Bitcoin into a cashew mint, I know that I have my cashew token that is within that mint.

32:40 Is it the same kind of concept? No. If you have a public and private key pair, what you're able to do is just, and you lost everything. You're starting from point zero. You just read the blockchain and you're able to reconstruct all of the notes that are yours. Of course, you don't want to do this every time.

33:01 You can keep some information and so on. So is that like a zero knowledge proof that gets written to the blockchain? How do you do that? Yes. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, this is I think it's the simplest way. Yeah, it's effectively a like a ciphertext which contains the data necessary for like, you know, kind of understanding what's the state, what's the state of your wallet, plus a proof of the correctness of this ciphertext information.

33:23 And that's what that's all. But so and when I said like, where do the notes live? When I like lock that Bitcoin on chain? Yes. Is it going to like a separate protocol? No. When you lock it, what you do is you... There is an address that you send to, it creates a UTXO. And then what happens at that moment, like you locked one Bitcoin, and now you have a shielded note of one Bitcoin, and then you can transfer with it.

33:58 And then when you're leaving, so you need to show that you nullified a bitcoin worth of notes so what if i lock one bitcoin yes send half a bitcoin to you like with these notes and then i only have half a bitcoin left in notes but i have one bitcoin locked on chain like oh you absolutely do not enter an exit through the same path i see okay yeah yeah yeah you can use any of the ciphertexts available out there to put to put the note which still exists, which still belongs to you through the verifier or decryptor and get your Bitcoin back. Get the amount of Bitcoin which this particular note is advanceable for back from any of the ciphertexts which kind of contains that.

34:44 Recent hardware wallet vulnerabilities have definitely made me rethink my entire security setup as I'm sure it has for a lot of Bitcoiners. And the uncomfortable truth is that no single security product can promise there'll never be a problem, which is exactly why the design matters. BitKey is a self-custody hardware wallet that uses three keys created in three separate environments There's one on your phone, one on the BitKey hardware itself and one on a secure BitKey server Two of those three keys are required to sign any transaction So a problem isolated to just one key is never enough to move your Bitcoin So if you are rethinking your setup right now, as I'm sure a lot of people are You should really think about the BitKey

35:19 The hardware looks great, the app and the user experience is second to none Backing up and restoring your wallet is seamless and they even have inheritance built in So I really don't think you'd be disappointed. So download BitKey today. Use the code WBD for 10% off the second generation BitKey, which is this device right here with the screen.

35:37 Download the app, download BitKey, use code WBD and get 10% off. Bitcoiners hate single points of failure, but your phone has three of them. One network, one identifier for life and one carrier employee who could be taught into handing over your number. And that's where CAPE comes in. CAPE fixes all three.

35:53 It's the only US carrier running two major networks on one SIM. So if one drops, you're on the other. Your identifier rotates every 24 hours. So to the network, you're a different person every single day. And the big one, your number only moves with a 24-word phrase that you control, just like a Bitcoin wallet.

36:09 There's no call center worker, not even CAPE can move it. CAPE provides the same premium, reliable service you'd expect from any other carrier, but designed with privacy and security as its first principles. If you're a Bitcoiner in America, I don't know why you'd use any other carrier. Head over to cape.co forward slash WBD and use code WBD for 33% off your first six months.

36:29 That's cape.co forward slash WBD and use code WBD. Every Bitcoiner eventually has to answer one question. If something happened to me, could my family access my Bitcoin? Would my children inherit what I've spent years stacking? That's why Anchor Watch builds Bitcoin custody solutions designed to protect you and your family against real life accidents, errors, kidnappings, and even death.

36:52 every solution includes their inheritance protocol designed to help your bitcoin reach the people you intend it for and us-based customers can also add bitcoin insurance backed by lloyds of london whether you're a self-custody expert or want multi-institutional support your bitcoin estate plan should not be an afterthought bitcoin is only generational wealth if it can be passed down so make sure your family can access tomorrow what you've built today anchor watch is your custody your way so visit anchorwatch.com to get started that's anchorwatch.com Okay, I know I'm being silly here, but I'm just trying to understand.

37:26 So I've locked one Bitcoin on chain, spent half a Bitcoin. Where does that half a Bitcoin that I now own come back to me from on chain? So let's assume there are enough denominations and something will make sure. You locked one Bitcoin, Misha locked half a Bitcoin. You spent the transaction, now you have a half Bitcoin note.

37:49 So what you can do is go to the ciphertext that Misha originally interacted with and show that ciphertext that you burned half a Bitcoin and get the half Bitcoin that Misha put in. So in reality on chain, it would look like Misha and I have swapped private keys. I don't know that it does. like on chain what the chain will see is you went in with one bitcoin assuming you didn't use like a fresh address and so on yeah misha went in with and put in half a bitcoin and then you know the we need a good set of people out there for this to be and then the next thing that the chain will see in this context is somebody leaving the shielded bitcoin protocol with half a bitcoin back on chain okay there is no way to connect you like the entry and exit point yeah and so i do i do understand

38:54 that part but does does it look like so if misha locked half a bitcoin and i leaving and you are gonna essentially unlock that half of Bitcoin for me Is that not a little bit like a private key swap Well first of all Misha is not involved there anymore But also, if you are the only two people in the system, then well, nobody knows that you swapped keys with Misha.

39:26 yeah but but but do i get misha's half a bitcoin that she lost initially okay and so what happens if like this is not necessarily something i care about but it's something that people care about what if this is used by like terrorist organizations whatever okay um and they have bitcoin that gets locked to go into the encrypted bitcoin pool and then someone else ends up like leaving the encrypted Bitcoin thing and ends up with that? Like, are they having the entire history of their coin? No, they don't have the history. You don't have an, well, oh, the, when you exit, first of all, you know, you can choose the exit point. Okay. So if it's important for you, you can be careful about this, but honestly, you can choose any of the ciphertexts available out there. Just pick,

40:14 pick one, whatever. Pick one that looks nice to you. Yeah. Yeah. But, but so, but that is a potential that that could happen yeah okay i see um and so once i've pegged into this system i've got my notes that are equivalent to my bitcoin i can obviously leave depending on if the denomination of the notes that i have left there's another person with the same amount who pegged in the same amount of bitcoin how do you make sure there's enough liquidity there then so that no one ever like you don't want to get like if someone doesn't want to get trapped there how do you know there's the right denomination for me to get out so there are two ways to go about it first of all as we work on the ways to enter we'll have a variety of denominations you will also you can

40:58 always do an atomic swap this is something that the system absolutely allows and it's a very boring kind of thing it doesn't mean you need to involve a third party beyond that you also have the option of if you want to exit through specifically this and you have half a Bitcoin, you need a whole Bitcoin, you can always put another half and take out the whole one.

41:26 But mostly it will put some statistical work on what do the denominations need to be. And yeah. Is that something though, that when this is like new and nascent, that that will be one of your bigger challenges? is honestly that's compared to other things i think there's plenty of big challenges yeah yeah and i think like especially we don't expect people to peg in and peg out very often especially using pipes if you just want to drop by for you know a transaction or two and head out probably atomic swaps is the way for you for you to go but if you want to do like the full carefully private way then then you need to do pipes and then you do need to be your bitcoin would just live in there potentially um and i imagine once this is at the point where people can use it a lot like we're

42:24 getting into the details here but a lot of this will be stripped away with good ux hopefully where people can just do this and yeah within what they would expect a normal bitcoin world to look like and is it the kind of thing that you want to be in sort of the current major Bitcoin wallets or do you have to build your own thing there?

42:39 I think we can embed this in like the currently existing wallets yeah at the heart of it it's really like the classical Bitcoin UTXO the classical your keys, your shielded Bitcoin it's I think that a lot of it's from a ux standpoint will feel very familiar to bitcoiners yeah okay because that's obviously going to be the most important part of this yeah people can actually use it relatively easily yeah um and so what will the cost be to do a and shield the bitcoin transaction because is that going to go up significantly from sort of current fees so for a transaction we're looking it's going to be uh the transaction is going to be bigger, but we're looking at the same orders of magnitude.

43:31 So we don't have an exact number right now because there's some choices still to be made there. I don't know, five times, 10 times, not more than that. Okay. It's like, what was it? Like the, you know, kind of the size we published in the paper, what was it like three or four times larger than the regular transaction?

43:53 But like, it also kind of depends on how fast we want to make Shielded Bitcoin to become kind of quantum resistant. If we want to make it quantum resistant as soon as possible, sure, like the design with quantum resistant Shielded Bitcoin is going to blow the size of the transaction a little bit up because of the choice of the proof system.

44:14 We would need to choose a different proof system there. So you could make this quantum resistant before anything changed on the Bitcoin base layer? Some parts of it. So at the end of it, we have UTXOs that are living on Bitcoin. As long as Bitcoin is not quantum secure, we can't be quantum secure. Of course.

44:38 But we can prepare for it. And if you had Bitcoin on chain where the public key had never been exposed, can you peg into this system without exposing your public key? Potentially. Hmm. it depends on the type of like we can use any hashtag oh yeah yeah oh yeah by the way yeah yeah we can't do that this could be our way of uh of making do while everything changes on bitcoin if there's a rush please do better okay and so you're you're working on shield of bitcoin transactions what else do pipes allow you to do it's not just this right i mean of course there There is a ton of cases one could have done with this.

45:20 It's just all about what's the most interesting, what's the most pressing need, right? Like pipes actually, well, pipes actually allow you to induce, like pipes V2 specifically, allow you to induce binary covenants. It means that, you know, it's effectively covenants which predicate, which functionality always ends up in zero or one.

45:38 So like, for example, CSFS, it's either the signature is valid or not. It's binary choice, right? Same like with OpVault. You can either take your Bitcoin or you cannot. That's it. Like it's kind of that. And basically any binary predicate can be used there. Like check CSS, check CTV, not CTV itself.

45:57 CTV itself is not like probably directly possible to be expressed via with subscription, but check CTV. Like effectively, if certain transaction will choose a CTV or whatever was valid, maybe we could do something like this. So effectively, it's all about, it all comes down to what you could do with pipes.

46:14 Like imagine you finally have some confidence of Bitcoin. What are you going to do with that? Like we spent so many times debating that. Sure, you have it. What are you going to do with it? What for? What for have you pushed for it? Take it, use it, show us, you know? And the answer actually like, you know, kind of all came down to just two choices, like which are, you know, which are there, like as, you know, kind of interesting things and what to do with your Bitcoin, regardless of how the market behaves.

46:42 Like the first thing is obviously, as we spoke today, it's shielded Bitcoin, it's privacy, it's a never changing need. Like it's a never fading need. You always need this. And the second thing is you could create pools. You could create pools of Bitcoin. Like for example, pools with shared collateral for lending to get the rates down, right? Or you could create pools for something else. But so you said you wanted to work on like what was the pressing need and the pressing need for you is privacy. Why was that privacy?

47:16 Well, because I think it all comes down to the fact that, you know, we had, we had several waves of people coming into Bitcoin, right? Like several major waves, like there was, you know, small time retail, retail, like small institutions, big institutions, like last cycle was specifically big institutions, right? Like, what's the next wave we have? Governments. And the thing is all all about that even currently existed, all of the people who currently kind of came and started doing something about Bitcoin, they all kind of also as well need privacy because like they don't want to get attacked by a $5 wrench attack, right?

47:51 They don't want to like whatever. They don't want anybody to know the identities of the multisigners. They don't want to get front round if they're doing like a large bulk sale or buy or lend or something like this, you know, they don't want to anybody because it's not of their business. You know, like it's just the fact that somebody sold or somebody bought is like not nobody's business.

48:13 So that's the thing. And when it comes to like the next wave of who is supposed to come like to Bitcoin, who is left to come to Bitcoin, who's like, you know, we have all of these conversations, right? It's governments. And imagine tomorrow you hear that the U.S. government started putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet.

48:30 Guess what happens next? Everybody tries to front run it. Everybody on their mother tries to front run it. There will be countries who will be trying to front run the U.S. treasury. So this needs to happen in a more interesting, more discreet manner. It needs to happen without loud on-chain traces when the whole Twitter panic, when people are running around with eyes like apples.

48:53 And if we look at Zcash as maybe the easiest example here, they obviously have their shielded and non-shielded transactions. What percentage of transactions on Zcash are in their shielded pool? Good question. It's a testnet. I don't know. 30? 30. 30%. Yeah. Thank you. We got to help from the audience.

49:18 Okay. So 30% are in the shielded pool. Yeah. And do you think, obviously, this will take time. People have to build trust in this new protocol. But do you think that's roughly what this will end up being? I actually wanted to say that we don't really pay attention to test nets. So we don't know. Who cares about test nets?

49:35 But anyway. Let's go. Yeah, go on. So do you think that's the kind of, would that be winning for you, I guess? Is it that kind of scale that you're looking for? Well, I mean, if we get 30% of Bitcoin locked in a shield of Bitcoin, first of all, well, yeah, I mean, it means that the need is actually there.

49:58 That's the first thing. And the second thing, it means that we would need to be really, really prepared for that. so that was going to be my follow-up question like you two obviously know the the ins and out of this better than anyone um would you be comfortable with that on the cryptography as it stands today would you be able to sleep at night today no like today no absolutely so and what would build your faith in it to get to the point where you would be comfortable with that uh we need to exhaust all the potential attack surfaces at least at least at least at least at the surface of all the potential attacks, at least, you know, from those ones which we know, or like people alive know, because we, I mean, as I said, we, I think we annoyed everybody in

50:40 like the academia industry about this already at this point. And I guess we just need to annoy them a little bit more just to, whatever, make them try to like come up with some more attacks or something else. So we need to A, exhaust the surface of all the potential attacks. And that's kind of what we're on. That's our kind of mission for this year. The thing that I can't quite figure out is how you incentivize people to actually do this because obviously there's like the academic side where someone might want to try and break the cryptography but that's a very very small pool of people that are probably willing to do that putting money up creates an incentive but again you'd have to put a hell of a lot of money up to really drive an incentive is it really like this has to exist

51:15 people have to take risk at first and as it's built out we'll see how secure it really is so there's a of a game theory there where you're putting up a prize and then the attacker has a choice right wait for more people to come in or take this prize yeah but especially in this day of age of llms you found an attack the risk of somebody beating you to the punch and taking the prize is higher and higher and higher so the longer you wait for actual people to get into the system the lower probability, you might as well take the price.

51:51 But yeah, we're going to offer substantial amounts, I believe. I also hope that somebody from all of these, we had all of this panic from like kind of, OpenAI and everything about solving big math problems. So like OpenAI, if you're listening to this, please go solve it. Help us reduce it to something hard.

52:16 Help us reduce it to min rank because we're close. And as Clara said, indeed, it is like, I guess maybe a function of the amount of work being put into proving things out. Because again, like the fact that there is a recent Amit Saha's paper, like with a second author, which kind of basically constructs a mid-rank-ish witness encryption from GGM, from just general group model.

52:43 It gives us hope that we, instead of like just exhausting the potential attack surface, we'll be able to find the reduction. So this is what it is. And if we have that, it makes things so much easier. I want to maybe bring this back to a question you asked me in the beginning of why did I join? I really remember that first conversation where I was like, ah, this is the exact right amount of boring.

53:11 These are people that are doing things so carefully, doing like the coolest things in the most boring way. And I was like, so I think- Sign me up. Yeah, sign me up because this is the way to do new cryptography, doing the most exciting things in the most boring, pedantic, step-by-step way. Annoyed way.

53:29 when it comes to anything bitcoin security i love hearing boring that's that's what we need um so when you look at like everything that's happened in bitcoin over the last few months with after the cold card hack and all the bitcoin red team they found vulnerabilities in almost every code base they looked at to varying degrees of severity obviously yeah how worried does that make you when you're working on something that's quite novel uh well we didn't have this goal like with open challenges. Like we had, as I said, a bunch of submissions. Some of them were like just purely chatbot generated stuff. Like we ourselves started obviously kind of, you know, trying to harden and like trying to enforce all the approaches we're doing like with the subscription

54:10 itself through all the possible help we can get. So that's why I'm kind of being like, yo, if you can get us more help on this, join us. Like join us, we'll do it. You know, it's so much easier than actually upgrading Bitcoin. So we will do it. Let's go for it. Is it a damning indictment of Bitcoin that this is so much easier than upgrading Bitcoin?

54:31 I think it's actually what makes Bitcoin interesting. Bitcoin being resilient to changes is what gives people this feeling of trust, feeling of safety, that it's a safe harbor, it's nothing going to happen with it. And it's all going to be fine. There's going to be no, like you know some kind of like you know uh the leader or like some whatever like i'm sorry rob hamilton's a ceo now i don't know yeah okay well that's uh he's a he's a ceo he's a hiring manager he's a we can we can fire him you know the people are the power here the plebs are the power here anyway so uh like there's gonna be no like you know kind of the the leader who's gonna come and just upgrade everything and change everything like in like in a day and like somebody's gonna like

55:18 how the rules of the game completely has completely changed. That's the value prop of Bitcoin, the trust, the fact that it's a thing which doesn't go anywhere, that's going to be with us like in 100, 200 years, like 500 years, whatever. Everybody's going to die and it's still going to be here, you know.

55:32 And that's good, actually. Like resilience to changes, resilience to changes which are not absolutely necessary, which are not absolutely must have for the sake of security. Like that's what makes it interesting. So obviously, in the time I've been in Bitcoin, the big changes were SegWit and Taproot.

55:50 And I mean, Taproot especially, you didn't need that for security. Do you think the idea of upgrading Bitcoin for wants rather than needs is now gone? Do you think, take aside a real imminent quantum threat where we need to make a change, do you think soft forks on Bitcoin might be over? like never say never but it's a slow and painful process and i don't know uh prophecy is given to the fools but i think like i wouldn't count on a soft fork on a nice to have soft fork in any definition of a near future.

56:34 Yeah, like I think we're done there. I think we should be done there, honestly. We just need to build things differently. Can I ask you a question? I always hate asking anyone working on stuff like this because I don't want to speak something into existence. But with obviously like the Samurai case a couple of years or a year ago, whenever that was, and then obviously there was pressure on Wasabi Wallet.

56:55 They removed themselves from the US got rid of the company How worried are you about working on privacy worried enough to talk with very serious people and understand how can we do this in a compliant way so it i like the information on a needs to know basis because the fact that everything is shielded doesn't mean you can't tell your accountant your partner somebody that really needs to know this you you can do that we have solutions for that but this is your information this is your choice so this is something we're very very careful about because we want people and institutions and so on to be able to use this i don't we don't want them to be worried that somebody will come knocking on the

57:47 door it's not from from at least my perspective it's not i'm not worried about anyone knocking on their door i'm worried about them coming knocking on your door for building this yeah oh um i don't like we're building because yeah but i mean why why do they do it with samurai i think we this is a bit of a different time where there's more clarity about what can be done and should be done and we're following these guidelines we are being very very careful Yeah.

58:20 Yeah. I would also say just kind of from the architecture perspective, right? Like it's, you know, it's actually kind of a very sad story like about what happened with Roma Simolov, with Samurai people, with, you know, kind of all of the people who are having a lot of trouble for like, whatever, dealing with these problems in a way which, you know, kind of without actually thinking beforehand how to do this properly.

58:42 And it's bad that it happened that I hope it will be over for them soon. you know, just whatever, Free Samurai, whatever. Anyway, but the thing is all about the design of those products was always, you know, done the way that it violated some laws somewhere, unfortunately. And there was always somebody taking custody of users' funds, which requires licensing. There was always like a bunch of other stuff. Is that true, though? I don't think that is true with samurai's case like i i as far as i'm aware like they never touched any users funds and they believed they were inside the and i think they were inside the regulatory requirements but they still decided to come after them coin joint fundamental requires this what what does coin

59:28 join require i mean it does i mean it it does it does require somebody it does require somebody kind of you know going to try to coordinate like these but the coordinator doesn't take possession of any funds in the coordination. Indeed, but they are facilitating something what's going on there. You know, it's you'd better not to have this kind of entity in the protocol.

59:52 You don't want to do that in the protocol. So like we, you know, we think again, it's kind of one of the things why we think pipes is specifically valuable in here is because it's pipes and it's with the subscription, which allows to actually make these kind of, you know, private transfers on the Bitcoin one in the way which would be compliant, which would be legal, which would be, you know, kind of safe for everybody with their where there would be no coordinators, no operators, no people who would, you know, kind of could take heat for anything or like break any laws or something.

1:00:25 Because I mean, as Clara said, like, we are explicitly working with, you know, kind of quite, quite some folks to make sure everything we do is, is, is, is not going to get anybody into trouble and at the end of the day you know it's just research no i mean i obviously in no way want anyone to get in trouble this i think it's awesome uh it's just it it would be a concern of mine not not because you're even doing anything wrong that doesn't even matter um so in terms of the data that goes on to bitcoin how much data is going there and where's it going is that going in up return it can go both in up return it can go interpret that access yeah that's also And is it a large amount of data?

1:01:10 Well, as we said earlier, we're looking at, let's say, four or five the size of a usual transaction. So you have the usual what comes in, what comes out, and then you need to put either in the witness or in the op return. The whole nullifier, the extra things that have nothing to do with Bitcoin. So we're not talking crazy amounts?

1:01:34 No. we're not we're not inscribing jpegs on bitcoin why what the hell you know whoever whoever did this guys like don't spam all right i think this sounds really cool i've obviously i am not technical i've tried to understand this as best i can what am i missing is there anything i'm missing that i not asked you about oh you asked even about the legal aspects which people usually check it out to ask about so i understand why i remember having this conversation um i won say with who but someone privately who working on a uh like a privacy protocol yeah and um like you you almost feel bad for asking because i don't want this to ever raise any flags that mean someone comes and knocks at your door like

1:02:19 but but i think they're really important questions like because these have to be considerations when you're building stuff like this and the tricky thing with it is like with the you know the administration in the us now like it seems more favorable but who knows when that switches and what happens and i would also say it all comes down to the fact if kind of you know we as you know as people as a company or whatever are actually participating in a protocol or there is is there is there anybody who kind of needs to participate in a protocol which kind of you know the way which in the way which might require some additional regulation but like whatever and it all comes down to the fact that, you know,

1:02:55 it's research, it's open source code and like nobody needs to run any kind of operator, not us, not any single company out there participating in this. It's all self-custodial. It's all on the user side. A user can do if you have enough storage at home and whatever, you can go through the whole flow process just yourself.

1:03:15 You don't need anybody. So it's, yeah. The other thing I did want to try and understand better is what is this in the sense of like bit vm and all the things that we're building on on those kind of protocols we're like layer we would call them like a layer two what is this it's a meta protocol this is the i think the best the best term for that maybe it's the best term and what does that exactly mean it means that it's uh it uses bitcoin for ordering for publication just the reading and the interpretation is left to a separate software so it's a and i would say it's it's and i would say it's a metaprodicol maybe even even even if we call it a metaprodicol it's uh you know kind of interestingly different metaprodicol from

1:04:12 what we've seen maybe like before because we've had a bunch of metaprodicols around Like we've had OmniLayer, like this master coin thing. We had a bunch of other stuff from like 2013 era. We had a lot of people building MetaProtocles. And there was always a thing that people kind of were not really happy about this MetaProtocles because it's a spam.

1:04:36 Why? Because they don't contain Bitcoin in it. They don't have Bitcoin. They're not doing anything with Bitcoin, like interested in it, like interested in it, like interested in it not internally. right? And because of pipes, we think that there is a way to like kind of, you know, start trying to do something with Bitcoin inside of MetaProtocles without adding additional kind of, you know, operators or like some of the trust assumption or custody or anything like this, right? Like multi-sigs or goddamn. So yeah, like we think there will be a kind of a resurrection, I would say, maybe of MetaProtocles on Bitcoin because of pipes. And like, surely Bitcoin is just the first can be i would say the first the first birdie it's very cool and it's exciting to see some like

1:05:19 this is the first time in a while where i've seen something new being built on bitcoin that i i didn't expect to see coming like this kind of took me by surprise and it looks really really interesting i think it's very cool um this is probably because i have such limited technical understanding like there's still some question marks for me and especially when it comes down to like the cryptography and the safety of this what since you announced this both pipes and um the shield of Bitcoin. What have been the best pieces of sort of pushback or criticism that you've had? Well, it's kind of interesting. It's kind of fun that, you know, but we actually had quite a ton of conversations with Zcash people because it's their design. And we're basically

1:05:59 kind of, they were thinking about it for like 10 years. And we basically came to consult with them in terms of, okay, guys, you spent 10 years doing, you spent 10 years doing this. Like, can you give us any hints about what we're missing? Like anything, anything we, anything's wrong maybe or whatever, you know?

1:06:13 So that was like a, that was like a good thing. And that's like, you know, in terms of, you know, some of, some of, some of, some of them kind of, you know, some of them pushed back on something, we changed it. Some of them, you know, were more endorsive, like just in general, right? Even some of them were publicly.

1:06:30 So that, that, that was a good pushback. On the cryptography side of things, we obviously had a lot of this process going with like, hey, what if we do it this way? What if we do it that way? What if we do it one way or another way? Right? And obviously we received a lot of deception and also a lot of pushback for some of the versions of previous versions of with inscriptions subscription from our side which kind of induced us or like made us to like iterate forward on it so it like yeah like even open challenges themselves you can think about them as like a little bit of a push back in terms of hey guys this is broken fix it yeah you know you said you've obviously taken a lot of this from from zcash the witness encryption is not from zcash though right this is yes yeah

1:07:18 So again, that's like the new thing that needs to be proven out. Yeah, the transfers, I think, and this is the paper that we publish now. It has some new and cool ideas, but I think people are pretty used to, to like nullifiers, notes, like these are terms that people are comfortable with right now. Yeah.

1:07:40 Yeah. And nullifiers, remind me what this is. null fire is the way what this is where you keep all the notes that you've used oh okay okay okay got you yeah um is there anything that stood out to you in terms of i think for me because we have so this paper has to do with a transfer but it doesn't take care of the boundaries so how you peg in how you peg out things around it and so on and this paper is in the working we've put a lot lot of time into that also. So just going through all of the interests and the replies, there were such interesting questions, so many things. I was like, okay, I'm literally taking notes. Make sure this is clear. Make sure this proof of sound. Make sure and so on. And it's,

1:08:32 yeah, it's really, really exciting to get this feedback and understand like what's important to people before you, you know, throw another 60 pages in a PDF. The same thing goes for witness encryption. We will be publishing one more kind of updated AADP witness encryption paper later this year. And we invite everybody to just whatever come try and kind of come look at it and try to criticize it.

1:08:56 Please criticize it because this is effective. Getting Shield of Bitcoin arranged requires not just us pushing forward for that or us proposing something. It would be great. It would be cool if we were able to involve people just in general among Bitcoiners. just for us to be able to understand what do they think is good?

1:09:14 How do they think this would be accepted? What do they think is needed? What do they think is missing? In general, eventually, we hope this will end up being all over Bitcoin mission to make it private because private Bitcoin should happen eventually. I totally agree with that. And in terms of for you guys now, you've obviously done the work, you've done the research.

1:09:36 Is it now just build it? No. Okay. No, I think on the protocol end, we need to finish up the research. We need to publish two more papers. Go through the scrutiny. Yeah, no, we have a road ahead of us. Yeah. And how many of you are actually working on this now? What is it? 18, 19? Okay, so it's a pretty big team.

1:09:59 Yeah. There's a lot of us. I'm excited to see it. I hope to see it in the wild at some point soon. Soonish. It sounds very cool. It's one of those things, like, if someone, straight after this interview, if someone said can you explain it i might still say no but i think i have a better understanding and if we get this to the point where using it is as simple as using bitcoin that will be incredible that's what i'm looking forward to i mean we're pushing forward absolutely but thank you so much for both of you coming on the show yeah um there'll be people that have listened to this they'll be in the same boat as me where it's a lot of it may have gone over their head where do they go to find out more about this and maybe they want to read the 60 page research pieces i mean we have twitter

1:10:41 we're publishing explanatory blog posts there like just today we kind of published a specific like a specific blog post like clara did a little bit of a yak una about like frequently asked and frequently answered things about like the protocol design so we kind of intend to publish more kind of just simplified blog posts than you know instead of reading 60 page pages or whatever because like actually one of the reasons why we separate why we've split the peg in and peg out paper and like the shielded bitcoin paper is because if we slap them together it's a 150 page thing you know very very few people are gonna be like you want me to read the book what it's uh it's very cool though i i love that you work on something very new and exciting but thank you for

1:11:26 coming on the show of course yeah thanks for inviting i think there's gonna be a lot more questions coming. Absolutely. We hope so. We hope so. We can't wait for that. Please, please, please drag them our way. Amazing. Thank you, guys. Yeah, thanks. Thank you.