Show Notes
Kieran Mesquka is a contributor to privacy projects, best known for his work on Railgun for Ethereum. He is also an advocate for freedom-maximizing technologies and a connoisseur of Zero Knowledge privacy.
In this episode, we talk about what it's like to build shielded pools and anonymization tools in a political landscape that actively fights against it.
Time stamps: 00:01:10 - Introducing Kieran Mesquka
00:02:21 - Kieran's Early Crypto Involvement, GPU Mining
00:03:54 - Discovering Bitcoin
00:06:31 - Transition to Ethereum Smart Contracts
00:10:24 - Motivation for Working on Privacy
00:20:33 - Comparing Tornado Cash and Railgun
00:26:30 - Why Tornado Cash Developers Got in Trouble
00:29:10 - The "Kieran is Satoshi" Joke
00:31:07 - General Online Privacy and Naomi Brockwell
00:33:25 - The Surveillance of Smart Devices
00:43:43 - The Problem with Subscriptions for Hardware
00:46:35 - Building Privacy for Mainstream Adoption
00:51:04 - Podcast Sponsors: Orange Rock, Cake Wallet, SideShift.AI, Layer Two Labs
00:54:49 - Technical Similarities Between Railgun and Zcash
01:00:26 - Opt-in vs. Default Privacy
01:02:37 - Why Bitcoin Lacks Advanced Privacy
01:10:32 - Railgun's Multi-Chain Presence
01:15:05 - The State of Ethereum and Privacy Demand
01:19:13 - Railgun's Elevator Pitch
01:20:47 - Railgun's Transaction Filtering System
01:29:20 - Trusting Zero-Knowledge Proofs
01:36:18 - Future of Privacy Technology
01:40:37 - How to Follow Kieran's Work
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