Privacy on the Blockchain: An Introduction to Zcash
Channel: Kevin M. Gallagher
Date: 2017-06-23

Zcash is the first open-source and decentralized cryptocurrency offering strong privacy in the form of shielded transactions, which are made possible by a novel form of zero-knowledge cryptography called zk-SNARKs. Like Bitcoin, Zcash payments are published on a public blockchain, except the sender, recipient, and amount of a transaction may remain fully private. In this talk, we will provide an uncomplicated overview of Zcash, how it works, the history of the protocol and its conception by a talented group of academics, cryptographers and scientists in the original "Zerocoin" paper, what's happened since it finally launched in late 2016, and what's in store for the future of ZEC. We'll also look at the current state of the network and discuss the remarkable way we generated the public parameters required to construct and verify shielded transactions, in the so-called parameter generation ceremony.

Speaker: Kevin Gallagher, former DevOps Engineer for Zcash Company (@ageis)

Video courtesy of Privacy Lab: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Privacy/Privacy_Lab