Vitalik Buterin (founder of Ethereum) gave a speech + Q&A at the opening ceremony of W3PN HACKS hackathon focused on privacy, digital freedom and open-source solutions.
"Using privacy protocols today requires a separate seed phrase, No multisig option, Requires opening a separate wallet, ~5 clicks to do private send / withdraw, Public broadcaster mechanism brittle, often breaks. We can do better", - Vitalik Buterin.
Web3Privacy now hackathon was an anti-bounty event proposing radically different nature of web3 hackathons amplifying solution-first approach and not chasing sponsor bounties. Moreover, it enabled 28 interdisciplinary mentors shaping hackathon projects from UX/UI to privacy-open-source-fit: https://hackathon.web3privacy.info
00:00 Intro 00:17 Getting Serious about Ethereum privacy 24:44 Q&A Session Start 24:53 Do you know we have been working on offchain protocol to turn every file into a hash tree which you can sign and the test like time stamp and linking to other files as well. Is there something similar you already know which has been established? 26:45 How would you explain what a nullifier is and why can it be coerced easily? 29:00 Do you have an opinion on the EIP7503 wormholes and do you think there's like plausible deniability maybe possible? 30:59 You mentioned that you want to see our privacy tech stack formally verified. Obviously formal verification comes in many formats. Can you talk just what you would like to see under what paradigm to give you the confidence in the next? 33:25 Do you agree with the community's reaction to the ban of the Tornado Cash some years ago, and if not how do you to the and how do you uh prevent how do how do you prevent it in the future? 36:10 You showed a slide with a lot of things that could be paralized like the reads, the rights, etc. Were those use cases uh what you had in mind when uh Ethereum came out with with Whisper? And if so because you also uh said that offchain is good because it doesn't leak as much metadata. Is there a strong case for for the adoption of offchain peer-to-peer like I'm going to say Waku? Would Waku make sense for a bunch of those? 38:53 Talk about Waku again in back in 2021 I built a messaging app that was and using Waku and one of the interesting things is that because the node was running in browser, I didn't have to require the user to do some operation like run a node. So what do you think about? 41:39 Just wondering about governance and privacy. I know you mentioned the onchain voting as well as the fund transfers and kind of the important privacy elements there. Are there any other specific use cases around governance that get you excited and where you think it's crucial to enable privacy? 44:02 Any work on reintroducing interfaces to allow for encryption decryption keys which might be derived from a root key via a standardized API? 45:16 Is Railgun ever going to lower their quarter % fee? Do you know? 45:38 How do you see the synergy between B2B privacy and sort of like human privacy and where are the disconnects between them? 47:51 What is privacy endgame? 51:28 Can you share your perception of cypherpunk in two years? 54:15 Since you it's very important for you to keep your thoughts private and you run a local LLM, how do you deal with the your location privacy? 56:26 What's your opinion on the how privacy projects can reach product market fit? 58:17 What would be the low hanging fruit in terms of dev hours spending on privacy? 01:00:14 What are your thoughts about uh whistleblowing rights and how they intersect with privacy data? 01:01:20 What do you think about ZKTLS proof?
