Zooko Wilcox
Head of Product, Shielded Labs. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderscientistengineerexecutive@zooko ↗z.cash ↗Wikipedia ↗
He is best known as the founder of the privacy-centric cryptocurrency Zcash and the former CEO of its development firm, the Electric Coin Company. A veteran cypherpunk technologist, he formulated Zooko's Triangle and has contributed to pioneering cryptographic and distributed systems.
2shows
2appearances
20statements
8resolved
5supported
1contradicted
63%fully supported
Everything Zooko Wilcox said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Wilcox: Cryptocurrencies remain useful even if mining power is concentrated
“Protecting users, even if there's a concentration of mining power, that's possible. So don't misunderstand and think that we have to have distributed mining in order for it to be useful.”
Wilcox: Zcash provided the first practical application of zero-knowledge proofs
“Like I say, it was a very important scientific discovery, but it didn't get practical application until my company implemented it. We made some scientific advances that made it sufficiently practical, and we implemented it and deployed it to the world in this …”
Wilcox: Zero-knowledge proofs could solve blockchain scalability bottlenecks
“Zero knowledge proofs might be a breakthrough to solve the scaling problem that has stopped all the blockchains so far. Because the scaling problem is, you remember, everybody wants to be sure of everything that goes into the blockchain. That means the more pe…”
Wilcox: Centralized personal data databases are a national security threat
“But as we've learned over the last couple of years, this isn't safe, it's not scalable, and it's ballooned from not just being a personal security problem, and not just being a business security problem, but even being a national security problem.”
Wilcox: Capital investment into mining operations cannot be prevented long term
“There's probably nothing that can prevent someone from investing capital in order to improve their mining operation.”
Wilcox: Founder block rewards align incentives across all crypto participants
“I don't know if there's any other example, but there should be, because it's really great, because it aligns the incentives of the, of everyone involved, everyone in the system, all the miners, all the token holders who buy or use the tokens, and the company a…”
Wilcox: The NSA led a government faction opposing early HTTPS encryption
“There was a faction within the US government led by the NSA that objected to the development of HTTPS.”
Wilcox: Economic necessity drove the shift from opposing to mandating encryption
“And the big reason for that transition is that it turns out in that two-point system between the web server and the web browser, that web server became the center of our economy, and encryption is, became necessary for business purposes.”
Wilcox: Traditional point-to-point encryption cannot be applied to blockchains
“You can't apply this encryption to blockchain, because all this encryption from Julius Caesar to Alan Turing to Netscape is point to point.”
Wilcox: Satoshi Nakamoto failed to encrypt Bitcoin due to early ZK limits
“So when Satoshi Nakamoto was inventing Bitcoin, he tried to figure out how to add encryption into it, and he couldn't figure it out. It didn't fit, because back then, 10 whole years ago we didn't have good enough zero-knowledge proofs.”
Wilcox: Zero-knowledge proofs solve privacy flaws in traditional identity verification
“Every time we want to prove our identity, we do it by disclosing potentially sensitive information that could be abused. This is not a safe or scalable way to do it, and zero knowledge proofs might provide a replacement where instead of divulging information, …”
Wilcox: Zero-knowledge proofs will protect national infrastructure within 10 years
“It'll turn out in 10 years that it's something that protects both individual safety, and it protects businesses, and it protects our whole national infrastructure.”
Wilcox: Public Blockchain Flow Patterns Make Linking Real Identities Easy
“Once you have that much of a pattern, that much data available to form patterns out of, then it becomes very easy to make that final step and link it back to our identities.”
Wilcox: Zcash launched with zero pre-mine and relied purely on mining
“And what we did instead was we started with nobody having any of the money, and we just had mining, which was an innovation that we copied from Bitcoin, so that anyone who has a sufficiently powerful computer connected to the internet can participate in buildi…”
Wilcox: Cryptography was exclusively a military secret until the internet
“Cryptography was a military secret, until the advent of the Internet.”
Wilcox: Zero-knowledge proofs confirm facts without revealing underlying data
“It's a zero knowledge proof because I have learned zero information about what's on here. If no matter if we did it a thousand times, I'm no closer to guessing whether this is a zero or whether this is a one. He never showed it to me, and I didn't learn any hi…”
Wilcox: Zcash forks Bitcoin's codebase, not its blockchain
“It's a fork of the software. We copied the Bitcoin software and added our cryptographic improvements. Okay. But it's not a copy. It's not a fork of the Bitcoin blockchain. It's a separate independent blockchain, Zcash blockchain.”
Wilcox: Zcash trades at $200 with $20M daily volume
“Those Zcash coins are trading for about 200 dollars a piece on about 15 or 20 different markets in, in different countries around the world, and every day there's about twenty million dollars worth of coins transacted which puts it in the top tier of this kind…”
Wilcox: Zcash raised $3M from Silicon Valley and Bitcoin angels
“So what we did was, when we were planning this, and this was just gleams in our eyes, we raised funding from a set of Silicon Valley and Bitcoin angels. There were a couple of Silicon Valley DCs, but they were almost all angels. We raised three million dollars”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Zooko's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 a16zLEDGER | Head of Product, Shielded Labs | 1 | 11 | 0% 0/3 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |
 TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Head of Product, Shielded Labs | 1 | 9 | 100% 5/5 | full record on Top Founders → |