For the last couple of decades, the trend was that on average, over the long haul, the number of bugs added was slightly fewer than the number of bugs removed, and so it was was a good practice to update your dependencies to new releases frequently.

That’s changed because of supply chain attacks. Today, updating to newer versions of dependencies will, on average, introduce more bugs (backdoors) into your application than it will fix.

• accidental bugs ← the old world
• software supply chain attacks, mass automated ← you are here
• supply chain attacks, targeted ← cryptocurrency developers are here

The culture of software developers, and the tooling around software ecosystems like Rust (cargo/crates.io), JavaScript (npm), and Python (pypi) are adapted to the old world, where everyone wanted to stay up-to-date with the latest versions of their dependencies.

So in the short term, software developers are going to have to painfully unlearn the lessons of the last few decades, and start prioritizing safety over functionality and ease of development, when managing their dependencies. The software supply chain attacks will continue to get worse instead better from here on out.

This will continue until the world learns how to safely use malicious software. The only known way to do that is with the object-capability access control paradigm:

• safe use of malicious code ← we want to get here

Links for further reading on object-capability security:

• https://papers.agoric.com/assets/pdf/papers/robust-composition.pdf
• https://medium.com/agoric/pola-would-have-prevented-the-event-stream-incident-45653ecbda99
• https://metamask.io/news/lavamoat-and-the-ledger-software-supply-chain-attack
• https://spritely.institute/
• https://foresight.org/norm-hardy-prize/
• https://github.com/dckc/awesome-ocap

Zcash allows anyone–anywhere–to send, receive, and hold private money without being subject to pressure or coercion from others. Zcash puts the control over your money solely in your own hands.

Zcash is the most important project in the world because all civil rights, businesses, and economies depend on private money. Non-violent social change needs private money. Civilization itself depends on private money.

Certain factions within the world’s national governments are attempting to take complete and permanent control over the economy. This means controlling every person’s business and personal life, and all possibility of political change. For the survival of our civilization, this must not be allowed to happen. Zcash is the alternative.

Zcash is winning. For the last eight years, Zcash has successfully outraced and outmanuevered those lumbering titans, the national governments. The Zcash technology has been published, scrutinized, replicated, honed, and battle-tested. It cannot be uninvented or banned. The Zcash coin, ZEC, has been distributed far and wide by a neutral Proof-of-Work mining algorithm into the hands of (likely) millions of holders and supporters.

Even more importantly, the idea of Zcash has spread: that it is possible for people to have control over their money and that this is good for society.

It’s time to upgrade Zcash to (hybrid) Proof-of-Stake

The creation and distribution of ZEC coins by the Proof-of-Work mining algorithm was a necessary first step. It allowed individuals to acquire ZEC when they didn’t have any and couldn’t acquire it any other way. It ensured that ZEC flowed far and wide, and invisibly, into the hands of the people who valued it most and were most committed to its long-term mission.

At the same time, the ongoing creation of new ZEC over these first eight years has put downward pressure on the price of ZEC. (A similar thing happened to Zcash’s predecessor, Bitcoin, during its first eight years.)

Zcash’s coin-creation schedule follows Bitcoin’s. Every four years the rate of new coin creation is halved, ensuring that only 21 million ZEC coins will eventually exist. When the second Zcash halving occurs, this November, three quarters of all ZEC will have been created.

Over the next several years, this downward price pressure is going to ease because the rate of new coin creation is going to reduce. This price effect is critical to our mission because the Zcash holders are the core supporters of that mission. Now is the time for the next stage!

Shielded Labs is a new Swiss non-profit dedicated to improving Zcash to be the best private money. Shielded Labs is funded solely by donations from Zcash holders.

The next steps to make Zcash even better

First we’re going to implement the “Zcash Sustainability Fund”, which provides long-term sustainability of the Zcash network and development without exceeding the 21 million ZEC supply cap.

Second, we’ll accelerate the upgrade of Zcash to “Crosslink”–a hybrid Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake protocol–with our friends at the Electric Coin Company. We want to deploy this as fast as possible while maintaining Zcash’s track record of excellent safety.

Crosslink will deliver many immediate benefits. It will allow people to stake their ZEC, thus increasing demand for ZEC. It will also reduce the supply of ZEC by locking up staked ZEC.

It will provide finality. Finality protects users against rollback attacks, reduces wait times for some kinds of transactions, and allows safer two-way bridges to other networks.

It will further strengthen security for Zcash users. The Proof-of-Stake mechanism and the Proof-of-Work mechanism provide two layers of defense, making it safer than a pure Proof-of-Stake network or pure Proof-of-Work network.

Crosslink will also be the foundation on which future scalability improvements can be built, so that everyone–everywhere–can use Zcash cheaply and efficiently.

This is the beginning of the next stage of Zcash. I’m thrilled and grateful that I have the opportunity to contribute. I’m joining Shielded Labs because I trust its founder, Jason McGee, and because Shielded Labs “Honors the hodlers”.

P.S. Please read my previous post in this series: Honor the Hodlers — why the price of Zcash matters.

Gratitude

I’m grateful to the Zcash holders and supporters who have made Shielded Labs possible with their financial and intellectual support: Vitalik Buterin, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the Anoma Foundation (Awa Sun Yin, Christopher Goes, and Adrian Brink), and anonymous donors. I’m also grateful to Jason McGee for doing this with me.

Thanks to Kevin Owocki, Kelcie Liddell, zerodartz, Jason McGee, Vitalik Buterin, Alan Fairless, and anonymous other hodlers for feedback on this post.

The price of Zcash is essential for the sustainability of our mission of freedom. Working to support the price of Zcash is morally good.

Zcash is a decentralized, open-source cryptocurrency which puts the right to disclose information solely into the hands of the user. With Zcash, nobody else gets to decide to share your information — only you do. (It does this with end-to-end encryption.)

I’ve seen Zcash used by poor Afghani schoolgirls, tech billionaires, political activists, entrepreneurs, sex workers, and all kinds of people from all over the world. I’ve also seen it used for jokes, silliness, love letters, and marriage proposals!

Historically, the price of Zcash (ZEC) has trended down.

This price decline has been super painful for a lot of people who heavily invested in ZEC (including me), but from the perspective of our mission, does it matter?

The Zcash community is made up of patriots, not mercenaries. We’re not here to “Get Rich Quick” — we’re here to put freedom and opportunity into everyone’s hands for the good of our societies and future generations.

I’ve decided over time that the price of Zcash does matter for one simple reason: sustainability.

Often, I’ve heard people in the cryptocurrency industry say something like “Sure, Zcash created some of our most important technologies, and sure they have the best technology deployed to users today, but that doesn’t make ZEC a good investment. That makes Zcash a science project, creating innovations that other projects will profit from.”

I pondered it for a long time, and thought: They’re not necessarily wrong — it could play out like that. Zcash, having already given humanity new capabilities, might gradually wind down and hand its mission over to younger and more vigorous groups.

But I don’t think it’s going to play out like that. Zcash is strong. In addition to the best technology deployed today, Zcash has a vast underground network of patriots — users, advocates, developers, and hodlers. These are people who can do anything and choose Zcash, even though it has cost them money, because they believe in the mission of freedom.

If Zcash grows and spreads, it will give much more to humanity. Zcash will continue to innovate and — more importantly — put freedom and opportunity in people’s hands.

And the single biggest factor determining which way it will play out is whether the Zcash price trends up or down over the next several years.

If it trends up, this vast underground network will be empowered. The Zcashers will have more freedom, financial freedom — which is the basis of all other kinds of freedom. And the network will grow as new people join in.

So what do we do about it?

I’ve been thinking a lot about what, if anything, we can do technologically to make the Zcash price trend up long-term, without appealing to greed or attracting short-term-oriented mercenaries.

But I think the most important thing that we can and should do isn’t technological, it’s social: Honor the hodlers.

If someone tells you that they hold ZEC, you should respond to them with gratitude and respect.

Holding ZEC--whether on a centralized exchange like Coinbase or Gemini, or in your own shielded wallet — moves some of the world’s value from the realm of centralized control into the realm of personal choice. It also supports the Zcash movement financially. That intentional, individual decision made by millions [*] of people — to put part of their personal value into ZEC — is a central piece in the machinery of freedom. They are patriots.

Let’s work together to honor our hodlers and provide the world the platform for freedom that it needs.

[*] Millions of people, probably. Nobody knows how many Zcashers there are. Not even me!

(Thanks to Jason McGee, zerodartz, Chris Berg, Alan Fairless, and others for feedback on this post.)

[Editor’s note: It is the 31st anniversary of the publication of “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto”. It is an important document, not only historically, but also for our current day. The only copy I can find hosted on the web is https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html, which is formatted in such a way that it is ugly and hard to read, especially on mobile. I’m hosting this copy in the hopes that more people will read it. This is a very well-written document — every word is well-placed and is acutely relevant to the issues that our society faces today. Read it!]

A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto

by Eric Hughes

Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn’t want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.

If two parties have some sort of dealings, then each has a memory of their interaction. Each party can speak about their own memory of this; how could anyone prevent it? One could pass laws against it, but the freedom of speech, even more than privacy, is fundamental to an open society; we seek not to restrict any speech at all. If many parties speak together in the same forum, each can speak to all the others and aggregate together knowledge about individuals and other parties. The power of electronic communications has enabled such group speech, and it will not go away merely because we might want it to.

Since we desire privacy, we must ensure that each party to a transaction have knowledge only of that which is directly necessary for that transaction. Since any information can be spoken of, we must ensure that we reveal as little as possible. In most cases personal identity is not salient. When I purchase a magazine at a store and hand cash to the clerk, there is no need to know who I am. When I ask my electronic mail provider to send and receive messages, my provider need not know to whom I am speaking or what I am saying or what others are saying to me; my provider only need know how to get the message there and how much I owe them in fees. When my identity is revealed by the underlying mechanism of the transaction, I have no privacy. I cannot here selectively reveal myself; I must always reveal myself.

Therefore, privacy in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems. Until now, cash has been the primary such system. An anonymous transaction system is not a secret transaction system. An anonymous system empowers individuals to reveal their identity when desired and only when desired; this is the essence of privacy.

Privacy in an open society also requires cryptography. If I say something, I want it heard only by those for whom I intend it. If the content of my speech is available to the world, I have no privacy. To encrypt is to indicate the desire for privacy, and to encrypt with weak cryptography is to indicate not too much desire for privacy. Furthermore, to reveal one’s identity with assurance when the default is anonymity requires the cryptographic signature.

We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence. It is to their advantage to speak of us, and we should expect that they will speak. To try to prevent their speech is to fight against the realities of information. Information does not just want to be free, it longs to be free. Information expands to fill the available storage space. Information is Rumor’s younger, stronger cousin; Information is fleeter of foot, has more eyes, knows more, and understands less than Rumor.

We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do.

We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.

Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can’t get privacy unless we all do, we’re going to write it. We publish our code so that our fellow Cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Our code is free for all to use, worldwide. We don’t much care if you don’t approve of the software we write. We know that software can’t be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can’t be shut down.

Cypherpunks deplore regulations on cryptography, for encryption is fundamentally a private act. The act of encryption, in fact, removes information from the public realm. Even laws against cryptography reach only so far as a nation’s border and the arm of its violence. Cryptography will ineluctably spread over the whole globe, and with it the anonymous transactions systems that it makes possible.

For privacy to be widespread it must be part of a social contract. People must come and together deploy these systems for the common good. Privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one’s fellows in society. We the Cypherpunks seek your questions and your concerns and hope we may engage you so that we do not deceive ourselves. We will not, however, be moved out of our course because some may disagree with our goals.

The Cypherpunks are actively engaged in making the networks safer for privacy. Let us proceed together apace.

Onward.

Eric Hughes <hughes@soda.berkeley.edu>

9 March 1993

[This is the medium where I post personal stuff. For an archive of my posts as the CEO of the Electric Coin Co, see https://medium.com/@zooko_25893 .]

The Board of Directors of the Electric Coin Co—which consists of Alan Fairless, Michelle Lai, Zaki Manian, Christina Garman, and myself—has decided to make Josh Swihart the CEO of the Electric Coin Co, taking over that role from me.

I have known and worked with Josh for a long time. While he and I have often disagreed about how we should do things, we’ve never disagreed by why. We share the mission of putting irrevocable, sovereign economic freedom into the hands of every person on earth. I’m excited about Josh’s product focus and looking forward to seeing what he and the ECC team do together.

For the last eight years of my life, I’ve worked continuously on Zcash. I was blessed with the best team ever—people who could’ve done anything, but who chose to do this because they believed in the mission. I will always be grateful to them.

Together, we created—for the first time—the technology of economic freedom for the internet. We showed the world not only that it is possible, but also that it is good—that normal, honest people are on the side of freedom. Zcash has been adopted by uncountable people from all over the world. Privacy is for everyone. Privacy is normal.

For me personally, Zcash took over not only my life but also my identity. It was hard for others to see Zcash as something separate from me. Sometimes it was hard for me to do that myself. It has been an incredible experience, and I’ll always be grateful that I had the opportunity to live out one of my science fiction dreams in reality. However, in the long run, I don’t think this conflation of Zcash with me personally is healthy for me, and I don’t think it’s healthy for Zcash. Zcash’s role in human history is, and will be, much bigger than any individual.

So what am I gonna do now? This transition has been like waking up from a dream. I’m still blinking and rubbing my eyes. I’ve been thinking about all the interesting new technologies that are coming out and how they can impact us and our society. Anything that I could commit to would need to be focused on human freedom, because freedom is what breathes life into everything that we love and value.

And, I think that anything that I would commit myself to in the future would need to include Zcash, because the Zcash community is freedom’s best hope. They (we) are far-flung, mostly invisible, highly skilled, and unshakeably committed to our mission. They (we) are best positioned, at this moment in history, to bend the arc of history toward the good.

Give me a couple of months to think about how I can best help, and I’ll get back to you. Long live Zcash!!!

[See the Electric Coin Co’s blog post about this transition here: https://electriccoin.co/blog/welcoming-a-new-season-at-ecc-a-message-from-the-bootstrap-board-of-directors/]

Isis’s declaration to the court included this screenshot made on Jane Doe’s phone:

Jane Doe’s declaration to the court included this statement:

(Archived at courtlistener.com and at The Internet Archive.)

This is consistent with what Jane Doe told me.

Here is a copy of the declaration that I made to the court. Everything I wrote in this declaration was, to the best of my knowledge, true at the time and remains true today.

(Archived at courtlistener.com or The Internet Archive.)

I will not be answering questions or saying anything else about this at this time, because I’ve already stated what I know, and I don’t want to give anyone an opportunity to sow confusion by changing the topic to be about me. I’m posting this because I’m fortunate to be in a position where I can safely speak out, as so many others are not, and because I felt like it would be wrong to remain silent.

After originally publishing this post, I edited it to add the screenshots of Jane Doe’s declaration to the court.

Peter Todd is suing Isis Lovecruft for defamation. The defense team asked me to make a statement to the court about things I know that are relevant to the defamation question. My statement was submitted to the court today. Court filings are made public by the court. Here are copies of all the documents from the court case, including my statement. I have nothing else to say about this matter at this time.

Quite a while back, I agreed to serve as an advisor to the Tezos team. This blog post is to state why.

But first, I want to emphasize that this does not constitute a recommendation that you participate in the upcoming Tezos crowdfunding. People sometimes ask me for investment advice, but I never give investment advice. I always just say:

• Never risk more money than you can afford to lose, on something new.
• Never invest in something you don’t understand.

(Also see this investment advice from Fred Wilson.)

I will receive $25,000 worth of Tezzies (Tezos tokens) in return for my service as advisor, half upon launch and half a year later. I will not buy any Tezzies myself in the sale, because I don’t have time to think about such decisions! (If I had time to think about such things, I’d probably use Fred Wilson’s recommendation of dollar cost averaging.)

So why am I agreeing to serve as an advisor?

The core idea of Tezos — formalized and automated governance of a decentralized protocol—is a deeply powerful idea, and I want to see it implemented and deployed, in the hopes that it can greatly help humanity.

The Tezos leadership team of Kathleen and Arthur Breitman are people that I know and trust. Kathleen has given me valuable business help and advice over the years, and Arthur has served as a technical advisor to the Zcash project throughout its life so far. I consider them to be able, intelligent, and ethical people.

They already have made substantial progress in the development of the ideas and implementation of Tezos, well in advance of the upcoming fund-raising.

The exchange of ideas between they and me has already benefited Zcash, and by serving as an advisor to Tezos I hope to give back and also to keep the mutually-beneficial ideas flowing. The two projects share a culture of openness, transparency, and scientific knowledge-sharing.

Some people think cryptocurrencies (such as Zcash and Tezos) are primarily competitive. They think this for entirely valid reasons involving network externalities. They might turn out to be right, but I think that the network is bigger than any particular cryptocurrency—the network is all cryptocurrencies. In fact, the network is much bigger than that—the network is all of the scientific and economic activity of all of this planet’s people. It is urgent and imperative that we leverage and multiply the value of that network, and I’m happy to cooperate with Tezos to do so.

No more!

I’m now advising three different projects (Basic Attention Token / Brave, Tezos, and the company that I founded and am still an owner of — LeastAuthority). At the same time, my responsibilities as CEO of The Zcash Company are continuing to balloon as Zcash is rapidly expanding in multiple markets and garnering a tremendous amount of enthusiasm and investment. I am absolutely maxed-out and will not be agreeing to advise any more projects, not matter how good they are, because you can’t squeeze time from a stone.

But first, I want to emphasize that this does not constitute a recommendation that you buy BAT tokens in the upcoming token sale. People sometimes ask me for investment advice, but I never give investment advice. I always just say:

• Never risk more money than you can afford to lose, on something new.
• Never invest in something you don’t understand.

I will receive a modest share of the BAT tokens in return for my service as advisor. To give you an order of magnitude, the share allocated to advisors is typically quoted in “basis points”. A basis point is a percent of a percent. So the total financial benefit to me if there is high demand for BAT tokens (like if it sells out the entire $24M token sale) is probably in the range of five figures. My BAT tokens will come under a six-month lockup so that I can’t sell them until six months after the token sale.

I probably will not buy any BATs myself in the token sale. In part because I don’t have time to think about such decisions!

So why am I agreeing to serve as an advisor?

The first reason is that I believe in the importance of their mission and I want to help. Most of today’s Internet is built on an economic model (advertising) that is inimical to the rights and the mental resources of the users, and that exerts a corrosive influence on our society’s economy and our political discourse. BAT is an audacious attempt to disrupt that entire economic basis and replace it with something better.

Note: this is not to imply that the BAT team intends to do away with advertising altogether, at least not right away. I would be delighted if they could do that by finding something better, but I don’t know if that’s possible. I trust them to choose their strategy wisely and to have their hearts in the right place.

This leads me to the second reason I’m agreeing to serve as an advisor: I trust Brendan Eich (CEO) and Yan Zhu (engineer). They are skilled, intelligent, ethical people with long track records. They and the rest of the team have already delivered a working product (the Brave web browser) which I use every day as my regular web browser.

The third reason is that I want to be on hand to help them should they decide to integrate with Zcash in the future. Also along the way I can learn more about what features Zcash needs in order to be an attractive platform for projects like theirs.

Okay, that’s it! My responsibilities as an advisor will be limited to reviewing technical and business ideas for a few hours each month and offering whatever advice I feel will help. Feel free to ask me if this blog post didn’t answer any questions you have.