Zooko Wilcox

Okay.

It's a cryptocurrency.

So it's like Bitcoin, if you're familiar with that.

And it adds improved data security.

Yeah, I like that analogy because we protect the access to the data, the confidentiality of the data that goes into the blockchain.

You know, when the internet was new, people thought nobody on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog because your IPv4 address doesn't have your home address or your legal name in it.

It's just four numbers.

But later we figured out that's totally not sufficient to make you anonymous or give you security on the internet.

You need a lot more tools such as SSL before you could use the internet for things like banking and confidential business data and stuff like that.

And similarly with Bitcoin, it was a real breakthrough.

And when it was new, people naively thought, since your Bitcoin address doesn't have your home address, your legal name baked into it, then it's basically secure.

But I always knew from my experience working in similar fields that that was not going to be sufficient.

Well, so Bitcoin is primarily only used for payments or transactions of money.

Other uses of blockchains are rapidly proliferating, which apply the same technology for all sorts of things like title and interbank settlement and all kinds of experiments in Bitcoin.

financial inclusion in the third world and all kinds of interesting stuff, tracking the provenance of goods with Internet of Things and so on.

So in both the money use case that's already well established and all these experimental new use cases, you need to protect not only the identities of the participants, but also the

traffic, the information about what actions are taken, which things connect to which other things within the system.

So in the simplest case is the payments case, where in Bitcoin, there's not necessarily an identity associated with a Bitcoin address, but the flow of funds from one Bitcoin address to the next is publicly visible to anyone who looks at the blockchain.

And just that information, the pattern of flows of funds from one Bitcoin address to the next, is a lot of information, some of which would be sensitive information if a business were using Bitcoin for their operations.

And finally, once you have that much of a pattern, that much data available to form patterns out of, then it becomes very easy to make that final step and link it back to identities.