Privacy Panel - Vitalik Buterin, Barry Whitehat & Toni Wahrstätter | EDCON2023

Vitalik Buterin (Founder of Ethereum), Barry Whitehat (Ethereum Foundation), and Toni Wahrstätter (Ethereum Researcher at Vienna University of Economics and Business) join together in a panel at #EDCON2023 and talk about privacy!

Vitalik says privacy is a super important topic because privacy is a human right and an incredibly important thing for Ethereum, and the panel will be about the state of privacy today, what we’re doing or what we can do more to achieve privacy, and what is the future of improving people’s privacy. He points out that one of the probably biggest technologies being used right now for privacy is ZK-STARKs, so what ZK-STARKs are? What kind of things people are making use of it for?

Barry says ZK-STARKs are like the language of truth and you can create a system where you are only able to say true things that ZK-SNARKs are too old to do. He gives an example that if you want to make a proof that you’re a member of a group, zero-knowledge proofs allow us to make these proofs. So we can use ZK-STARKs for privacy, and we can also use ZK-STARKs for scalability since this technology compresses the verification of a program and uses that for scaling purposes. He says another example is zkEVMs, and some people use ZK-STARKs to make proofs like the Ethereum Virtual Machine has given correctly, and he thinks this is the first step of a long journey, and we still have a long way to go, and his expectation is we’ll eventually start making proofs of almost everything. Barry also mentions that he’s been in Ethereum for years and has been pushing zero-knowledge proof technology since he thinks in today’s world it’s very difficult for people to have privacy in their lives.

Toni says he came into the privacy staff in Bitcoin so he started focusing more on privacy technologies via Bitcoin’s unspent transaction output. This is his first experience with privacy in the blockchain. Then he got to Ethereum and found those cool applications, did more research into ZK-STARKs, and he thinks stealth addresses, which are much simpler and much less complex than ZK-STARKs, just using cryptography and can be rolled out quickly and a lot of wallets can adopt and doesn’t give you the same privacy like Tornado Cash that gives you untraceability and always requires some mixing to be involved while stealth addresses can only give you unlinkability which is for many applications sufficient to be used.

Vitalik points out that in terms of privacy for coin transfers, over the last 10 years, there has been this kind of progression in that we started from CoinJoin and then Monero, and then Zcash and Tornado Cash. You can learn more about their insights into privacy and its development in the blockchain space via this privacy panel at EDCON 2023!

About UETH:
De University of Ethereum (UETH) is a non-profit organization dedicated to blockchain education for all. Our mission is to bridge the gap in access to blockchain education, increase digital literacy, and promote shared prosperity. We strive to empower future leaders to reach their full potential and tackle uncharted space confidently through accessible education.

Website: https://ueth.org/
Twitter:   / deueth  
Telegram: https://t.me/UETH828