[Cryptography] Business opportunities in crypto

[Adam P. Goucher]

> Block chain is a significant advance, which I place right
> next to 'double entry bookkeeping' and 'writing' itself
> in the history of business technology.
>
> But block chain technology does nothing to protect privacy
> or protect against collusion.
>
> This is where real crypto protocols could be useful, and
> I haven't seen much deployment of novel crypto protocols
> in this sector yet.

There's ZCash, which supports encrypted* transactions:

https://z.cash/technology/

The encrypted transactions are publicly verifiable thanks to
zero-knowledge proofs. In the case of ZCash, these zero-knowledge
proofs are based on a pairing-friendly BLS12 elliptic curve.

* such that no-one holds the private keys for the encryption:

https://z.cash/technology/paramgen/

Of course, the cryptography in ZCash is much more complicated and
makes many more hardness assumptions than does the cryptography
in Bitcoin, so more likely to contain a hitherto-undiscovered
cryptographic vulnerability.

There's also a project called AZTEC which implements similar
zero-knowledge proofs inside the Ethereum network:

https://aztec.network/



Best wishes,


Adam P. Goucher