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I've written quite a few times about this already... the idea that one of my long-term infrastructure desires for cryptocurrency is the recovery of privacy in our online and real life personas. And as always, the infrastructure needs and solutions are the sorts of things that I'm looking for in projects... sure, it isn't quite as lucrative in the short term as the fad and hype of the "latest" thing for crypto... but my core wish for cryptocurrencies and blockchains is to reinvent and replace the way that we do things digitally. It is pretty obvious the way that the internet is at the moment is a bit of a perversion of the original intent of information sharing.. sure, in the good old days, when the internet was the domain of nerd-arses and dorks (whilst the cool people did whatever cool people did...), the thing sort of worked... but there were unspoken rules and a certain etiquette to it. However, when you let in the popular people... well, then things go to crap. I guess that happens for all sorts of cults... when they get taken over (I can't remember where I had read a post that dissected the evolution of a niche interest to the mainstream...).

Anyway, this is even more apparent when we move away from the internet and look around us at all things that are supposedly "digital"... banking, stock trading, and everything that seems to have a digital front. In fact, most of the stuff is just digital front facing... with crappy crappy back-end that is basically creaking and archaic infrastructure. Honestly, I'm surprised that more things don't break on a regular basis... it seems like it is the heroism of the real tech-wizards in the back end that perform the equivalent of fingers in the dyke emergencies combined with the "oh my god, don't touch anything" approach.

Anyway... in all the hype about decentralisation (which is sort of also important), some of the original ideas for cryptocurrencies have been lost in the quest of number goes up. And I think that the idea of privacy of digital interactions is the critical one. Of course, it is the much more difficult problem to solve... but as we stand, the technology is ready... and the implementations are rolling out in the coming year or two. To be perfectly honest, I think that this will be a bigger thing than people imagine and it isn't really getting that much traction outside of crypto-nerds. Even within the cyrptocurrency space, most people are still focused upon other things.

This was one of the pillars of the cypherpunk movement, and even Satoshi talks about this... but Bitcoin has failed to really do much on this side of things... and the Bitcoin community these days is a shadow of its former self. I'm not even sure that it has the will to innovate anymore. In fact, I do wonder if this coming wave of secrecy and privacy will be the thing that finally wipes out Bitcoin? I would be pretty sad if that happened, but it is a reflection of the apathy of incumbents... change is always coming.

So... where are the new protocols coming from? Well, we have the ZK (Zero Knowledge) implementations on Ethereum... and Zk-EVMs are also rolling out with testnets already out there. Zero Knowledge proofs that allow for private and confidential digital interactions, backed by the security of Ethereum and scaled with Layer 2 chains. Holy crap... if that isn't a real earth-shattering change, then I don't know what is. EVM compatibility means that there is picking dApp winners or anything like that... credibly neutral technologies that enable all manner of dApps to be built upon them... infrastructure!

Meanwhile, I have also been interested in the development of Monero and ZCash... these are older technologies that attempted to improve Bitcoin with privacy and to serve as "currency" proper.... and to date, they haven't had the adoption that I would have thought that they deserved. A pity... Zcash in particular has been quite sidelined. Monero has seen greater adotpion, it appears to have supplanted Bitcoin as the preferred currency of those interested in hiding their transactions. However, there was a worrying report that Chainanalysis has made some progress in uncovering transactions... it seems to "probablistic" rather than definite... but it is still quite a step to start unravelling a secrecy protocol.

... and that does seem to be the critical thing about the privacy implementation. There are those that are based upon obfuscation and encryption (like Monero and mixers...) that I would consider to be a middle path... and then there are those that are based on zero-knowledge proofs (zk-L2s and ZCash... which I would consider to be the current gold-standard of privacy. No information is transmitted other the proof... so, there is essentially NOTHING to unravel and reveal!

So... I'm really curious how it all pans out... and even more curious to see how much of the zk implementations can be bolted onto existing infrastructure (like Optimistic rollups). The future is coming... and I'm still an idealist in some things (I know that I will eventually be disappointed, but it is always good to dream!).

I can also be found cross-posting at:
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