Doug 
All right, we are live what's going on guys, let's go 

Guest 
going, Doug, thanks for having us cypher stack people here. 

Doug 
Yes, we got the whole well not the whole cypher stack team I know you guys run deep but we got we got some we got some of the heavy hitters today 

Guest 
That's right. I'll, uh, is it okay if I introduce myself and let them introduce themselves? Yeah, please. 

Doug 
do. I'm hoping most people know Diego by now. Obviously, you've been a little bit behind the scenes recently of late, but I think you made a comeback on the scene, so most Monero people should know of Diego.

Sarai, I don't know. Sarai, I think a lot of people obviously should know, but especially the noobs, some of the newer people of Monero probably don't, and Luke as well. So yeah, go ahead and run through the intro. 

Guest 
I'll do me first. I'm the most important, but also the least important, most important because without me, these guys would go off and work on other projects because it's hard to, uh, you know, pay your taxes when you get paid in Monero. So I handle all that nonsense for them. Uh, but least important because I say go do the math and they go do the math that makes Monero secure. So, uh, my name is Diego Salazar. I run Cypherstack. Um, we are design, development, infrastructure, research, cryptography, everything, illustration, whatever you possibly could need. We could make a whole coin from scratch if we wanted to, but we at present prefer to keep all of our, um, resources focused on making the stuff that exists that much better. Um, we also run stack wallets, uh, who, which is a privacy preserving little multi-coin wallet thing. Give us a look, give us a, give us a rating. Even if it's a bad one, it won't be because we have the best UX in the space. Haha. Uh, with that, I will pass this off to the more less important people.

Uh, hi everybody. I'm Suray, uh, uh, also known as Brandon Goodell. Uh, that's my real life name. Uh, Suray no other was my pseudonym for, uh, uh, working with Monero for a couple of years and it kind of stuck, uh, even though it's kind of regrettable for a couple of different reasons. Um, but I, uh, I'm a mathematician. I've been working on Monero and Monero related stuff probably since, uh, 2013 or 2014, um, back when, uh, Fluffy Pony was, was, uh, running, uh, the show and the Monero space, um, and, uh, I come back every couple of years, uh, get my feet wet and then get sick of it and go do other things. And then I come back and so on and so forth. Uh, past past year, I think, or so year and a half, uh, I've been working with Diego at Cypherstack, uh, and we've been doing typical cryptocurrency contractings to sort of stuff, uh, focusing a lot on helping get Monero's, uh, full chain membership proof and stuff out the door. Um, uh, yeah, so that's me.

I'm Suray. Uh, hi, I'm Luke. Uh, I'm also a mathematician. I work alongside Brandon, uh, doing various crypto currency, cryptography related stuff, uh, and with Cypherstack for what going on nine months. So, and it's nice to be back. Yeah. He's the baby in the cradle, but he's, he's pulling his way. So doing some good stuff. And he was, he was, uh, with us in the last Monero talk that we were on. Yeah. 

Doug 
Yes. And speaking of baby in the cradle, I do have a live audience here. My 11th month old is watching us. So you might hear in the background giggling and crying at times, but please, please ignore.

Guys, this is a treat to have all of you on today. This is fantastic. And super excited that you guys will be participating in Monero topia. At least I know Diego, you'll be down there. Luke, right. I guess whoever you end up bringing with you, who's whoever were lucky enough for you to bring with you. Yeah, Luke is going to the more the merrier bring them. 

Guest 
Luke is going, Rigo's going, Luke is a, Luke is a pretty sure, uh, you know, that has to get some things in order and Brandon shown interest in going as well. I don't want to definitively say that everyone's going, but, uh, there's still, there's still a few, I'm talking about Monero Zobia or C three Monero topia. 

Doug 
Naruto, so. 

Guest 
Yeah, I think I might need to go to Mexico City for the first time. All right. 

Doug 
All right, you know that's it's another small part of your biography, right was throwing the first Monero con Brandon Right on top of being the guy doing all the math you also Ended up with like being in charge of putting a conference together, which I don't think that ever should have been that you did an amazing job But holy shit, it was a lot of a lot of unnecessary Brunt work for somebody who could have been better utilized.

I think at the time

Guest 
Well, I don't know about that. I mean, like, you know, the legacy that came after that of being of doing it every couple of years, you know, every now and then is a pretty important one. Oh, yeah. 

Doug 
Yeah, no, it was a fantastic conference, and yeah, it's lived on since, but I'm just saying, I don't know why we chose our top mind to have to run around and do the legwork of throwing. 

Guest 
Your audience members who aren't aware, back in 2017 or so, Monero had never had a conference before and I believe that the magical crypto friends were throwing a conference in New York at the time or around the same time. I had just graduated from Clemson to get my PhD and so I was just like, you know, I can do this. I can contact researchers. I can organize it all.

It's Monero conference in Denver, Colorado in 2019, I believe. Yeah, it was a really, really successful thing. I think all those talks are still up on YouTube. Real high energy sort of conference from back when we were all younger. 

Doug 
Yeah, we had some big names there too. Obviously we had Ricardo, but we had like Eric Voorhees was hanging out there. I remember he's hanging out at the after party and he, I interviewed him on Monero Talk. We had a bunch of the burning of the Fiat ceremony on the bonfire. But yeah, we should, so we should, we should focus on today though, right? Because we could, we could talk about the past for forever.

Super excited you guys are coming down. But yeah, let's, let's get into the nitty gritty of what's going on right now in Monero land. I guess from a Cypher stack perspective, I know you guys are helping out a lot right now in a big way with the implementation of full chain membership proofs and everything that goes along with that. So I don't know if Diego, maybe you want to kind of bring some speed on that. 

Guest 
Yeah, as always, I'll give the dumb person's, uh, explanation. And then if, if people want more information, we can pass it off to the smart guys to give the smart person's explanation. Um, FCMP's full-chain membership proofs, which is the up and coming big privacy technology for Monero has a lot of moving parts, uh, that are interconnected. And pretty much each of those parts has to be vetted to make sure that they don't fail because if one of them fails, we either have to find a workaround or, you know, worst case scenario, the whole thing collapses, which hasn't happened yet.

Um, but you know, that's always a danger when you're putting together a technology that is very quite complex because, you know, it's, it's part of an open system. You have to look through the blockchain rules. Is this, can the stuff be propagated in time? Does this stuff increase transaction sizes by gigantic amounts? You know, everything is a trade-off. Every single thing that you choose is a trade-off, but it always ends up with having to do the best that you can with the mass stuff that you have and the time and resources that you have. Because if somebody came to us and said, look, we'll give you $3 million to do nothing, but just make the best, most, you know, uh, the smallest, most efficient, to the, the best kind of thing all around, we could do that, but it's going to take quite a bit of time, quite a bit of money. Um, and the reason FCMPs was chosen when something like, what was it? Serifis was on the, the later horizons was it was going to be tech serif. It was going to be easier and faster and, uh, get a whole lot of the same things that we were looking for with Serifis, but without having to go, um, down the gigantic R and D path that that was, which not to say that there wasn't any R and D that needed to be done here with FCMPs, there was, there's quite a bit.

And we're at the tail end of it. Um, but it's been quite the journey to get here. Um, and in between like, so they'll, they'll say, Hey, can you look at this part, can you look at this part? And then we give it back to them. They'll say, great. Now, can you look at this part? And he could, we do, and they say, well, now there's this ancillary stuff like carrot addressing. Can you look at that? Sure. And a lot of work has been coming our way and not just with Monero. I know some people here are Monero maxis totally fine, but we get a lot of work requests from a bunch of different people that are in the privacy space because I don't know if you guys know this, but Cypherstag, we got some pretty good talent here, we've got some pretty top notch guys and they do some pretty good math and that's starting to get noticed.

So I'm going to have to start bumping the prices on Monero guys and say, Hey, you guys, we're not the only game in town anymore. No, I have a soft spot. 

Doug 
Don't do it. You got it. You got to give us a discount man You got to give us the that's until the price goes up like it You know you're like a 10x then let me give you a star raisin 

Guest 
We're at 350 from like 250 last year. 

Doug 
Come on, man. I'll, uh, we just got passed, we just got passed by Zcash. All right. That was not the time to be asking for more money. 

Guest 
that that that would turn people off another 

Doug 
Maybe we could have you jump on stage at Monero topia for some stand-up 

Guest 
I mean. 

Doug 
It can't be much worse than some of the things I've already been saying. 

Guest 
want to turn your audience off, or just, if you have two stages and you really want somebody to go to the other talk, we put Brandon with the stand up on that stage and it forces everyone into the other talk. It's good.

It's great. It's like a good music festival. You just have to direct people from one stage to another. 

Doug 
Yeah, probably just one stage to say we have done two stages in the past. We're probably just one this year. Just keep it simple. Keep it simple.

What was it? Oh, so, you know, one of the one of the things that's getting lobbed at Monero full chain membership proofs is that it's it's not proven tech like they're kind of like it's like coming from the Z catch community, kind of like what we used to say to them, right? Like it's moon math. They're like, well, now they're saying like they're the proven ones and we are no longer the proven ones. What's what do you guys say about that? Is is that a fair assessment or are we, you know, pretty pretty well tried and tested with regards to how, you know, how you how the things have been researched? I mean, we and we ultimately do derive from Zcash's tech in a way, right? It's not completely unique in what we're doing, right? I mean, we're not breaking complete new ground here, but you tell me. 

Guest 
Yeah, pass it off to Ben in. 

Doug 
How moon math is our moon math compared to their own math. 

Guest 
So there are so many rabbit holes in the work that we do that. Admittedly, it's hard to keep track.

So if, if that, um, if that's the hallmark of moon map, then I suppose that it's moon math, but, um, you know, we have this, we have this, uh, attitude of pessimism at cypher stack when we look at a project to start, because we would rather be like, that doesn't look right. And then be like, yeah, it is right. Then do the other way around. So, um, uh, you can't uncook a steak, right? And so, uh, as far as the, the math that we're using now, so for example, the divisor stuff that Lee and Egan propose, right, this is, uh, this is this, let's see here, this is a, this is a way to basically do some pre-computations on behalf of a verifier so that something that's going to be verified over and over and over again, the most expensive parts can just be done the once by the prover. And then the verifier can just check their work. Um, when you first, if you get the, the mathematics behind divisors goes back to like the 18th, 1800s, right. And, and the mid-1800s, like 1850, and like, it's not new math at all. It's just new applications of math that people thought was pure math that was, uh, you know, completely applied, like abstract for years. And so my, my pure math background is a background that ignores applications. And, um, I think Luke is kind of similar in that little, we're like, Oh, if it can be applied, I won't give me my triangles on my symbols. That's right. Application is silly, but, um, it just so happens that things that people thought were never really going to be applied to anything practical ends up being the foundation of an awful lot of the internet and cryptography in general.

So their criticism has teeth to it in the sense that we have to be checking all this stuff, right? Um, their criticism doesn't have teeth to it in the sense that, you know, if our emperor has no clothes, their emperor hasn't, isn't, isn't wearing too many either because the Z cash, you know, um, there's long storied history about Z cash that, uh, the listeners here who are unfamiliar with it might be interested in learning, but I don't. 

Doug 
Yeah, I know I think we should definitely go there now Zcash is a very hot topic right now But I'll let maybe Luke chime in on this same question, and then if you want to tell this Zcash tale, please do

Guest 
Yeah. Okay. So my, my only comment is I guess it's moon math in the, in the sense that to most people, all math is moon math, right? Like I'm sufficiently convinced of any time we come down and we sit down and work out an argument together as a group, I usually walk away with, oh yeah, okay, it's we're good, or this still needs a lot of work. And, you know, we'll meet again to talk about it, you know, everyone needs time to go to their whiteboards and, you know, write down more moon math on a tablet or a piece of paper, whatever. But I guess it's really tricky because with the tried and true stuff in other cryptocurrency, we, it's tried and true in the sense that you get to see it and it works, right? No one's going through and digging through, well, not no one, we are, but no one's going through and digging through the proofs and being like, oh, yes, you know, all of the, all of the cryptography works out perfectly fine and all the computations are all well and good. I mean, with whenever FCMPs gets rolled out, I like people will see that it, it works because the math works and that's how the universe works. If the math is good, then the universe is good. But it's hard to convince people of stuff that is so difficult that we all need to just disperse and like simmer on it for a couple hours.

So it's even trickier to say, all right, well, let's take all this stuff that we're working through and trying to find like good ways of formalizing and understanding and then explain its specific use case to a person who might not have the background that we do. You know, we've had plenty of like back and forth conversations, but every pretty much every single week, we have back and forth conversations about what stuff seems good, what stuff feels bad, you know, stuff to look into. It's kind of hard to wrap that all up in a nice way, since all mathematicians are kind of like neurotic in the same way. So we're all in the same wavelength. So to a well adjusted person, it might be a little bit harder to explain, you know, the really funny thing that I have had the pleasure of seeing being on the outside, a person who is not a mathematician and cryptographer, but who has gotten these people in the same virtual rooms many times and been a fly in the wall, gotten these people in the same physical rooms many times and been a fly on the wall, is how much of this is like, gut driven, where they're kind of like sitting there, somebody proposes a problem like this is what they're showing. And they just kind of sit there for a moment. And somebody's like, I don't know something, something somewhere feels like it's not quite adding up. And of course, like it doesn't stay in the gut. They go up there, they try to mess with the numbers and the letters and all these things until they go, aha, okay, this is proven this way, or this is proven not this way, or whatever. But it all starts with somebody with somebody's stomach grumbling just a little bit and going, I couldn't, there's just something about that. That's just not hitting me the right way. And that is the most. 

Guest 
So I don't know. So kind of coming back to the original question about like the moon math, it's actually crazy to me how much of everything probably Zcash did, FCMPs did everything, you know, even going further back started off in this way somewhere somehow. And to me, this really did open my eyes of how many mathematicians you do need to look over something in order for in order for me now to kind of recommend, yeah, we should put this out there. Because if maybe two is too few, because maybe both of their guts feel fine.

And that third mathematician would have been the one that's like, Oh, there's something turning in me that finds something out there. I think I mean, man, cryptographers are expensive, but I think man, okay, maybe four is not enough. Maybe we need another and another. But instead of having everybody work on different problems, as a good business person would do, because that maximizes your profit, I just get them all six or seven in the same room looking at the same problem. I mean, at some point, you're going to get diminishing returns there. But you know, to me, it's it's so it's so interesting. And I think a lot of people would really appreciate having that kind of fly fly on the wall look. And we're trying to do that.

We're having a live stream on Wednesday, which is our virtual cipher stack research meeting. We could probably do one with Monero talk if you'd like to somewhere down the road. But

Doug 
Yeah, whatever you want, you let us know. Well, happy to stream it out there, in addition to your stream, put it out there. Yeah, that'd be cool anytime, of course. That's awesome, so you're gonna start picking those up. I look forward to that content, for sure.

So, Brandon, you want to get back to the little Zcash anecdote start? 

Guest 
Yeah, absolutely. So just to follow up real quick about Diego's comments there is like, you know, we got to the moon on like 32 bytes of memory or something like that.

I don't even know how many. But did we? 

Doug 
Did you really? This is the Monero crowd here, I don't know And have a lot of novel areas to get to the mirror 

Guest 
I mean, speaking of move out, but the thing is, is like any time that you're going to be doing a system that's complicated and complex systems fail in interesting ways, designing a complex system that has like a graceful failure is a difficult thing. And you know, if you build a rocket ship, usually the failure means if it explodes and everybody dies. And so, you know, the way that you avoid that sort of thing in the finance world, because, you know, you don't want the challenger sort of situation in the finance world. That's what we call Black Tuesday, right? If you apply that sort of thinking, you think about it like a nuclear engineer thinks about a power plant or a rocket engineer thinks about a rocket and you end up building multiple layers of sort of like, not multiple layers of redundancy, but when you have people checking the black, the blueprints of what you're building, you need, you know, chains of people because each layer that it passes through has a small probability of missing. And so it's really kind of useful to have as many eyes on things as possible.

Of course, you got to balance that with too many cooks in the kitchen. Before I get to my story about Zcash, you have an anonymous comment that says, how do you decide which math to use to apply and solve the problem? And I think that is probably ultimately the reason that you hire a mathematician in the same way that you hire a mechanic to know which screw to turn. You hire a mathematician so that you can describe a problem loosely to them and they can kind of roughly guide you to a solution without, you know, having to do a week and a half worth of research. And we had a very interesting instance of just that on one of the problems we were working on. I think Brandon, your approach was different from Rigo's approach, which was different from mine, right? Whenever we were doing some sort of counting argument, you know, Brandon took a very like probabilistic view towards things. And I'm like, oh, this kind of seems a little bit more combinatorial. So there's like multiple different ways of getting to the same conclusion, which is also the benefit of having a bunch of different guys, because I think we all, everyone on the team is a cryptographer, but everyone's focused area in math is very different. So we're used to seeing things fail in different ways, which is ultimately super useful because that helps influence your intuition. So coming up with different ways of solving a problem and then everyone getting to the same conclusion, regardless, that's like an extra cherry on top that, OK, we're probably correct if we took two completely different routes and got to the same place, which is why it's so much it's it's so much fun working with people with different mathematical views of the world. You know, I had a teacher once who would say stuff like, if it's worth proving once, it's worth proving multiple times. Of course, you're like, as a student, you're like, why the hell would I do that? 

Guest 
I just did my homework. I'm not going to go do like a second copy of my homework, ignoring the first copy, trying to answer every question completely new, you know, in a completely different way.

But when you do that, you end up with like three or four solutions to a problem. One of them takes 25 pages, which are usually my solution. And one of them is like a short half pager that doesn't have any explanation whatsoever. And you got to strike this balance where you need to convince the reader that your explanation is correct, but you also want to like be elegant. And if you're writing for like a math audience, you target essentially the most efficient language that you can see you can say as much with a single sentence as possible. And you never have to repeat yourself. If you try to target like a broader audience, it's a much more difficult sort of animal. But yeah, let's

Doug 
I just want to thank Anonymous for the tip. You tipped the .01 Monero. And we do have another XMR chat, but I'll bring it up after the story. And Diego, you go ahead and make your day. 

Guest 
I'm going to circle this back to the original question of our Moonmath versus Zcash's Moonmath, which brings us back to the topic of Zcash and we can continue forward from there. So Zcash, first of all, all my cards on the table, I like Zcash. I think they do a lot of great privacy work. I think they have committed too many blunders as a project to be seen as a serious contender for, I mean, not just world reserve currency, but you know, like king of the privacy space, I guess.

But, you know, who knows? The market has been showing us for hunks for the past couple of weeks. So what do I know? But the blunders that they made are numerous and they're very deep. They run very deep. And you got to get into it. You got to get into it. We will. I'm trying to explain my position here before I move forward because some people aren't going to like my position and that's fine. I'm smarter than you guys, so it's better. Oh, no, I'm not that smart. I knocked over my stupid microphone. Yeah, but Zcash, one of the biggest blunders that they did is things were pretty new with the math absolutely back when they first started. And they kind of put all, you know, pedal to the metal kind of thing anyway and said, we're going full speed ahead. Yes, we don't have a whole bunch of people that have looked over this. And fewer people even know what they're looking at. But we want to be first to market. And so they did. They they made sure that they absolutely could be first to market and they got it out there. And things were not as peachy as they seemed. And even as some of the founders claimed, which was really disappointing to learn in hindsight because we only learned the extent of that. And we'll get into specifics here, I guess. But we only learned the extent of that much, much later. And that was that was kind of disappointing. I will say Zcash is a project right now under the new leadership. The electric coin company is now headed under a different guy, Josh, than Zuko. And he is he is a cypherpunk through and through. And he has made a lot of changes in the ECC that I really, really respect. I've had I've gotten on the call with him and spoke with him through several things. And I don't know, I'm to use to use crypto terms, I'm more bullish than I've ever been on Zcash, which I've never been bullish on Zcash. But the changes that they make, a lot of a lot of people may argue and I would respect the opinion too little too late changes. And I do think the blunders, the initial blunders are are a very large hurdle to cross. But under previous leadership, I would have said there's no way that these boundaries or hurdles could be jumped over under current leadership. I'm more optimistic.

I'm not saying yes, it will happen or no, but I'm more optimistic. These the new people in charge are very cypherpunk and I'm quite excited. 

Doug 
And they're avoiding participating in Monerotopia, so I don't know how cypherpunk they are. There is bad blood.

They've been invited like very graciously, I mean I am talking to so many different people. 

Guest 
the reason, man. I'm not saying you're the reason, but the bad blood runs just as deep.

And for example, you know, you can see it where people like, well, Moonmath with Zcash, Moonmath with Zcash and FCMP stuff comes and people are like, yeah, but it's kind of a little bit different with us. And I actually, I'm on that person side, that hypothetical person side, I do think it's a little bit different with Monero. We are taking, we're not trying to be necessarily first to market, we are taking it slow. In fact, we at Cypherstack, I'd say we're some of the most Cypherpunk people because we have pumped the brakes several times to the chagrin of a lot of the people in the Monero Research Lab. And we said, nope, guys, we need a couple more weeks on this. And they go weeks, weeks, the return. And we're like, nope, we can, we are not giving, and we had so many internal discussions. Ship, we feel mostly okay about this. Should we just give the thumbs up? And we come to a consensus. No, because it's people's money and freedom and lives at stake with this. That's one of, that's one of the things that FluffyPony said way back in the day that stuck with me. He's like, Monero takes his job seriously because people's money, people's freedom, and people's lives could be at stake with the things that we're making. And with that kind of stuff on our shoulders, we have pumped the brakes several, several times. Because we want to make sure that we don't repeat several of those blunders that Zcash did back in the day. And I wouldn't be able to stand up here in good faith and with integrity and say, yeah, Zcash did it wrong if we were not trying our best to do it right. And, you know, just kind of rush this process along. So I know it's a slow process, especially from the outside, if you're a person waiting for FCMPs, and on the day-to-day, sometimes even the week-to-week, you're not seeing forward momentum. We did just get a test, a stress net up, which went really well. And that's awesome. But, you know, weeks may go by and just like, well, is anything happening? Is this delayed? What is happening? What's going on? Well, I'm a man of integrity, you know. So if Monero comes to my business and says, we want to know, is this good to deploy, we're going to do it the right way, even if it takes longer. And I think Monero will be better for it in the long run, even if some other teeny tiny shit coin comes along and says, look, we're taking FCMPs and we're launching it and we are going to think it matters. 

Doug 
is that happening is that it is you just hit there is while narrow drop in full shame every i guess i guess it'd be fiero right who would who would do for i don't even know fiero fiero's got their oh no there's they're staying on the um yeah on their

Guest 
So FCMPs does plug and play into Spark in a different way than Monero uses it. Um, but at present, they're not working on that. They're working on a few other things. I know it was maybe. 

Doug 
Maybe Zano can beat Monero to Full Chain membership proves that I'm blowing my mind. Get on it, whoever you are out there.

Oh my God. Well, I mean, I was hoping to get this later, but I mean, when do you think, you know, this is the most annoying question in the world, I know. But what's your current estimate on when we'll see Full Chain membership proofs live? 

Guest 
Uh, so without being able to say too many things, we have hit a couple more bear traps, um, just in our most recent past couple of days work. So we are, we are literally three steps from the, three steps from the finish line. We are three steps from the finish line. And in this last three steps are like, there's a bear trap. Um, we don't, we don't suspect that this would cause everything. No, no, no, this will not cause everything to fall apart.

There are backup plans in place if the spare trap was hit. Um, but they're not great backup plans. They are. They're fine. They're fine. I guess that's the way to put it. They're fine. We just want it to be excellent. Um, with that said, I would love goodness, we're, we're already end of October. I'm trying to look at the dates here. So you're like Diego, when can we expect that? Obviously Cypherstack can only give the reviews and stuff. There's

Doug 
Yeah, there's other aspects. 

Guest 
But let's see, I would love end of Q1, 2020, I would love it. I think I can. 

Doug 
ramp up those TI-82s we got to do that moon man that moon man all right well actually we still haven't heard Brandon's z-cash story it's great but before we do before we do I'm gonna play a quick commercial break of Monero topi we're about a half hour in guys we're at two hundred and we're you down

Guest 
Do I get a cut of the commercial credit like did we get paid? 

Doug 
Sure, well, we'll figure something out. Um, we got 237 live viewers, guys, like and retweet. Uh, we're about to hear, I think, a pretty good Zcash anecdote. Uh, it's been, uh, great so far.

We got the big guns on today. Please do us a favor, like and retweet so people can come and learn about Monero. But first, let me play this quick little Monero-topia commercial, and we'll get right back to it. 

Doug 
All right, if that doesn't hype you up for Monero too, but yeah, I don't know what will. Yeah, without further ado, we've hyped up this Zcash anecdote that Brandon is about to tell for the last half hour of yet to get to it.

Let's hear it. 

Guest 
You know, I don't really want to turn this into like a z-cage bashing session. 

Doug 
You know do it do it nicely 

Guest 
let me let me explain the history a little bit and let me preface this just like Diego right before the commercial break preface to his like look i i like zcash i like zcash too um if everything that had happened at zcash had been made public in an appropriate way then i feel like a lot more people would have maintained confidence in this project so in in fact in a lot of ways most of the blunders that i've seen have involved like unnecessary secrecy like at monero it's an open source software project if there is a problem everybody knows it unless it's like been recorded like a vulnerability has been reported secretly or something like that everybody learns about problems immediately there's no keeping there's there's no secret hen house to keep the foxes out of um but when you have a corporation involved that's not really necessarily true and then you have a group of people who are making a decision about what to do and guiding things without like the the community knowing about the issue at all or the severity of it so so for those of you guys who don't know in the in the monero uh talk audience um zcash has gone through multiple stages of evolution the very first stage had this secret transcript ceremony that actually ended up being on a radio lab an npr radio lab uh podcast years ago which was very very interesting so even if you guys don't take anything else from monero talk today if you go back and listen to who is called the ceremony um or is this american life or something like that i'm not sure but doug do you remember

Doug 
I think it was Radiolab. Is Radiolab, okay. I think so. 

Guest 
So a bunch of shady stuff happened during the trusted setup ceremony. And at least some of it was documented by the radio lab audience, like radio people. Some of it occurred off screen, so to speak. And the way that the original ceremony worked was that if even one person was honest in the crew of people doing it, then it was gonna be fine. And a researcher named Peter Todd participated in that transcript ceremony and he ended up actually driving through the desert way out of cell phone range of anything with a rental car that he had rented through a friend's name and stuff like that. So there was no chance that the computer that was rolling all the random numbers could be listened in on or in any way. Another fun fact for the MoneroTalk audience is that if you have a sufficiently powerful microphone, you can hear the computations being performed on a computer from outside of that room that it's in. And then you can crack RSA keys up to 4,096-bit keys just using what's called acoustic crypt analysis. So this isn't a sci-fi fear of these people, of being listened in on by the Israeli government or the Chinese government or whoever. And some shady stuff happened during that ceremony and the people who ran Zcash at the time claimed that the transcript had been lost.

And the transcript, again, is just like the transcript of communications between the six or seven computers. I think they used six computers to roll all the random numbers. All the communications between these different computers were written down in the transcript. Basically a text file, like a script, literally just like at the bottom of a YouTube video, you click read transcript. It's just like that. And the Zcash folks claimed that they had lost it. They had been destroyed. Of course, they intentionally destroyed all the devices that were participating in this ceremony so that nobody could go recover from the old device, the random tape that had been used to generate all the random numbers. Like literally, they went all out for this. This is like military grade sort of thinking in terms of trying to make sure that nobody owns your hardware before you actually roll any random numbers. And then a couple of years later, Peter Todd started bothering the Zcash folks on Twitter around 2019 about the transcript and helping them recover it. And Zuko apparently reached out to Peter Todd to ask about helping to recover data from the transcript. And it turns out that there was a problem with the original setup that the Zcash folks knew about. They destroyed the transcripts to try to hide it because the transcripts were toxic waste. If anybody could read those transcripts, they would have broken the coin. So like, I would have destroyed them too. But then they said that they lost them, that just didn't handle that whole situation in a very upstanding way that helps people gain confidence in their decision-making. 

Doug 
abilities. 

Guest 
none was involved. Yes, he was. Yeah, thanks. He was. See you. Urban legend. I don't even know that. 

Doug 
Yeah, so you would think they would I don't know the whole thing was a little with the whole the whole ceremony But I mean that was the only way to do it at the time right there was no way to do it Obviously without the trusted setup, otherwise they would have

Guest 
It's like Monero, it was for a long time Monero's main complaint with Zcash was well trusted setup. Well, it turns out that the trusted setup was actually compromised. So we were, we had some pretty good reasons to be criticizing them for that.

And you know, it's, it's, it's important to note that the trusted setup would not have broken the privacy. It would have allowed basically the, you could just print as much for cash as you want, which, which is why everybody's eyebrows were raising when Zuko like was really like, again, this was before he kind of came clean and said, this is what was happening. He's like, well, we're going to have kind of a turnstile kind of thing where when we transitioned from one shielded pool, like sapling to the next one, like sprout or no, I got those reverse, you know, because they, they kept upgrading their privacy until it got to their kind of current Halo 2 orchard. But they say we're only going to allow X amount of shield of funds to come out of the transparent pool, which if no Zcash was ever created or destroyed, then that's not a problem because the amount that we know went into it would be the same amount going out to it. So let's say for sake of hypothetical, that we know that 5 million coins got shielded. So the turnstile says that if we're only allowing 5 million coins out and then transitioning to the next shielded pool. So what this means is if somebody had printed a bunch of Zcash then, and they took all of that out there through that turnstile before other people did, then those people's funds are effectively stuck and locked. And everyone's kind of raising their eyebrows like, why do you need this? Like if, if, if the, if the ceremony was like, you guys keep claiming it wasn't compromised, if everything was good, if everything was fine, like why, why are you going through such lengths?

They give a good answer at the time. And it's one that actually Monero potentially struggles with too. They say, well, we just don't know that nobody has broken the math because it's new, right? I mean, it's the same thing with Monero. Like, yes, you can add up all the Coinbase transactions to know how many Monero should theoretically exist. But if somebody has found a way to secretly break Monero's math, and I know this is not popular to talk about, but that would allow them to print more money. We would not really be able to know, depending on the break that they've made. And in fact, if you look through getmonero.org's little blog posts, there were, there was one or two times where they say, Hey, we found a way where somebody potentially could have printed money. We, this is a way where we can check if it was exploited and it wasn't. That happened like, shoot, like four years ago, five years ago. So this had a couple of potential exploits itself. So, you know, Zcash was like, we just don't know that anybody would have broken this. So if they did, they would have print money. So we're doing the turnstile, but like, and everyone asked them, like, so does that mean like, you're concerned about the ceremony? They're like, Oh, no, no, no, no, no. 

Guest 
You know, like the ceremony, the ceremony was good. The ceremony was whatever.

By the way, just to add on to this, there was, and there remains in my mind, because I didn't follow it. There remains in my mind a question about whether or not privacy was actually compromised or not, because at least once Peter Todd tweeted about, yes, I just linked it to the chat in this, in this group, at least once he tweeted about claiming that in fact, a compromised property ceremony would have harmed privacy. So because I didn't go farther into the math of it at the time, because I was busy with other things. And as far as I was concerned, it was just another coin. You know, I mean, there's a lot of coin drama, can't follow everything. I haven't followed the follow things since. So in fact, what I'm guessing is that at least one member of the audience already knows that the answer to this about whether or not this was actually a privacy thing or what, but I don't know that for sure. Yeah. And you know, I actually do remember seeing this and like you it, Zcash did a really good job of kind of hand waving this away. So they kind of went in one ear of mine and out the other, which is why I just said, you know, maybe it doesn't, it probably didn't compromise the privacy.

But I, to my knowledge, nobody has looked into Peter Todd stuff to see if it's correct. And it's fun. This is this, you've all been like debated years ago. Yeah, yeah. It's old hat enough that at this point, delving into this is kind of difficult, difficult, and maybe a waste of time. Because if you do prove that it was, then, okay, well, who's paying, who's paying you guys? I'm trying to pay you guys to do things that are helpful now. If anyone wants to fund Cypherstack to look into this claim and delve into the super nitty gritty, let me know. But actually, you know, Sarong Nerwether, who is also at Monero Research Lab for a long time with me, they probably remember this drama very clearly. And it could probably recite the whole story with no errors off the top of their head. But so yeah, as you can see, just kind of the stories are wishy washy and the guarantees were wishy washy. And they set up safeguards in place like well, just in case this happened, it totally didn't. But just in case this happened, we have these safeguards up that yes, would lock legitimate users out of their funds, but it would at least enforce the social contract of how many Zcash should be present at this point in time. And they say this the enforcing the social contract is more important than then legitimate users losing some of their funds potentially by not getting through the turnstile in time, which yeah, this is what I'm this is what I'm talking about in terms of like major blunders at the beginning of the project that like, this is the kind of stuff that locks you out of the big boys table, right?

This is the kind of stuff that when you show up and you go like, yeah, we got the best privacy tech in the world. It's like, here's the problem. You're right. Halo two orchard is at present, the best privacy tech there is. 

Guest 
It is there's just there's at present, there is no competition there. There's just goodness, man, just the everything, everything except the technology and Zcash. The tech is great. Everything except the technology and Zcash is a big oof. It's a big oof is the only way I know how to say it nicely and politely.

Again, like I said, past couple years, new leadership, I'm more optimistic than ever, which was not a high bar to clear, but I'm more optimistic than ever that Zcash can actually make something of themselves and do some really cool privacy stuff in the space. But before then, it was it was too big of a new forever for me to surmount. And even now, every once in a while I go, ooh, Zcash, I remember all these things. Like even just talking through this and Brandon bringing up Peter Todd's tweet and stuff like, oh, I do remember seeing that. Oh, goodness. It's it's it's rough back there. It's rough. Fred Dira Hopwood hops in and explains that it's not a privacy problem, so that probably puts the nail in that coffin. But of course, this is like, you know, we shouldn't be relitigating stuff from before the pandemic. 

Doug 
Yeah, this is pretty pre pandemic. So I mean, obviously, we don't want to stay too much on Zcash, but you know, it is the elephant in the room, right?

I think I think a lot of people listening in do want to, you know, get, get your guys current take on what's going on with regards to Monero over Zcash. So other than, you know, how things have started and you know what their culture is or whatever and how they're a little, you know, they're more corporate than us. How do you guys currently would love to get each each of your takes on how you currently see the Monero project versus how you currently see the Zcash project because they ultimately are both trying to do the same thing. What how would you currently compare these two projects? 

Guest 
So this is not gonna be a popular answer, but Tachyon, their new scalability privacy thing that a lot of people that I respect have looked at and said, this is like really legitimately exciting because it's going to take their also large proofs and really make them a lot more scalable. That is really powerful stuff.

And at present, that is not something FCMPs has. So it's not like Zcash is just resting on their laurels. FCMPs brings us up to almost Zcash levels of privacy, but Tachyon would take Zcash beyond in terms of scaling, which is not, like I said, it's not something that FCMPs is built in with. We could potentially look at making it more efficient or once Monero gets on FCMPs, things become a lot more chill, I guess I should say in terms of, okay, now we can kind of take a good look around at the other privacy stuff that exists and take our time in either developing or making something more efficient because no longer are we in a race against time where the statistics-based model, probabilistic model that we have is really bad and we know it's really bad.

Right now we want to get to something good, not just for its own sake, although it is for its own sake, but so that way at that point, we can have a little bit more breathing room as we surveil, not surveil, as we get a lay of the privacy land and decide which way we want to go forward from there, I guess is the way. 

Doug 
But you know that that also ignores all the other aspects of Monero over Seacash, right? Like we have arguably better network privacy with Dandelion plus plus we have you know, we're ASIC resistant We have the dynamic block size I mean are you taking all those things into account when you're comparing the two projects like in the

Guest 
the tech. I'm talking the privacy. I mean, that's what I'm here for. I think privacy is a big thing for freedom and you can't have freedom without privacy.

Absolutely. Some of the things that you mentioned are problems that persist. And what was the last one that you had said? Because that one in particular I could speak on too. 

Doug 
Uh, dynamic block size tied in with the tail emission, you know, and then we also have the dandelion plus plus network layer privacy. 

Guest 
Zcash puts its gamble on the Bitcoin model. That Bitcoin, I mean this isn't an economics talk or anything, but Bitcoin's economic model is that because there will only be a finite number, as the people in the world increase, and as demand increases, and as coins are locked, it is an inflationary asset. And that has led to its price going up, absolutely.

It has also led to the battle for the soul of Bitcoin happening every two months for different reasons. The current reason is Bitcoin Core's most recent release, which was Bitcoin Core 30 or something like that, and was unpopular with a vocal minority, and most people didn't care. But Bitcoin has a new battle for the soul at least twice a year. And a lot of it really does revolve around the fact that is Bitcoin supposed to be cash or is it supposed to be gold? Are you supposed to put it in the safe or are you supposed to be able to spend it? Monero has taken the opposite gamble. So Monero's gamble is not just opposite to Zcash, it's opposite to Bitcoin too, that we have tripled down on the cash thing.

We are still technically a deflationary asset. We do have a tail emission, but the amount total asymptotically goes to zero. And in theory, in theory, I can't prove this, in theory, there will eventually be an equilibrium point where the amount of Monero that is lost due to deaths or people not keeping track of their seeds or any number of reasons and the amount that humans procreate will equal the amount of Monero that goes into existence and we're going to hit an equilibrium point. It's something that people have theorized. 

Doug 
And it's one Pete Peter Peter Todd is one of the guys that's game is right there rising that as well 

Guest 
is the viewpoint that I generally share. So Monero has taken an opposite gamble. Really, it's hard to compare them on a one-to-one basis because Monero's grassroots Zcash is corporate and you can choose a side on that. Zcash chose the Bitcoin gamble in regards to economics. Monero chose the cash gamble, which like Bitcoin cash also chose and stuff. So none of these are unique things for coins.

And what you will find when you evaluate a coin, I'm talking a lot and I'll let other people talk in just a moment. One of the things that you will find when you evaluate coins is that there's generally two opposing sides on things like, are we gold or are we cash? And a coin will pick one of those. And then they'll say, are we private or are we transparent? And then they'll pick one of those. And then they'll say, if we are private, going down the little tree there, are we going kind of a probabilistic model or are we going an accumulator model? And then they'll pick one of those. And most coins will try to differentiate themselves that say, yes, we are 90% the same, but at this branch, we chose this thing which no other coin has done. No other coin has done this combination of these things, if that makes sense. Which in my mind, again, I've said this many, many times and I continue to say it, cryptocurrency as a whole is a pretty big experiment. And I am really happy to see all these concurrent experiments running because every once in a while, several of these will crash and burn.

Excuse me, laundry is done. Several some of these will crash and burn. And we get we get the benefit of being able to look at said project and say, why did this happen? Can we prevent this in the future or whatever? I'm not trying to be kind of standing in the middle of the fence, not really going one direction or the other being wishy washy. I'm pretty firmly team Monero. That's why I'm here. But I am I also have my head on my shoulders well enough to be able to say not just when other projects are doing good things, but to be able to say I want them to succeed so they can continue to do good things. Because ultimately, it's not Monero versus Zcash.

It's Monero versus the powers that be that would try to restrict or take away our freedom. And if we choose enemies, if we choose small enemies before we get to the big bosses, then we are only shooting ourselves in the foot. Bitcoin does this all the time where they say there is no second best. Everything except Bitcoin is a scam. And if you put any sort of resources on something that is not Bitcoin, Bitcoin is our only shot, our only shot to freedom money. And if we screw this up, it's over. I don't believe that for them. And I don't believe that for Monero. Some people disagree, not not just they think Bitcoin is the only shop, but I know the Bitcoin cash people. I was on a podcast with them. They're like, we think Bitcoin cash is the only shot. They're Monero people. I think we think Monero is the only shot. If that's the case, then we might as well pack up and go home because I know for sure that Monero does not have everything right as of right now. 

Guest 
And we're not ready to take on those big bosses. And anyone who does think so really, really does not know what those people are capable of from a resource perspective.

So we can only hope, we can only hope is what I say. 

Doug 
All right, Brandon, and then we'll get we'll get Luke. Yeah overall take You know, we're how do you how do you see Monero?

Holistically versus Z cash holistically like taking everything into account as their bros

Guest 
evolving living projects and keeping up with the development of both of them is a really difficult thing even if you are paid to be part of it. I think a lot of the issues boil down to having a community model or having a corporate model and whether or not one is better than the other. I'm now working for Cypherstack which is a corporation because the community model was unable to really provide the security necessary to live a lifestyle. There's perks and drawbacks to both.

If you have a corporate structure, you have a small group of people whose opinions need to change in order to get something done. If you have a community structure, you need to persuade everybody. That's both a strength and a weakness of democracy. I look at Monero versus Zcash as a question of almost anarchy level of democracy versus perhaps too much corporate control. I'm not sure exactly if I'll still feel the same way a year from now because I have felt differently about this every year I've been in this game. There you have it. Actually, Luke jumps in. Sorry to steal the spotlight again. I think that is something that a lot of Monero people really don't see is that they say, look at Monero. It's come so far on the community model. It obviously works so we don't need the Zcash thing. Again, the whole reason I started Cypherstack was because the community model was not able to really reliably sustain our researchers and several of our developers and they were leaving because they needed more stability in their lives. By the way, it's not resources. It's not like a community couldn't afford to pay us. It's the overall environment of working for a crowd. Somebody could argue, well, Diego, that you stepped up is a credit to the community model because it shows that somebody will step up and do what needs to be done from a legal business perspective to ensure that the thing goes on. Because I'm a part of the community, it shows the success of the community model. 

Doug 
much to how we've seen in Bitcoin, right? I mean, that's how Bitcoin is functioned, right? 

Guest 
And this, this, this is a good point, but I'm going to be blunt and say that if I hadn't, I don't really know anybody else that was positioned to actually do so successfully that had the contacts and the ability and the, I'm not saying I'm the, I'm the only Holy Grail that's keeping Monero together, but at the time when we lost those researchers, there was nobody that had, that was set up that was in a position to do so. And we would have had a huge brain drain for quite some time, which would have been really detrimental to Monero as a whole.

And the fact that Monero currently does not completely rest on my shoulders and I have no delusions of grandeur that it does, but the fact that it did take me stepping up in that point in time. And if I had not, we would have really been hurting. It's kind of scary to me for a project of Monero size that there wasn't, that there wasn't four or five people all stepping up saying, look, we can figure this out. We can make this happen. And, and that I had to kind of look at my financial resources. Is this something I can actually do or no, not really. It's kind of scary. Like the single month of the bed, no clients would completely tank me. And when I proposed the idea, a lot of people like, Ooh, we don't know. We're not sure if we're liking this because you're just going to do CCS proposals and take a cut. And so we're just going to pay higher grades and whatever. And so there was a lot of drama when I did this at the beginning, uh, shoot, man. If there were five people, I'd be, if there were five people coming up there waving their cash around saying like, no, we're going to make this happen and we'll set up the entities to do it. I'd be like, okay. My narrows, you know, like Monero is pretty secure. It's got a rock solid stuff, but there wasn't. And now that's not really the case. We've kind of moved past that, but if we're looking at Z cash has passed and poking holes at it, I think it's only fair to kind of do the same to Monero a little bit there. Um, we're, the community model is, has a lot more drawbacks than the average person sees. Um, and as a person that has him say, I,

Doug 
I have personally experienced this many times. You know, I can relate, Diego. I know you've experienced that, you know, perhaps before me earlier, but I have definitely felt the brunt of it. 

Guest 
Like few of us have had to be the Dan who backed the waves every once in a while and yeah you come away from it a Bit disillusioned about the whole community model. Just being like the way it works. Yeah

Doug 
Yeah, I mean, I don't think you'd see a show like this in Zcash where everybody's talking openly and honestly and criticizing their own project deeply Right. I think that is definitely a value that Monero has that few projects do right? 

Guest 
But so here's the thing you pick a crowd of people Thousand people a thousand people over here in Monero fans a thousand people are here as the cash trans you're gonna have at least five jerks in each crowd right and like the illusion that we are on different sides is because Some of us will make money only the other crowd loses it and vice versa Not all of us are in that situation, right? It's not like a zero-sum game.

We are all on the same side Even if I disagree with like the electric coin company's choices in 2019 or 2017 or whatever they want people to be able to transact privacy privately I want people to be able to try exact privately and so like the the bickering back and forth is It's like it's like it's like having your favorite football team, but like guys we're all still football fans, right? Yeah

Doug 
I really have tried to avoid participating in it believe it or not obviously having discussions like this out here, but There's been so much shit being flung on X and honestly when it's coming from the Monero people It looks it looks weak Like you know like it's coming from a weak point where I'm seeing them attack It's like you know Maybe maybe instead just focus on ourselves and figure out what we need to do to improve as opposed to just like slinging mud better

Guest 
Give applause to Stu. You can still have your criticisms of the project, and you don't have to. 

Doug 
No, the criticisms are fine. But I'm seeing some very superficial criticisms where it's just like, I don't know, not even about the tech, but just about who's using your protocol versus who our average user is. I agree. It's pretty weak.

It's pretty weak. Right? It doesn't instill confidence in me. This instills confidence in me when I see the intelligent people in the community talking about these problems openly and like, all right, let's be honest here. Zcash is doing these things well. Monero's doing these things well. We need improvements here. So I'll let Luke give his take on all this. And then I would like to, as a follow up to that question, what do we see as what should Monero be focusing on now? Because yes, if Zcash wins and Monero doesn't win, yes, sure, we still have digital cash. But I want Monero to win. And I'm sure you guys want Monero to win as well. And when I say win, it doesn't mean Zcash goes away, right? They'll be competitors. But I want us to be as big as we could possibly be with our network effect as large as it could possibly be and global adoption, people using Monero as untraceable digital cash. We'll get to that question next. But Luke, why don't you go ahead and give us your, if you don't mind, your Monero versus Zcash overall take. 

Guest 
Sure. Yeah. I've been in this space for considerably shorter period of time than the other two esteemed gentlemen here. So my answer is probably going to come off as like much more naive and uninformed. So I apologize for that. No worries. 

Doug 
I know I'm misusing you guys too because you know, this isn't even normally the type of stuff you want to be talking about, right? Like, I think we should be talking about the nitty gritty of, of like the Monero math and whatnot.

But this is what people people want to hear, you know, your takes. So please. 

Guest 
So for me, the most important thing for me is just kind of trust in general. And I kind of like lucked into that, both with the people I know and the people I work with. Because the huge benefit of working in mathematics is it's like impossible to lie effectively because someone's gonna catch it and then they're gonna rub it in your face, right? Nothing sneaks by because we're just such a neurotic, pessimistic group of individuals, right? So you spend your life surrounded by these people who, it's not like they're waiting for you to fail. They're looking for your mistakes in case you don't see it, which is super beneficial.

So whenever it comes to the, like a ZCASH first Monero, I've been more ingrained in the Monero community because those are the projects that we're working on. And I'm seeing lots of great things there. I mean, the math is really exciting and it's really cool seeing someone say, hey, try this thing this way. And it might've been something that I saw an undergrad eight years ago and it's popping up here and I'm like, oh wow, that's really cool. But now hearing all of these stories about the ZCASH having that untrustworthy bit, the problem is that people are trusting the voices that they hear from the community. And that comes from trust in the research, which is important. So the people speaking in the community need to be equally as trustworthy because people aren't going back several layers to the white papers and the research papers that are coming out. They're looking at the voices in the community and hoping for them to be trustworthy.

It becomes this multi-step process. I haven't had any horrible friction in any of the communities. I just, Diego says do math and I say how high and it's as easy as that and it's the way I like it to be. But I can speak for, I really enjoy some of the math that comes our way from Monero. I think it's really cool. I think a lot of the right questions are being asked and we're existing in a space where asking new questions isn't something that's penalized or thrown under the rug or anything. So as far as their, I guess, trustworthy values, I've had no personal reason to mistrust either. But being close to the Monero stuff that's working on, I feel a little bit more comfortable singing their praises because that's really just, I mean, ever since I got hired up until now, it's been MRL stuff pretty much all the way through since the last time we talked, since before that, it's, and I like the attitude they take towards things because it's not like I feel bad that something might be broken, right?

We found this thing, that's a good thing. There's gonna be stuff that needs to happen before we move forward, but you're not gonna be doing the right thing by saying, oh yeah, the math's fine, wipe your hands clean of it and just move forward. It's important to me that that sort of mathematical integrity carries forward. Cause never once have we had a conversation where I was like, ah, we should just like not, if we don't talk about it, it goes away and that's that. 

Guest 
Cause that doesn't, I don't think that's just right with any mathematician period, but certainly not within our group. So I very much like the openness and honesty. It just, it's very effortless. So I really do appreciate that from Cypherstack and from MRL.

It's, you know, I don't feel bad being the bearer of bad news, which is the best thing you can be. Kind of fun. It's like, if you're working on a construction site and you hear something go boom, normally that's a bad thing, but yeah. 

Speaker 2 
I was like, whoa, that wasn't here. 

Guest 
And I think that's something of a maybe misunderstanding that people in the wider community might have that delays aren't necessarily a bad thing in the same way they are in other fields. Because if there's an issue, that issue is going to be there whether we discover it or not.

So if there's a delay because we found an issue, that is best case scenario, right? 

Doug 
as if we didn't. You guys are actually doing your job and you're finding. 

Guest 
Yeah, well in the subtle the subtle places that these issues hide are insane, right? They're they're so easy to overlook and you know, Brandon's been looking at math for longer than I have and I've been looking at math for a good chunk of time. We got two other great mathematicians that work with us And some of these issues might be so subtle. It might take one person making a comment of this doesn't sit quite right with me I think we should yeah.

Yeah, it's like I feel like we should look here and then we you know reconvene and and try to flesh out the issue a little bit more But it's good that it was caught before you know, it's too late That's you know, it feels hard to say hey celebrate every single Bear trap we fall into but every bear trap we disarm now is one fewer We need to worry about avoiding in the future. So yeah, that's sort of my my two cents on that I guess

Doug 
Okay, okay. And then, yeah, Diego, if you want to follow up, you know, what, what should Monero be doing so we can, you know, win this friendly competition between Monero and Zcash?

I like that streaming, because I wouldn't maintain our lead in terms of adoption and usage as digital cash. 

Guest 
Yeah, I like the framing because I do want Monero to win. Uh, this is kind of where I've put my stake. This is where, ha ha ha ha, no pun intended. Um, this is, you know, this is kind of the home that I've built around myself. And that's just where I've built up, uh, business reputation and other reputation. But, you know, I generally think the Monero people are, are some decent people. I like to say we have the worst community except for all the other ones. Um, because goodness gracious are the Monero community, the worst. But, uh, I've peaked outside of the little hovel also. It is a, it is a war zone out there. Um, so I would be, you know, very happy to see Monero maintain its lead and just continue to be the king of the privacy coins and deliver on its promise for, uh, privacy and freedom money for everybody.

Um, to maintain that lead, I would say, especially with Tachyon on the horizon for Zcash, um, and with quantum computers coming up, who knows when. Um, and even the people inside for stack are divided. Some are more pessimistic and some are more optimistic when it comes to quantum computers. I think as soon as FCMPs goes live, which is our current mainstay focus, and we're kind of razor focused on this until it does, but until that point we've got, uh, or after that point, rather, we've got a lot of work on our hands. It's not like, well, FCMPs is out, you know, it should be good job. Gentlemen, we get to go home. It's like, all right, now the other work starts, you know, so in some cases, the real work starts, how do we make this quantum resistant? You know, how do we scale this better? Um, because FCMPs makes Monero transactions bigger, which sucks. It sucks. Like it doesn't make it like insurmountable, but it makes it bigger. And with blockchain that sucks. So we need to make it. 

Doug 
but arguably currently more efficient than a Zcash transaction in its current state, no? I actually don't know those numbers. 

Guest 
I believe so Luke write that down we can look into that Does that that would be interesting I believe? 

Doug 
I believe I saw Jeff Rose said that, I believe Jeff Rose said that. 

Guest 
I would like to see privacy per kilobyte as an objective measurement. How many privacy's have I received per kilobyte?

We'll get to that. But yeah, we've got to work on making it more efficient. We've got to work on quantum computing. And then the next thing we, well, not the next thing, but you know, kind of in parallel, we got to work on the circular economy stuff. You guys are doing Doug, like with XMR Bazaar and DEXs, decentralized exchanges, because right now people like Kraken are the only people holding down the fort for America in terms of Monero, which is where I live. I don't foresee that lasting long. I expect that to go any day now. 

Doug 
We need Sarai to launch, and we need Thorchain to add Manera. I don't know if you've been following that. 

Guest 
just very, very, yeah, it's kind of on my peripheries. We need to be working on that circular economy. We need to be working on alternative ways, you know, atomic swaps, decentralized exchanges, all these things are very important because if people realize they need Monero, but can't get Monero, well, what good is it as a tool, right? So there's a lot of areas that Monero needs to go to really continue to maintain its lead.

And that's the uncomfortable thing also about Zcash is I don't like that they have transparent addresses. I don't, but it does allow them to say on exchanges. And I understand the people that say, well, then that means that they must not really be private. I understand that line of thinking. I think it's a bit disingenuous, but I agree with the general thought process that goes down there. But that does mean that people can obtain Zcash and it is as easy to just press a button these days to get it into the shielded pool. So if they are a lot more liquid than us, then they will just become the default for the masses. That is not to say that I think Monero should make any sort of compromises on its vision or its privacy or anything so we can get onto centralized exchanges.

If some of them continue to support us, great. If they all kick us up to the curb, that's fine. But we need to be able to route around. We need to be able to have people able to work for Monero, sell things from Monero like the you know, be able to obtain Monero via good, easy to use decentralized exchanges. It's not just enough to have a decentralized exchange. If only the nerds are going to be able to use it. It needs to be beautiful. You actually say, Oh, you want Monero? Just download this thing. And a normie downloads it. It's like, Oh, boom, click thing. Got the thing. Got the Monero. There we go. Will it ever be that easy with decentralized stuff? Maybe not. But we need to get as close to that as possible. And if we do, I don't think Monero will lose its lead.

I don't think it's, I mean, market cap or whatever aside, Monero is just used everywhere, which is great. And again, coming from the cypherpunk perspective, the money is secondary to me. Making money is secondary to me. If Monero is 50 bucks, but allows people to be private and safe from the powers that would take away their freedom or their life, then to me,

Doug 
I don't know if I can agree with you on that one. Yeah, well.

Because I just think it's an indication of network effect. That is racist, right? We need a high, if we don't have a high price, that means we're not really being used that much, right? 

Guest 
I generally agree, and it helps in a lot of ancillary things that do matter. For example, when Monero price is high, people are more willing to fund CCSs, which means more Monero work gets done. When prices are low, people tighten their purse strings and things don't get done as much.

There's more liquidity there. Yeah, for sure. I'm not saying price doesn't matter. I'm not stupid and naive enough to just definitively say, price doesn't matter, and anyone who thinks so is barking up the wrong tree. I think price is secondary. It is very important, but it is secondary to Monero's primary mission. And I would say that I don't think anybody would disagree with that statement because if somebody said, hey, look, we can get on more exchange of meaning, more liquidity, meaning higher price, but we compromise on privacy, it's an automatic. No, the mission is the first. Right. The price is second. I just feel sometimes we forget that to an extent.

And I would like to go towards those grassroots. I'm not saying price doesn't matter. I'm not saying it's not important. It does. But we can sometimes err a little too close to the edge. There, in my opinion, that's that's me. You did bring a. 

Doug 
good point. We didn't discuss the biggest difference between Monero and Zcash, which is the fact that Monero is private by default and Zcash is not. You touched upon it a little just now. Obviously, there's some benefits to that, for example, being able to be listed on more exchanges, arguably, because it's easier to convince the regulators and the exchanges themselves that it's just like Bitcoin.

They're just sending it to a transparent address. And then after that, they shield it, right? But yeah, do you guys... Maybe Brendan and Luke, do you want to give your take on that? Monero being default private versus Zcash being optionally private. Do you think there's a fundamental difference there? 

Guest 
Oh, yeah, yeah, I mean private by default is in my opinion the best way to go simply because the tack on privacy stuff It's gonna have it's gonna my gut is telling me it's gonna have problems with it, right? It's like, uh, Having kevlar skin versus wearing a kevlar vest, right? It's it having it built in Starting from the ground up with privacy in mind Means you're not going to overlook some stuff that you might otherwise have overlooked if you built something and said, okay Well now we want to we want to add all these extra features to it uh, just something in the I don't know it maybe it's just a gut feeling at Brandon I don't know if you feel differently about it than I do but um Like I mean it might work really well My my instincts could be wrong, but something about the privacy first focus Makes me a little less wary than hey, we have this thing that works and we're going to put all these protections on it Feels like there's vulnerabilities that could be missed I don't know much. I don't know enough about it.

But like I like everything leaks information Black holes leak information. I mean not technically but like their mass and their rotation, you know, like Depends on how much and depends on how much data is going to be collected and then how it's going to be Cross-referenced and stuff like that and all of the meta data like Little connection like network data that people can scrape That's going to be where at this point like it's so much more effort To sort of crack the cryptography of these things than it is to like socially engineer your way into Getting an answer that at this point Um, we make sure that our stuff doesn't break so that you have to social engineer your way into it you know, um

Doug 
Let me, let me go ahead and bring up some of the super chats that we missed here in on tip to dollar 71.

What do you guys think are the risks or what would be the worst case scenario when full full chain membership proofs plus plus goes live on main network. So what do you guys see is the

Guest 
Well, the worst thing that could happen is that something that we're relying on to prove something cryptographically is not reliable due to some hidden thing that eight people looked at and nobody noticed it, but some 16-year-old kid in his basement is going to crack it just by looking at transaction records. So that's the worst thing in the world, is the one screw that the NASA people forgot to put into a spaceship before it blows up. That's the worst possible fear.

That's one of the reasons that Cyberstack is doing its job to do our due diligence and stuff like that. Actually, no, the worst case scenario is that somebody comes up with a very plausible but fake way to criticize it as being broken and then that it takes so much effort to dissuade people that this thing that was invented was fake, that it actually takes away time for... 

Doug 
Oh man, that's definitely happening, Zcash will be doing that in the first 5 days, it's lost.

Oh man. Yeah, it's much harder to refute the bullshit, right? I don't know if Diego, if you have a comment on that. 

Guest 
I mean, besides the obvious ones, it's broken. Somebody can print an infinite amount to Monero and will never understand or know.

And, uh, you know, I think the, I think a, an undersold bad thing that can happen is that the Monero community just isn't ready from a UX perspective. Like a bunch of people are going to see, okay, Monero is not just king of privacy coins, but has top tier privacy these days. That's excellent. And you're going to have a swath of people come try it for the first time. And it's just going to suck because there are other pain points with Monero. Like you have to sync the whole chain, whereas with Electrum, with Bitcoin, like it's synced in an instant and tells you how much Bitcoin that you have. And this is just, you know, you can't get around this. It's just the way private blockchains work, but like, um, you know, we have like Monero, LWS, uh, the light wallet server that my Monero used to run, which just got bought out by cake wallet recently for who knows whatever. Um, but you know, it's not great for somebody else to have your view keys, but if you run your own or I don't know, there's, I'm kind of rambling here, but the idea is that the UX is not ready. Um, and a lot of these people will try Monero, find it too hard and never return. And if somebody else says, Hey, have you tried a minute? Like, yeah, I tried it. It's kind of sucked. 

Doug 
Yeah, but I mean, that's not an unknown, right? You're saying like usability could get worse with full chamber proofs? Cause like, aren't they cake wallets? You know, cake wallet's good.

Obviously stack wallet, edge. I mean, these things are pretty, obviously we need improvements, but they're pretty good. It's pretty usable. 

Guest 
Like, it does get worse because with bigger transaction sizes, if the rate and number of transactions remains the same, which we hope it will, or increase, that's like, you have to scan all those blocks. So the amount of time you spend scanning rather than spending is going to increase with full chain membership proofs. The UX is going to degrade. I'm not saying it's going to be catastrophic, but it will get worse a little bit.

But we find the trade-off worth everything is a trade-off, right? We find the privacy gains to be worth the degradation and user experience. We think that is the correct route to go, but it will get worse somewhat. And because we have not really done FCMPs, we can't really say how much. We have a good idea and we can run the numbers and whatever, but maybe everybody just starts using it and the blockchain size really just explodes and it gets really rough to use. It's possible. So I think that's an undersold one because everyone kind of focuses on the privacy. Something's broken. It turns out you can break the privacy. It turns out somebody can print an infinite amount of Monero. But my concern is the UX degrades just enough to put it just past unusable for a large amount of people. I don't think that will be the case. In the same way, I don't think the privacy will be broken or whatever. You just ask for some worst case scenarios. 

Doug 
Yeah, no, this whole show, man, we're just so, you know, the Monero creators, we're just so honest. Yeah, yeah. We're our own worst enemies sometimes.

No, but no, this is important, this is important. You know, obviously this is, we like the skepticism around here. I mean, and you know, in this scenario that you're talking about, isn't one that then wouldn't be insurmountable? We would then just have to, once again, invent our ways out of it and improve, right? And just like we came up with bullet proofs to improve things back in the day and make things more efficient. I'm sure there'll be efficiency upgrades, which could be a good question for you guys. What, you know, once full chain membership proofs is implemented, do you think there's room there to improve in terms of efficiency of transactions? Like we'll see breakthroughs, things, you know, will ultimately still be full chain membership proofs, but I don't know, it could process faster, whatever it may be, like can the math be tweaked, do you think, and improved over time? 

Guest 
I think the answer to that is always yes. There are so many clever ideas that, like I could spend a lifetime researching this stuff and people have thought of clever ideas that I would never even touch. I think that's the other beautiful thing about working in this because Brandon said before, a lot of the, uh, you know, quote unquote mathematical technology that's being used has been around for like a century and a half. You know, it's not like it just blossomed out of some guy's skull and now we have it, uh, people are constantly finding new and clever ways of applying, uh, you know, very old time tested ideas and theories and then morphing it into this new space.

Um, and that was maybe like the biggest shock to me coming and working at cypher stack is seeing how much of this esoteric math stuff that I thought me and a handful of other people only appreciated and then seeing it like being used in the real world. Um, even whenever you were talking, whenever you just said bulletproofs, uh, some of the first range proofs relied on, um, like these crazy Euler theorems from four centuries ago or whatever. And, uh, so yeah, there's always going to be improvements to be, to be made. There's always going to be someone with a good idea coming by and saying, Hey, we could compress this, or we can do some, uh, magical elliptic curve nonsense here and a whole bunch of neat stuff. Um, even with some of the divisor stuff, I was like, wow, I don't, I don't think I would have come across this organically if I were looking at it, which gives me a lot of hope in the, in the community that someone's just going to pitch an idea. Uh, and they're going to send us a paper and we're going to spend weeks and weeks and months lose more hair, uh, looking at these things, but ultimately it, yeah, it could definitely happen.

Um, but that's how it happens too. Cause like we were on the serifist track for a while and then Kayaba comes along. I was like, Hey guys, you know, I have this thing for FCMPs. He's just, he kind of comes out there and it kind of pops out of nowhere. And then the next thing you know, you're like, well, I guess we're on this now because we can implement this faster and it's pretty good and does some good stuff and da da da da da. And who's to say, who's to say three months down the line, somebody won't come by and say, Hey, Monero guys, uh, I'm kind of new here, but I've just, you know, I've just been thinking about some of the stuff you guys been doing. And I wrote something up on this notepad. She thought, dude, does somebody want to look at it? We have a math guy look at it. They go, Oh my gosh, this is it guys. You know, this is the thing. So could happen. Could happen. I mean, the, the definite, uh, the only minor drawback to that sort of thing is that research takes a lot of time. It, it takes a lot of time and it, it takes a special kind of like masochist to really enjoy doing research, uh, of which I think me and Brandon are, are definitely part of that group. 

Guest 
Um, but there have been times like, I think one of the earlier meetings earlier this year, uh, Diego said some offhand comment about like, Hey, you know, maybe try to, maybe it was at one of the stack attacks, but, um, you're like, Oh, you should take a look at like the scalability stuff for Monero. And then that just like occupied the subconscious part of my brain for like a month, right?

Because that's how research is done and, and having a good idea is great, but then it just needs to go through like a million different litmus tests about how good it is, um, which is what FCMPs is going through right now. Uh, which is great. I just want to, I just want to, uh, say to any of the people who want to peek behind the scenes of Cypher stack or say, well, you know, how much does Diego have this guy's work on Monero? Like this, this is pretty common where I'll say, Hey guys, look at, you know, this is, here's a, here's an ancillary tangential thing. I just want you guys to keep in the back of your head in regards to Monero and just, you know, kind of think about it. And then we circle back to it. This is, this is a very common thing. We, I'm not going to say that we're all in on Monero because we do have a lot of different, uh, clients from different places, but a lot of pretty much all the free time in between clients that we do get pretty much all goes to Monero.

Um, but, uh, yeah, you guys are our first home. I mean, and also it's, it's kind of tricky because existing, uh, Diego mentioned to like the, uh, uh, like the quantum computer, like we're, we're Potentially on the quantum horizon. You know, it's a scary boogeyman that lives in my closet. It's, it's nice because a lot of the research that we do, I mean, it's not like we're omniscient, we don't know everything. Uh, one of the things that I really enjoy doing in the last couple of weeks is just giving like a presentation and then talking about like some new stuff. You know, some of these things that we might've seen in passing, but no one's really an expert on, right? Like there might not even be experts out there. We talked about, uh, Shor's algorithm, uh, like two weeks ago or three weeks ago or something, and, uh, getting to dig into that, uh, increases my appreciation for these things and why they're so important for us to start asking questions into. It also makes me way more paranoid, but, uh, I, that's not necessarily the worst thing to be in, in this sort of privacy space, I guess. Um, so yeah, yeah, that's. 

Doug 
Let me let me bring up another Super Chat I missed here. I don't know if you guys have any comment on it.

Eat Pray, XMR tip 31 cents. A Zek account on X claimed dirty little secret XMR devs asking Zcash devs how to implement zero dollar proofs. Is that true? I'm going to assume that's just a troll, but yeah, I don't think I mean, OK. So I mean, they're they're they're working. I'm sure we're getting I would I would hope that we would be getting some some feedback from Zcash devs. 

Guest 
If I were to guess that this came from a real thing, then what happened probably was that somebody like Kayaba was at a conference last week and was seen publicly having a conversation with somebody from Zcash and overheard him publicly ask a question and like, which is great. Right.

These, yes. Well, even what, I mean, the whole tweet is flawed to be going to implement what Zcash knowledge, like, I mean, there's so much it's. 

Doug 
Bulletproofs. Bulletproofs are zero knowledge, right? I think we've already done the zero knowledge thing in Monero. 

Guest 
Oh, there's so much zero knowledge stuff out there. I'm actually getting sick and tired of seeing that word pop up because some freemen who's not here, but, uh, when we were both at Clemson together and, uh, uh, he loves zero knowledge stuff, loves it. It's his bread and butter.

Every chance he had to bring it up, even before we started working together here, he'd be like, bro, you got to check out this, this 300 page long zero knowledge Bible. And I'm like, man, I ain't never going to see that in the real world. And lo and behold, here it is literally everywhere. 

Doug 
It is a little annoying how Zcash has co-opted zero knowledge as if it's some technology that they've invented and owned. It's just a mathematical, right? 

Guest 
job, like branding, like you can hand, you can say whatever you want about the Zcash people, but for their branding has been spot on this whole time.

Yeah. The whole, to slightly build on what Luke said, the whole zero knowledge thing, it's an entire family of mathematics. So the answer is probably yes. Monero people have talked with Zcash people and Fero people who have talked with Monero people who have talked with people that are not in the cryptocurrency space at all and do zero knowledge stuff. Like everybody talks with everybody and reads everybody's papers and say, Hey, can you look at this work? Or somebody else pops on uninvited on Twitter, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It says, Hey, I looked at this and this is not necessarily good. Yeah, man. Like we're all building this cool zero knowledge thing together to hopefully have a system where we can live privately. So if the answer is yes, and that's a good thing. 

Doug 
Yeah, I hope we could have some of that taking place at Monerotopia this year. That's when we're successful, right?

When we got the devs talking to each other, making breakthroughs. Binary Baron tips $7.25. Very generous.

Full chain membership proofs plus plus is awesome. Thanks so much for all your work. Could you expand a bit on transaction pre-signing? I'm assuming it's still part of the fork.

Is it going to enable bi-directional atomic swaps, which I'm really excited about, or it is going to enable. Yeah, so is that the case? I mean, do we have bi-directional atomic swaps once full chain membership proofs is implemented? 

Guest 
So, unfortunately, I have no idea how to answer this question. I don't think any of us do.

We have been in the swampy weeds of the math, and this is the stuff that builds on top of the stuff that we're building, if that makes sense. So, we're knee deep in the cement trying to get this foundation ready. And the next person up is designing the network that's going to be in this business, like the internet. But none of that can go in until the cement foundation is done, but the cement people don't necessarily know what's going on. 

Doug 
This is a Luke Parker, Jeff Rowe, Jay Buhrman question. 

Guest 
Yeah, sorry, guys. Sorry, good work on your stuff, by the way. Really enjoying your stuff. 

Doug 
Alright, yeah, thank you binary Barrett. There were so much cuz do we have I think we got all the super chats Yeah, I think we got them all.

Oh So I guess you know we could do like a fine a final question here We're almost an hour and 40 minutes in and I rather you guys spend your time Do an actual work and then then jerking around with me Although although this is important it's important that the Manera community gets to see gets to see who's who's behind the scenes Doing all this all this heavy lifting Do you go I mean you yeah you talk about you guys are involved in other projects, right? You have other projects that come to you guys What are some of the things you're you're most interested in in like privacy tech right now privacy crypto tech I'm not

Guest 
big proof of stake fan, but any project that tries to do proof of stake completely privately is very interesting to me because like, how do you do that? So it's more kind of like, oh wow, I'm really interested to see where that goes.

I've always had a soft spot for MimbleWimble. It is the suckiest technology and I hate it, but somehow it has wormed its way into my heart, and I like to see MimbleWimble succeed. So GRIN, Epic Cash, MimbleWimbleCoin, just try to find ways to make this usable. Maybe it's just like I'm a UX designer and I'm trying to make this worst UX ever not suck the worst it has ever sucked. It's the worst, but there are some interesting things on the MimbleWimble horizon, not just with Tari coming out with their MimbleWimble stuff, but different ways to make those non-interactive, and we kind of go back and forth on those. And with Litecoin's kind of MimbleWimble extension blocks as well, that's really interesting to me. As of late, I've had some of my guys look into like the MimbleWimble extension blocks with LTC just so I can get kind of a gauge privacy-wise how much it is, and it's less impressive than I was hoping. So from a privacy perspective, no, not so much, but from a scalability perspective, MimbleWimble really can't be beat. It's really rock solid. So like, if we could find a way to do MimbleWimble in a way that's more private, that solves a lot of the scalability problems. I just don't know that it's possible, but that's the interesting stuff to me. Like I said, Tachyon from Zcash, that's pretty good. It puts the Snark stuff on not quite Bitcoin level, but pretty close, which is really small. That's really cool. If they can pull that off, like, you know, huge props to them. Let's see, there was one other thing that I was looking into that I was like, this is actually pretty... No, I can't remember off the top of my head. Sorry, I'll tweet about it later or something, but there's some interesting stuff out there. 

Doug 
Yeah, the mimble wimble. Yeah, I don't know much about you know, I've noticed been around for a while We might have the like coin mimble wimble people down there one of the guys working on that. Yeah Yeah, yeah, so that should be cool down a mineral topia. It sucks.

I hate it Brandon look yeah, I don't know if you guys have like I mean, are you working on other other things outside of an arrow like privacy tech wise privacy crypto wise? Yeah

Guest 
actually, what's interesting is one of the things that we've been working on until, you know, I think we kind of brought it to a close about a month ago, but Silver Bullet is this divisors based approach for pre-concuting stuff. I kind of mentioned it offhand earlier without calling it by its name, Silver Bullet. It was designed originally by Liam Egan. It's the divisors based zero knowledge proofs, et cetera, et cetera. We ended up putting it up on into a slightly firmer ground theoretically, which is great.

And we realized about a week ago, I think we might be able to make Tor bootstrapping faster with. So the interesting thing about these projects is I don't really care so much about any one particular branded project. Like Monero is very interesting and I actually do care about Monero for a bunch of personal reasons, but I don't really like keep track of the landscape of how projects are evolving or what they're claiming to be doing because, well, actually this is probably a weak spot in my own intellectual life from the bubbles of 2016 and earlier and the 2016 to 2019 period was just bonkers with a bunch of like overblown claims. And if you like started going down the rabbit hole trying to investigate whether or not any of these technologies were possible, you were going to be spending a lot of time wading through hip deep trying to run hip deep through water. And in the meantime, five more projects have come out and have been announced by the time you're done looking at the first one. So I got real lazy about following new projects, but any one little device that's plugged into one project can have knock-on secondary effects across not just the cryptocurrency world, but the cryptography world and applied like the internet itself. I think it's totally cool if we can manage to make Tor bootstrapping faster with something that was originally designed to simply just like enable FCMP to be sufficiently efficient, which I think is pretty dope. But this is something that we just realized we're not fully, we haven't fully fleshed the idea out yet. And this is actually the first time that we've discussed it publicly. So. 

Doug 
Sir Jams giving me a challenge here. Tip $2.35. Peter Piper picked a pack of pickled pepper that Pete does with his peppered pickled pecker. Thank you, Sir Jams. Appreciate that one.

$3.35. Very, very generous, very generous. These are XMR chats, by the way. People are sending Monero with these tips. I don't know if you guys are aware of that. Obviously, I see that as a huge one. These are Monero-based Super Chats that are coming in. I don't think Zcash got the Monero. I mean, the Zcash-based Super Chats coming in on the streams yet? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Luke, I don't know if you have a response to that last question. Just so you know, things are working out. Things are interested in, in the privacy coin field, maybe from a mathematical standpoint, whatever it may be. 

Guest 
Yeah, so the one thing that's been taking up way too much of my non-work time that's cryptography-related is the... I've always had this sneaking suspicion about post-quantum stuff that, yeah, there's a lot of really crazy break for a lot of pre-quantum cryptography that's not too difficult to understand. I mean, it's still tricky and it's really weird and there's some black magic stuff that happens in the background.

But my big concern with the post-quantum stuff is that as these new proposed post-quantum schemes come out, who's to say that some Shor's algorithm-type thing won't come out in a year and break all of these things? And it seems like making these tools, because the prerequisites are really tricky, making these tools is going to be... they're largely going to be produced within intelligence agencies as opposed to by grad students and their advisors and be publicly accessible. Because the toolbox for attacking things with a quantum computer is really, really, really tiny, at the very least to us non-government entities. So I've been doing a good bit of thinking about ways that the tools that we have access to now can be adjusted or tweaked to do things that could be potentially damaging in the future. But that's more of a bit of a pet project, how to really take advantage of a quantum computer's power in ways outside of the stuff that people are scared of right now. Looking at it from the opposite side of the aisle, yeah, we want the post-quantum security, but then we also need to be able to throw as many attackers at it as possible. And if that remains undeveloped or underdeveloped, I think we run into some issues in the future.

But more on company time, pretty much anything Brandon tells me to do and anything Diego tells me to do, which is a lot of looking into these different technologies and seeing what sort of... Speaking of which, did you get that thing done? Oh, I gotta go! 

Doug 
Monero bro tips, three cents. What are the organizations or people that have stepped up to fund Monero other than Cypherstack? Is this sufficient?

It's not so much Cypherstack is funding. They're getting hired basically using Monero funds that have been raised through the CCS or Monero grants. Obviously, you guys are doing a lot of additional pro bono work, I'm sure as well. 

Guest 
Yeah, I'm pushing back on that a little bit. We do. 

Doug 
No, but I just think there's a misunderstanding from what he's saying. What are the organizations or people that have stepped up to fund Monero? 

Guest 
Well, people fund a lot, they're excellent people, love them, new people on the scene, Power Up Privacy, who we do a lot of stuff for, they've been doing a lot of R&D funding for Monero and other privacy coins, the community itself with the CCS, which is still to this day a fairly unique system that is very functional. And you know,

Doug 
I mean the general fund has how much it has a decent amount of Monero sitting there right now and a lot of 

Guest 
a lot of anonymous whales have have donated a fair amount over the years to different projects so in terms of organizations oh magic also magic grants the non-profit has been instrumental and in a lot of facilitation and funding efforts i would say those are the top ones that pop to my mind if if i missed anything please don't be offended shoot me a message happy to be in contact with you about funding for cypherstack um but yeah i would say magic power privacy some anonymous people and um

Doug 
Magic Rants, uh, you mentioned that one, Hunter? He's Venero CCS, Vic, Kate, well, yeah. 

Guest 
Yes. One of the interesting things is that it's not so much that organizations contribute to Monero. It's right.

Funds to contribute to Monero flow through organizations. So magic is a great example. Magic is this 501c3 nonprofit that it's an educational nonprofit that I helped start with Diego and Justin Ehrenhofer back in 2017. And it's a nonprofit organization. They don't have money. They hold money that donors get them and then they give that money to developers or students or whoever it is that gets these grants. So that sort of might explain the funding structure. 

Doug 
You guys think we need more of that or different versions of that? Like we're saying Zcash has that built in, right? With the dev tax and they have the Z Corp and whatever, you know.

Do you think what would like, what would that look like? What do you see? What do we need? 

Guest 
I'm going to be 100% honest, Cypher Stack probably last year was in a pretty difficult financial position. And it was looking to the point where I'm like, okay, is this really tenable? Some contracts came through and some clients popped up that kind of saved me from the lurch there. But this has, I'm not, I'm not going to lie to you guys, running Cypher Stack has always been like a roller coaster and very anxiety inducing in some portions of life where it's like, oh man, there's, especially like if the price is down, nobody wants to fund, nobody wants to donate or whatever. I'm like, am I going to have to let people go? You know, is this, you know, what's this looking like? And thankfully it hasn't really gotten to that point, but I was darn close, man. I was darn close.

Not just throwing the towel and throwing it all away, but okay, do I have to downsize and what can we do with the groups and peoples that we do have? If us, some of the primary people behind getting some of this technology out have hit some of those walls. You can bet that many of those other smaller developers who are not as much in the limelight have also hit those places. So we absolutely need more people to step up. If you've got talent, start coding or start working on math. If you've got funds, start, you know, start donating or build something, donate to magic or build a, an infrastructure where you can help out some of the developers. And if you've got time, you know, start going around and learning, learning so you can start contributing. This is, this is all hands on deck. Again, the community model, this is an all hands on deck sort of situation. No creative, not creative comments, no, no tragedy of the comments, uh, get, get everybody on here. And if you're sitting in your chair and you haven't done anything and you have that teeny inkling that you want to really tap into that, you know, really, really see how you can start contributing and you can, you can make more of a difference than you think. 

Doug 
Never assume somebody else is working on it right because that's what the tragedy of the comments comes in and you know Unfortunately, that's a big problem Don't assume somebody else is working on it or even if they are don't assume we don't need more of it and competition is good Competition is good and necessary Do you you mentioned tacky is it what's it called tacky on a couple times?

Do you guys think I? Don't know how deeply you understand it know it at this point But do you think there's things been narrow can learn from that in terms of potential scalability with via full chain membership proofs? I know it's a bit of it obviously it's a different animal, but there are some similarities there, right there

Guest 
That is on the list, but like I said, we're three steps from the finish line at FCMP land kind of thing. And so I think everyone has been aching for that huge sigh of relief that comes when you actually pass the finish line.

So I've been saying, okay, this is on the list, this is on the list, but we're pushing this away until we can get that done. So that is one of the first things I am gonna have people start looking at once we get past FCMPs, because it's very interesting to me personally, and I'm the boss, so I can just tell people what to do. So there's been. 

Doug 
potentially things that Monero can learn from their proposal. 

Guest 
Math begets math that was exactly what I was gonna say grape mines or I guess in Germans they say two fools think alike I guess but um no I mean like it when you read a hundred proofs it doesn't matter like what was being proven you just read a hundred different techniques that's like judo or whatever and then somebody throws a new problem at you those proof techniques are still useful in other scenarios even if they were originally applied to like zcash or whatever so if I think time I read like a crypto paper on ICR I'm actually looking more for judo moves to incorporate not necessarily like oh somebody's built a big shiny thing it's more like how did they do that and is that like joint over there or those gearing systems over there are those things things that I can put into my machine over here I'm not gonna redesign the whole machine right but a couple of small parts here and there absolutely useful a lot of cross and pollination there what do you think oh yeah one hundred percent I mean half the fun of reading a bunch of math papers is isn't just the result like the punchline what is it it's about the journey not the destination right that's what people always say and in the case of math it's totally true because the proof techniques could be incredibly clever there there's some really cool stuff people just seem to like pull out of nowhere and it works and it works really well and you're like oh cool I can't wait to try to apply this to the first place it seems applicable and it's yeah it's great so yeah anytime more math research is being done even if it's in an unrelated field there's always something you can take and transplant over and then it just it's like a almost perpetual motion machine of ideas it's good stuff

Doug 
All right. All right, guys, I'll just mention this last Monero based Super Chat, Sir Jams tip two dollars and thirty five cents, which is point zero zero six nine XMR public shout out to Rideau swap for the new weekly volume. They hit an all time high, a new volume, all time high. That's awesome. That's these are the wins we need to see. This is the number go up we need to see for sure.

So very exciting to see that. Thank you guys so much. Thank you for taking the time to jump on today. Super excited to see at least some of you down at Monero topia. Brandon, I hope I hope you can make it down there. It'd be nice to see you first. And it's been years, obviously, Diego. I know you see Luke as well. Please, please do try to attend. Thank you, guys. Any any last words you guys could say whatever you want, show whatever you want, put any info out there. The floor is yours. 

Guest 
and 

Doug 
or 12 to 15 12 12 to the 15th yep three days no we don't say four days there's a Friday Saturday Sunday it's a lot it's it's it's a chill hangout though you're gonna have your you know you'll have you'll have a good time you'll have a good time what is there's lots of fun things to purchase with Monero as well Luke in Diego

Guest 
It uh, uh me first luke. Yeah. Yeah 

Doug 
Well, we'll let Diego close it out, you know, you give one his epic epic rants to close it out 

Guest 
I said almost everything I wanted to say. So yeah, guys, check out Stack Wallet.

And I'm really grateful for the support that Cypher Stack receives and the trust that the community has in us to look through this stuff and really try to get it right. It's very humbling to me that we are such a big part of a gigantic global cryptocurrency and working really hard to make it the best that it can be. And we take that position seriously. And the trust that the community has in us seriously. And we do our best to deliver good on that. So really, really humbled by that. And just big thank you to the Manera community and to Doug for having us on here and letting us talk and be nerdy about this kind of stuff. 

Doug 
Awesome. Thank you guys. Yeah, Luke anything any any last words? 

Guest 
Uh, yeah, uh, if you're out there, pick up a math textbook and just do a couple problems, right? Read a page, read two pages, right? That's all you need to get through.

I do have something to show actually. I've written two books. I don't know if people know they're fantasy books. They're not cryptocurrency related. You should go look for them. Bellmaker and choir of stars by Diego Salazar there on Amazon. 

Doug 
Can you sell these on XMR Bazaar, please, so I could just start with them? 

Guest 
I can I have physical copies that I could ship places those definitely and have something to show that's fun What what are the titles? bellmaker and Choir of stars, they're like fairy tale fantasy my great-granddad is a bellmaker to Mexico. So

Doug 
Shit get them up on XMR bazaar, and I will show them on Monero topia show for sure alright guys Thanks again, and hopefully we see you gentlemen soon adios you guys in LA bye 

Speaker 2 
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