Privacy Coins and Private Bitcoin Transactions

Reuben Yap, COO of Zcoin, joins me to chat about privacy coins, and how to achieve financial privacy.
Is privacy possible for Bitcoin?
Can privacy coins help the privacy of Bitcoin?
How does Dandelion Protocol compare to Gossip Protocol?
We also discuss the FATF travel rule and privacy coins being banned from exchanges.

00:25
What is ZCoin

1:10
How Dandelion works (vs Gossip Protocol)

3:26
Unshielded transactions: are they that bad in zero knowledge proofs?

4:12
Government using FATF Travel rule as an excuse to ban Privacy Coins from exchanges

6:10
Thailand election on zcoin blockchain

7:15
Privacy for Bitcoin:
Auditability vs Privacy
Privacy through exchanging with other coins

8:28
Lightning

9:23
Fungibility vs Censorability

Recently there was a vulnerability related to Zerocoin protocol, which came about after this interview was filmed, so it's helpful to elaborate on its relationship to Zcoin:
Zcoin currently uses the Sigma protocol, developed to improve scalability and remove trusted setup from the original Zerocoin protocol (not to be confused with the Zerocash protocol used in Zcash).

In April 2019, while already in the progress of migrating to Sigma, a cryptographic flaw was found in Zerocoin (https://zcoin.io/further-disclosure-on-zerocoin-vulnerability/) so the Zcash team decided to replace it completely with Sigma, which went live on mainnet in July 2019.

Zcoin is currently is set to release Lelantus, its next gen privacy protocol in 2020. Lelantus builds on the Sigma protocol and improves privacy by removing the need for fixed denominations and also allowing direct anonymous transfers. https://zcoin.io/direct-untraceable-anonymous-lelantus/

Huge thank you to BitPay who sponsored this interview! They provide awesome services like helping businesses accept crypto, and helping individuals pay with crypto even at places that don't accept crypto! Check out their website:
Bitpay.com

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