49 - Moon Math: The Bull Case for Cryptography | Justin Drake
Bankless
Bankless
4.7 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 25 January 2021
⏱️ 141 minutes
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49 - Moon Math: The Bull Case for Cryptography
Guest: Justin Drake
Justin Drake is a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation and is leading the charge of the application of cryptography to Ethereum.
Justin speaks about how far with come in the cryptocurrency industry, with only two extremely primitive tools: cryptographic hashes and signatures; the fire and wheel of applied cryptography.
Justin leads us through a cryptographic-enabled world, where more recent breakthroughs in applied cryptography supplement hashes and signatures. Multi-party computation, fully-homomorphic encryption, SNARKs, verifiable-delay functions, these are all cryptographic tools that are yet-to-be harnessed by the Ethereum blockchain.
Importantly, all of these new modern cryptographic tools are developed well beyond theoretical concepts; all that is left is for talented developers to put rubber to pavement.
Justin walks the listeners through the user story of a user making a transaction on Uniswap, and discusses how cryptographic tricks can make the entire user process more secure and more trustless.
We finish with a discussion about the long term fate of the Bitcoin blockchain, and its collision course with quanton computing, which threatens to break some of the crucial features that makes Bitcoin, Bitcoin. Justin provides a roadmap for the decoupling of BTC the asset from Bitcoin the blockchain, using a cryptographic two-way bridge between Bitcoin and an alternative new host blockchain, presumably Ethereum, and how BTC can upload itself to a new blockchain, and be rid of the baggage and liability of the Bitcoin blockchain 🤯
This is truly one of the most unique pieces of content we’ve produced on the Bankless program, and Justin deserves so much credit for leading this operation!
Resources:
Justin’s Uniswap Cryptographic Mechanism Solution spreadsheet and their theoretical application to any Ethereum app.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dyhNWMB6rVdmV3Xz-LlZlTt0f4tXfIW0YaoZVvenORs/edit?usp=sharing
Below are the two papers Justin mentioned on long-term Bitcoin (in)security:
"On the Instability of Bitcoin Without the Block Reward" by Princeton researchers.
https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/mining_CCS.pdf
There are two informal explainers:
https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2016/10/21/bitcoin-is-unstable-without-the-block-reward/
https://medium.com/@bergealex4/bitcoin-is-unstable-without-the-block-size-size-limit-70db07070a54
"On the insecurity of quantum Bitcoin mining"
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.08118.pdf
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. |
| 0:19.4 | This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front run the opportunity. |
| 0:23.9 | I'm Ryan Sean Adams, I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more |
| 0:29.3 | bankless. David, this is the type of episode we've not done on bankless before. What makes |
| 0:35.5 | this one so special? You know, I don't think anyone has done an episode like this. Justin |
| 0:40.9 | Drake, who is a cryptographic researcher at the EF. He loves cryptography, and that is one |
| 0:46.7 | of the harder subjects to do a podcast about, especially when, you know, you're generally |
| 0:51.3 | non-technical, and Justin is extremely technical, yet he did a fantastic job breaking down |
| 0:56.3 | cryptography, so we could help understand how it's going to fill some of the chinks in the |
| 1:01.7 | armor that we have in this cryptocurrency industry, right? So we use Uniswap as like the premier |
| 1:08.7 | example of the application that everyone knows and has probably engaged with. Yet there are |
| 1:14.2 | a few trust bottlenecks for engaging with Uniswap. Metamask is a trust bottleneck. The front |
| 1:21.0 | end of the website is a trust bottleneck. There's a number of other things that you are implicitly |
| 1:26.4 | trusting when you use an application like Uniswap that aren't at anything to do with the Uniswap, |
| 1:31.4 | the protocol itself, but are still holes in the armor when it comes to trust. And so what this |
| 1:36.1 | episode was about was how we are just at the beginning of the crypto economic revolution. We |
| 1:42.5 | start off this episode defining crypto economics. And Justin says, talks about how, you know, |
| 1:47.4 | originally the Cypherpunk vision was all about a cryptography enabled world, yet that was super |
| 1:53.4 | ambitious and perhaps never going to happen. And therefore, the integration of economic assurances |
| 1:59.8 | or assumptions with cryptographic assurances or assumptions is really powerful. And basically, |
| 2:05.4 | what this industry stands on. And we have so much left untapped potential in the realm of crypto |
| 2:12.2 | economics that we have not yet applied to our daily interactions with the Ethereum blockchain, |
... |
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