Explained Decentralized Privacy
At the Bitcoin Wednesday conference on 5 September, 2018, we’ll hear from Jelle Pol and Emanuele Francioni, co-founders of Dusk. Dusk is a new privacy-oriented cryptocurrency and blockchain based on a new consensus mechanism, the Segregated Byzantine Agreement protocol. This solution aims to deliver decentralized and anonymous media on demand, video- and audio-conferencing and file storage and transfer.
With these ambitious experimental goals Dusk is currently in a very early stage of development. The team currently aims to raise a modest amount of funding in pre-sale in order to deploy the first version of its main network before mid-2019.
The operational challenge presented by current decentralized networks is that the services that can be offered through them tend to be limited to a binary all-or-nothing approach toward privacy; transactions can generally be conducted with complete anonymity or absolute transparency. Being forced to choose from either one extreme or the other, often leads to considerable legal, ethical and usability obstacles. Advanced cryptographic methods such as zero-knowledge accumulators promise to address this problem. They can provide mathematical verification on certain questions without revealing the underlying information upon which the answer is based. At a private event in May 2018 Vitalik Buterin suggested that extending the uses of zero knowledge proofs would be among the most valuable breakthroughs for the industry.
Jelle writes, “During our presentation we will explain how these new cryptographic tools have the power to resolve the conflict with blockchain technology between privacy and transparency.”
Jelle has a Master’s degree in business and technology. He spent four years at a combination of start-ups and large corporates, and served in Shell’s blockchain and renewable energy teams as well as the business development team at Mendix. He focuses on protocols, supply chain and energy. He also co-founded a marketing and advisory firm for other blockchain projects.
