Sean Bowe is a core cryptographer and engineer who played a major role in building Zcash’s technology.

Dev Ojha, also a cryptographer, is the founder of Osmosis. He is now working on helping Zcash scale and go post quantum.

Topics we discuss are well captured by the timestamps below.

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Timestamps

0:00 - Why Dev’s working on Zcash

12:24 - AI is surveillance’s ultimate weapon

13:33 - Encrypted money must scale

15:49 - Compliant “privacy” is an oxymoron

19:25 - PIR for scaling Zcash

36:35 - How Tachyon and PIR work hand in hand

43:47 - Quantum recoverability

47:18 - Is quantum the last cryptography problem?

51:41 - Easier coinholder voting process

1:03:15 - Zcash roadmap

1:17:34 - What Zcash looks like at scale

Sean Bowe and Jack Grigg aka str4d are both cryptographic engineers working on the Zcash protocol. Sean’s latest project is Tachyon, intended to bring encrypted money into the hands of 8 billion people.

Topics we discuss are well captured by the timestamps below.

Watch on YouTube or X. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Follow me on X for updates on future episodes.

Timestamps

0:00 - Project Tachyon

10:20 - Privacy can’t be an afterthought for a protocol

15:24 - Encrypted Bitcoin

22:11 - Soundness bug in original sprout pool

30:15 - Sapling

33:00 - A decade of progress

39:04 - Zcash’s anonymity set

51:29 - Using private money as a passthrough doesn’t work

56:04 - The importance of ledger indistinguishability

58:30 - The ultimate privacy stack

1:05:58 - Tachyon removes all cryptographic bottlenecks of encrypted money

1:08:16 - What’s next after Tachyon?

1:15:25 - Weightless blockchains?

1:18:24 - Ragu

1:19:44 - What the next 12 months look like for Jack and Sean

1:31:22 - “Everything worth doing is worth doing on ambitious timelines.” — Sean

1:32:16 - Sean’s advice for young engineers

1:34:18 - What got Sean and Jack into Zcash?

My conversation with Samo Burja, founder of Bismarck Analysis. He chairs the editorial board of Palladium Magazine.

Topics we discuss are well captured by the timestamps below.

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Timestamps

0:00 - Intro

1:18 - Live players

5:41 - Great Founder Theory

11:20 - Our material technology rests on our social interactions

14:23 - Optimism, pessimism, and human agency

23:21 - Operationalized knowledge

25:22 - Lost and dead traditions of knowledge

27:34 - Tradition of criticism

29:36 - The most important piece of knowledge to preserve

32:27 - Common features of declining societies

39:18 - Are the Spartan warriors overrated and just had very good PR?

42:07 - DOGE and bureaucracy in America

45:28 - The machinery of freedom

47:43 - Tech Samo is most excited about over the next 5 years

50:10 - Curtis Yarvin and the orbital authority

55:01 - Samo’s advice for young people

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