S17 E27: Kieran Mesquka on Railgun & Building Privacy

About this episode

Kieran Mesquka discusses his work on Railgun and the challenges of building privacy tools in a restrictive political environment.

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…

People in this episode

Host: Vlad Costea

Guest: Kieran Mesquka

Topics covered

• privacy technology
• Ethereum
• Zero Knowledge
• anonymization tools
• crypto
• freedom-maximizing technologies

Keywords

• Railgun
• Ethereum
• privacy
• Zero Knowledge
• Tornado Cash
• anonymization
• crypto

Sponsors

Orange Rock, Cake Wallet, SideShift.AI, Layer Two Labs

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Railgun, Ethereum, Tornado Cash, Zcash

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