Unchained - After Years of Secret Work, Decred Adds a New Feature: Privacy - Ep.134

Episode Date: August 27, 2019

Jonathan Zeppettini, international ops lead and chief evangelist for Decred, aka "Decred Jesus," announces the launch of the coin's privacy feature. He first describes how Decred came out of some developers' frustrations of trying to work with Bitcoin Core developers, and how that led them to realize a couple of issues with Bitcoin's governance around the funding of development and giving other stakeholders a say in the development of the coin. He explains how Decred addresses those issues, how governance in Decred works, what tickets are used for in the system and why it uses a hybrid POW/POS system. We discuss the comparatively high participation rates in Decred, how it's resistant to contentious hard forks, and what Politeia is. Plus, he gives the scoop on Decred's new privacy feature, how it works, why it was developed in secret, and how the plan to make it more decentralized in the future. Plus, he talks about how Decred plans to decentralize its own governance.  Thank you to our sponsors! Crypto.com: https://www.crypto.com Kraken: https://www.kraken.com CipherTrace: http://ciphertrace.com/unchained Episode links: Decred: https://decred.org Jonathan Zeppettini: https://twitter.com/jz_bz Decred in brief: https://decred.org/brief/ Jacob’s 2015 post on the challenges with Bitcoin: https://blog.companyzero.com/2015/11/bitcoins-biggest-challenges/ Placeholder VC on why it invested in Decred: https://www.placeholder.vc/blog/2018/5/12/decred-investment-thesis?rq=decred Smith and Crown's Decred report: https://sci.smithandcrown.com/research/decred-report Voting in Decred: https://storage.googleapis.com/smithandcrown-asset-engine-prod/images/voting-cycle.original.png Politeia: https://blog.decred.org/2017/10/25/Politeia/ CoinDesk article on Politeia: https://www.coindesk.com/one-of-investors-favorite-governance-blockchains-is-handing-over-20-million DiceMix “paper”: https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/ndss201701-4ruffingSlides.pdf  Brave New Coin post: https://bravenewcoin.com/insights/decred-price-analysis-a-sustained-increase-in-mining-activity-2  Coinbase may list Decred: https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-continues-to-explore-support-for-new-digital-assets-4d2ecbcbd38c  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained. You're no-hyped resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Schitt. In case you haven't heard, I have another crypto podcast called Unconfirmed. It's shorter, newsier, and comes out Fridays. If you haven't yet, go subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts. Also, find out what I think are the top stories in crypto by signing up for my weekly newsletter at Unchained Podcast.com. Cracken is the best exchange in the world for buying and selling digital assets. It has the tightest security, deep liquidity and a great fee structure with no minimum or hidden fees. Whether you're looking for a simple fiat on-ramp or futures trading, Cracken is the place for you. CipherTrace cutting-edge cryptocurrency intelligence powers anti-money laundering, blockchain analytics, and threat intel. Leading exchanges, virtual currency businesses, banks, and regulators themselves use CipherTrace to comply with regulation and to monitor compliance. Grow your crypto and earn up to 8% per year with crypto.com. It's the place to buy over 40 coins at true cost with no fees and no markups. Download the crypto.com app today. My guest today is Jonathan Sepatini, International Ops Lead and Chief Evangelist for Decred. And also known as Decred Jesus. Welcome, Jayzie.

Hi, Laura. It's a pleasure to be with you. So listeners, there is an announcement about Decred today. This is maybe the second time I've done this on the show, which is kind of fun. It's not easy to do with the podcast. But before we get to that, we need to start with the basics so you even know what Decred is. So, JZ, tell us, what is Decred? Sure, Laura. So before the big reveal, suspense, Decred's a community-directed digital currency with built-in governance to make it a superior. long-term store of value. So what that means, basically, and as my buddy Chris Berniske, likes to say, a decreds killer feature is good governance, and with governments, you can have any feature you want. So what does that mean? So it's that you will be a currency, but that people will be able to help decide what the features, what features the currency will have? Sure, exactly. So if we think about Bitcoin as revolutionizing banking, you know, be your own bank,

D-Crit takes it one step further and says, hey, you know, you can be a central banker and help make kind of monetary policy, not necessarily monetary policy, but decide on features. And you also said that it would also be a store of value. So it would both be used as well as have features similar to digital gold? So what we think, the way we think about this is that the first issue you need to tackle is being a store of value. I mean, so much of this space is about speculation. And I think, you know, that applies to decredit equally. But before you can go and have that medium of exchange property, you need to be proven as a solid, secure store of value.

And if people want to hold your currency and they feel that it has a long-term future, they'll be willing to use it as a medium. give exchange eventually. All right. So we'll talk a little bit more about the full vision in a while, but as you mentioned, governance is a huge part of decred. And I think that is really, you know, key to the origin story of decred. So how did decred get started? That's really a great question.

It's super interesting because there were basically two groups that came together to found Decred. One of them was Jake, our project lead, and his team at Company Zero, who were previously working on Bitcoin. So they built something called BTC Suite, which is a full node implementation in Go. So their idea was, you know, Bitcoin's this cool technology. It's going to be a money protocol. To make it more secure, it's good to have multiple implementations, right? So if there's a bug, let's say, in Bitcoin Core and, you know, half the network goes down, well, if there's other implementations, you know, it'll just keep churning along. And what they learned was that, you know,

while Bitcoin was a lot fairer than, you know, the banking system in terms of the transparency of the rules, there were still issues with, you know, how you organize people and how you get, you know, new features proposed and push forward. And that kind of plugs into the second group that founded DeCred. So there's someone who goes by the name Taco Time who founded Minero. And Taco Time's big idea, essentially, was a white paper called Mempoint 2, where they proposed a governance system so that you could have all the awesome properties of Bitcoin, proof of work, but on top of that, have it so coin holders can make decisions about how the protocol is upgraded.

So Jake wasn't available for today, but I have interviewed him in the past, and he told me about that period when he and I guess some other developers were trying to get in a Bitcoin. and he described what he called challenging interactions with the Bitcoin Cordelvers saying that they were incredibly hostile, adversarial, and rude. And he also said that I guess one of the developers he was working with, you know, as you mentioned, they had written this other implementation of the Bitcoin client. And he said, quote, rather than see this as a positive development, that the ecosystem is diversifying, that now there's a second option.

They saw it as a threat to their power and they responded by trying to dissoning. and franchise us and sideline our project. And I think these feelings led him to write a blog post in November 2015, which was, you know, I feel like actually he must have, you know, this was shortly before he announced decred. And you can kind of see how his criticisms of Bitcoin kind of led to decred. So I will link to this in the show notes, but just to summarize, he called the way that Bitcoin was governed then an oligarchy. And he called out some of these, some issues that he saw, such as that he says consensus in Bitcoin is defined as 100% agreement, and that requires unanimous consent. He said another issue is that development was completely donation driven.

He saw there was a conflict of interest in the fact that a majority of the Bitcoin core developers were involved in the founding of Blockstream, and that there was a conflict between Blockstream's business model of side chains versus the block size debate. And he also said that Bitcoin businesses, miners, developers of non-Bitcoin core infrastructure and users have no vote when it comes to future decisions regarding Bitcoin. And he ended up summarizing the problems this way. The current governance model of Bitcoin does not admit multiple stakeholders and is geared toward stagnation because of the way consensus among Bitcoin core developers works. Beyond this structure being built to stagnate, even a conversion from a unanimous Bitcoin core developer consensus model

to a weaker one, for example, one with 66% majority required for changes, would be subject to a veto from Blockstream by merit of their employment of so many Bitcoin core developers. Additionally, all of us who participate in the Bitcoin ecosystem who are not Bitcoin core developers have effectively zero say in the matter, end quote. Wow, there's a lot there. Yes, so this very long blog post, oh, actually it wasn't that long. It basically ends with what he identified as the top two problems with Bitcoin. One, the lack of funding for development.

And then two, the fact that proof of work minors have too much power. And as far as I can tell, these really were like some of the key design decisions for decreds. So can you expand on these design features? of DecreD and how it attempts to resolve those issues? Indeed. So, you know, we really look at for three things with Decred. Make it as secure as possible, make it as adaptable as possible, and make it as sustainable as possible. So that would address those three broad points.

To start with the third, sustainability, I think, you know, that one's the easiest to attack just because, you know, it makes sense that if you want to have a currency and you want to have this piece of software that needs to be able to adapt and integrate new features and fix bugs, you're going to need people working on it, right? You need to be able to pay people. You know, some of us are lucky. We've been in the space a long time, you know, caught Bitcoin early on and can do whatever we want now, but that's not a big help to new talent that comes into the space, right? Most people can't afford to, you know, work full time on a project just out of passion. So one thing we realize is we need to be able to pay people. And that pay, and that

pay needs to be independent. It can't come from VCs. It can't come from, you know, people who invested in an ICO or anything like that. It can't be having strings attached to it. So the idea for Decred was we'll have a treasury. It'll be decentralized and 10% of the block reward is going to flow into that so that we have this self-renewing a pile of money that we can use to pay people who only care about decrid. And that's pretty much how we do that. I want to ask you about when you said that there was no ICO because you didn't want strings attached.

I think a lot of the theory for a lot of the people who had ICOs was that then they're sort of creating these like user-owned networks. So what was the thinking there around? Because I think for them, they thought, oh, then the incentives are aligned. But you guys saw it differently? Yeah, we saw it the exact opposite way, actually. So for us, it was, look, if we say we're going to build something and then, you know, you give me a pile of money, where's my incentive to actually deliver? Right.

And in the case of a software product like Decred, you know, if it's a bunch of people get this preferential access in like an ICO or pre-ICO, you know, there's a lot of other issues. You know, is it a security afterwards, right? So we didn't want to raise any external money. We figured if the product. The product idea is good. If it has value in the market, if the market gives it value, the treasury will have value, and then it will become self-sustaining. If the market thinks it's terrible, it'll be worthless, and it won't be able to sustain itself. So, you know, no external capital, no strings attached. And the other problem with ICOs is a lot of these

coins sell so much in pre-ICOs to a small group of, you know, preferred people. And, you know, then those people who actually participate in the ICO are underwater from like day one pretty much, and you just have this sustained selling pressure to people who got this kind of sweetheart deal. So our view is like treat everybody fairly. Everyone gets the same opportunity. And one of the things we did when we started decryd is we gave away part of a pre-mine so that we could bootstrap the network with individuals who owned coins for free and that they would actually be the people making decisions in the beginning of the early day.

So everyone pretty much just had to say, hey, you know, I got one of these. I just had to sign up and give, you know, like my Twitter and say, I'm a real person. Look at this. And, you know, everyone who did that got, you know, 282 coins, which is worth about, you know, $7,000 today. And if they stake those coins and participate in our governance as we intended them to do, that would be worth probably about like $42,000 U.S. today. So, you know, we're not a bad return for just being able to prove you can follow the mirror. So you talked about the origins of decred.

And where did you come into the picture? And what were you doing before? Sure. So I was a futures and equities trader for about 10 years. And I kind of discovered Bitcoin in 2010, you fell in love with the idea of having, you know, this, being able to have this kind of sovereignty over your own money. And then, you know, like my investor mindset was, you know, follow the smartest people in the space from that point on. And that's kind of how I found, you know, the guys from Company Zero, Jake and his team working on Bitcoin. I thought these were to be able to re-implement Bitcoin in a different language. You have to know it like the back of your hand.

You have to be able to literally take apart the old system, analyze every piece, and put it and recreate it from scratch in a new language. So, you know, these were kind of like the foremost Bitcoin experts in the space. I would argue that, you know, outside of the Satoshi team, there's probably no team out there that knows, you know, Bitcoin as well. So that was kind of my reason for following them so closely. And I kind of watched how things devolved and found out about Tocco Times' Menpoint-2 paper and thought, you know, this is amazing.

I wish Bitcoin could have something like this. So, you know, when the two teams merged and decided to create a currency based on some of these ideas, I thought for me, I got the same feeling I got when I first discovered Bitcoin. Like, wow, this is revolutionary. And this is a no-brainer Bitcoin hedge. I think everyone who owns Bitcoin is going to want to have this as a hedge in your portfolio just because it's got so many of the fundamental things that make Bitcoin amazing baked into it.

And then it's got this novel system on top of it that Bitcoin can never have because it's ossified, which is great in many ways, but means that it can't, you know, progress in other ways. Everything has to be, you know, soft forked in and done off chain. And you think that the decred developers know Bitcoin even better than the Bitcoin core developers? Honestly, I'd say that would be really tight. I think so. The work that they did, I mean, writing it from scratch the way they did was quite the feat.

To be able to reproduce a bug for bug how the consensus rules work requires an understanding. It's really unparalleled. Yeah. And just to clarify for listeners, I think the main Bitcoin, core client is written in C or C++, and they had written in Go language, which is obviously different. And it is true to recreate a functioning client in a completely different language. You definitely need to understand the protocol well. But I have a feeling there would be a lot of people who would disagree with you. Oh, they're welcome to. I want to be a little controversial.

Okay. Okay. Well, I think you've definitely stick to your claim there. So, yeah, why don't we go into how the governance system in decred works? And actually, before we get into the details, can you just sort of start with the overall philosophy around governance of crypto networks? Sure. For us, philosophy is skin and the game. So if I asked you, like, who's in charge of Bitcoin?

Well, I guess you kind of know who Jake thinks is in charge. And, like, you might have a different opinion. And that's valid in my view. And I might have a different opinion, too. So the big three that people usually point to are, you know, minors. The other one would be node operators. And some people say developers, right? But just the fact that, you know, like we can have this debate means that it's not clear, right?

So they've made a clear choice of making no choice. So their governance is pretty anarchic, which is fine because, you know, Bitcoin has certain properties to it that make that okay. First mover advantage is one of them. But for us, the main issue we wanted to solve right off the bat is who's in charge. So if you ask me, who's in charge of decred, I can give you a clean answer and I can explain exactly how that works. And the answer is stakeholders, people who own the coins, the people with the most skin in the game. So if you own decred, you're in charge. Okay, so why don't you then describe how the system works?

Great. So basically people take their decredit. And once they own some, they can actually lock it up. into what we call a ticket. And there's a pool of tickets. Now, the target for this pool is about 40,960. And if you own one of these, you're called in a lottery. So much of the way, you know, Bitcoin is a lottery on hash power, proof of work, right? We're choosing random miners who are playing this lottery to validate blocks. Proof of stake is kind of a lottery on these tickets where you get pulled out. So, you know, we work a lot like Bitcoin in terms of the proof of work decides. We have two validation systems in our blockchain, proof of work and proof of stake. The proof stake miners create the new blocks and they get added to the blockchain.

And then the proof of stake system, the ticket holders, participate by verifying that they accept the block to the system. So it kind of acts as like a second authentication factor on the chain. So every time a block is proposed, you know, five randomly selected tickets are included to vote on the validity. of the prior block. And if three of those five approve it, it gets added. And we can actually use that to upgrade the network as well, which we can get into a little bit later. And why do you have this hybrid proof of work, proof of stake system? Because a lot of other networks choose one or the other. Sure, exactly. So we found that like each each has its own weaknesses and each has its own strengths. So one of the main problems with proof of stake is, you know, how do you start up? Right. So for

for a project that's just taking people's money like an I see how it's easy i take your money i give you some coins right but you know there's no mechanism after for you know distributing the coins other than that right so we think proof of work is an awesome way of not only creating security but also coin distribution um so it's not a few people in decred who were able to acquire all the coins in the beginning who hold power forever because new coins are always being produced and proof of work is producing twice as much as proof of stake thus diluting all the people who happen to be lucky and get in earlier. So they work together in a symbiotic relationship where proof of work is basically producing blocks as a service to the network.

You know, we're not asking them to tell us, you know, where they want to go in terms of features or this or that. It's block production as a service. They package those transactions. They make sure they're secure. They make sure they conform with the consensus rules. They broadcast it and they get paid for doing it. And that's all we want from them. we really don't expect anything else.

And then you briefly touched on tickets as part of the decred governance system. And this actually took my, it took me a little wild to wrap my head around. But why don't you just describe more in full what tickets are for, what people do with them, how they function in the system? Cool. Tickets are basically for voting. So they actually let you do, you know, three main things. And it's really interesting because two of those things have to do with, with voting.

One of them is every time a blocker is produced, you have those tickets being called to say whether or not they want to add it to the chain. So most of the time, that's pretty straightforward. Everything gets added to the chain. If it was a misbehaving miner, like a miner who was mining empty blocks, we could create a rule saying, you know what, if a miner mines empty blocks, even though it's valid and performs the consensus rules, we're going to reject that. So we could create a rule like that.

But the other two things that we really vote on is that when these rocks are created, If we want to have a consensus upgrade, we actually pre-program all that code into the system, and we actually vote on that. And if that vote passes, it can essentially be activated automatically. So it's not a signaling mechanism. It's actually a selection for a hard fork that will take place if there's a super majority. And then that third thing is off-chain voting system. So the ticketing system does the on-chain voting for blocks.

and for consensus changes, as well as an off-chain system, which we call Polytea, which is for signaling how we want to allocate budgets, that 10% treasury that we have, and for signaling which features we want to build so people can make proposals or, you know, if we want to hire a PR firm, or if we want to hire a new development team, all that kind of stuff can be signaled on Politea. So the idea is, you know, decreeds really adaptable and we're not ideologues about stuff, you know, everything doesn't have to be on-chain or off-chain. We're super pragmatic about these things.

Some stuff belongs on-chain and some stuff belongs off-chain. We find that for things where there's a lot of little decisions being made, it's not super sustainable to have it all being dumped on the chain. And just so I understand, can you use the tickets then simultaneously for the off-chain and the on-chain governance, or do you have to use them just for one or the other at any given moment in time? You use them for both. So if you have a live ticket when an on-chain issue is being decided, it'll be valid. And if an off-chain issues being decided at the same time, that will also be valid. If I can give you an analogy, which I really like this one, actually, it's really interesting, about like kind of like a factory. So like imagine that, you know, there's a toy car factory with miners acting as machines that make toy cars, right? And every time a toy car is produced, five qualities. the inspectors that get randomly selected, look at that toy car and decide whether or not it's

valid, good. And if three of them approve, it's good and it gets added to the chain. Now, in terms of how that works for consensus changes, if we decided that we wanted to turn the car factory into a boat factory, that would be like a hard fork, right? Well, then 75% of the inspectors over a one-month period would need to not only approve those cars, but also say, hey, you know what, I want to switch to boats. And if that happens and we get to that 75%, you know, it automatically changes to a boat factory. And then because everyone's agreed, super majority, that we've switched, it's going to be pretty impossible to find enough people, three or five inspectors, to approve the old toy cars once we're all on boats.

And in order to participate in that, I need to stake my decredit. So during that moment in time, I can't be using it to purchase things or pay somebody or whatever. Correct. It needs to be locked up. That's a really important part of the skin in the game aspect. And I'm glad you brought it up because compared to other coins, you know, we're asking something pretty big of stakeholders in that, you know, they're locking our coins up for an average of 28 days, let's say. But a coin, a ticket could be called to vote in as little as one day about.

or as long as like 142 days. So you're talking about up to four months there. So when you lock your decredit up, you're going to have to deal with the consequences of your votes and be tied in to this system for potentially up to four months. So you need to really be cognizant of what's going on and be really measured in the kind of things that you vote for because you're stuck with your decisions.

And we think that's really important. That skin in the game is really important because it doesn't allow people to do hit and runs. like, oh yeah, I'm going to vote for this because I think it's going to make the price go up. And then, boom, when up, I'm gone. You know, we really want people to have a long-term vision and be in it for longer. And to me, four months isn't that long. My plan is to be here for, you know, decades from now.

And DeCrit is actually designed, you know, to last for centuries. Everything we've built is with an eye towards being adaptable enough to make any change necessary to deal with the unknown unknowns of the future. And at the moment, about 50% of decred is staked, which that seems fairly high to me. What do you make of that percentage? Yeah, it's been steadily increasing. I think it's fantastic, actually. It just shows that, you know, I mean, there's a couple of incentives to stake, right?

We can't ignore the big one is, you know, you're getting paid to stake to some extent. So you receive part of a block reward for staking. So, I mean, it is profitable. but I think even aside from that, you know, there is an incentive for people to actually participate and help make Decred better, right? So like if I could give you an example, we had a vote last week and, you know, there was a developer that, you know, did some work. He built some tools in Python, basically, a Decred toolkit in Python and finished the work

and then put it up on our proposal system, Paul Taya, and said, hey, guys, you know, I've built these cool tools for Decred. are you guys willing to pay me for them? It's all open source code. It's all out there. So if we say no, he's not getting paid, we've got the work, right? It's under a permissive license already.

And what stakeholders did is they voted on whether or not we should pay this person, $8,000 for these hours and hours of work that they did. And it passed, you know, with 94%. And they got paid. So we're able to organize labor and compensate people. So it doesn't always work that way where people do the work first. But often you'll find that. You know, people do a little bit of work and get paid in their rears.

And it's really an interesting way of being able to sustain the project. All right. So we're going to keep talking about decreds governance. I was going to say Bitcoin's governance and its new feature in a little bit. But first, a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. When buying crypto, price matters. With the crypto.com app, you can buy more than 40 coins at true cost. Our multi-exchange trading engine ensures the lowest possible.

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crypto-aML reports quarterly. www.cifertrace.com slash keep crypto clean. Today's episode is brought to you by Cracken. Cracken is the best exchange in the world for buying and selling digital assets. With all the recent exchange hacks and other troubles, you want to trade on an exchange you can trust. Cracken's focus on security is utterly amazing. Their liquidity is deep and their fee structure is great with no minimum or hidden fees. They even reward you for trading so you can make more trades for less.

If you're a beginner, you will find an easy on-ramp from five Fiat currencies. And if you're an advanced trader, you'll love their 5x margin and futures trading. To learn more, please go to crackin.com. That's KRAK-E-N.com. Back to my conversation with Jay-Z. So one thing that we haven't really dived into is that decred has a pretty high inflation rate, 28%. And when you combine that with the staking rewards, doesn't

that incentivize more people to just stake decred rather than actually use it? I mean, staking certainly helps offset some of that inflationary effect. As we discussed earlier, you know, a lot of that's by design. So the curve is very similar to Bitcoin. So, you know, like imagine where Bitcoin was in like year three. That's pretty much where we are. So yeah, it does help a little bit. But again, you're still being diluted by design because we want new people who show up to be able to have a voice. So compared to, to like a pure proof of stake coin where like, you know, you can get a foothold on the governance if you were there first. You know, if you had 51% of coins from the start,

you're always going to have 51%, right? Well, compared to that, you know, new coins are always being produced so that new people can have their voices heard. So we think that's, we think that's a real positive. But over the long term, it'll stabilize and level law. One thing that we find is, you know, which is really interesting is that, you know, stakers tend to take the coins that they get from proof stake and, you know, restake them. And even proof of work miners, a lot of them actually, you know, they mine decred because they want to stake it and then participate in the ecosystem. They're not necessarily mining it and then just blowing it out because it's, you know, another asset for them. So we think that's a really positive development that, you know, there's a lot of people who view this, you know, this contention between miners and developers in other cryptocurrencies and we just haven't experienced that at all.

We find that, you know, because we have this clearly defined set of rules, it makes conflict resolution easy. And because everyone knows what the rules are, there isn't a lot of fighting. And you talked earlier about the different kinds of voting that you can do when you have tickets. So what percentage of people are participating generally? That's actually a great question. I'm actually surprised how high it is. So for that super important stuff, those consensus rules where it's like, hey, do we want to raise the block size?

So for the on-chain stuff, we find that like 50% of people will usually cast the vote on those. So about half of the people, the other half are abstaining, which doesn't really matter because they still receive proof of stake rewards. They're just not expressing a choice. So if, let's say, I don't have a lot of time to follow, you know, what's going on in terms of consensus rules. And I feel I'm not educated enough to make a specific decision about this rule at this time. I can abstain. But if I decide I want to vote, you know, and I educate myself and hear from different developers, what they think are the advantages of a specific rule, I get to vote. So 50% participate in those super, super important ones.

And then on the Politain side for managing the Treasury, hiring people and whatnot, it's a little bit lower because those votes are happening really often. So like there's like at least, I think, two going on right now. And like last week there was a bunch. That's like it's kind of consistent. there's rolling votes. We usually see about a third of voters can participate in that. It can go higher, depending on how exciting something is, you know, but sometimes people just, you know, don't bother, which is fine. But I think the important distinction to make is, you know, there's no delegation in decrit.

So when you're voting, you know, you're actually voting. It's you expressing a choice. You can't just be like, oh, yeah, I'm going to delegate my vote to Jay-Z. and let him, let him vote. And then pump up the numbers by virtue of everyone just delegating so that they can get paid, the people that are voting are actually making a conscious decision to participate. And they're not saying, you know, oh, I'll let someone else handle it, which I think is important. Wow, that's amazing.

I actually wasn't aware that it was impossible to delegate. So, you know, because as you probably know, there are so many of these, these other systems do enable that. But then that also, I guess, requires that if for whatever reason, because here's the thing, like, so if you're going to stake, you need to be online the whole time, right? Yeah, that's, we actually have a really interesting way of dealing with that. So for people who are, you know, technically savvy, they'll have a machine, a server that, you know, will answer when those votes get called, right?

For people who are less technically savvy or just, you know, don't want to deal with the burden of that, we have is something called stake pools. And what a stake pool does is it lets you create this multi-signature transaction whereby the pool can cast the vote on your behalf, but not spend your coins. So you can say to the pool, I want to vote yes to this proposal to fund this code being written. And then when your ticket gets called as part of that normal process over the next you know, four months, that pool will say, oh, this is Laura's ticket. What did she want? Oh, she said she wanted to vote yes for this. And then she'll go ahead and she'll go ahead and have that vote cast and receive your reward for that, but not necessarily have to have

your machine online. So the coins will flow back to an address that you provided. The pool never touches your money, but you get to participate in the governance. And one other thing I wanted to ask about what you said earlier is you mentioned that there so we talked about how there's 50% roughly of decred staked at any given time and then you were saying that the participating I guess ticket holders for the big consensus changes are at about 50%. So that's so overall that ends up being about 25% of the network. Correct. Okay. And then so if it's a third for the softer proposals done through Politea, then I guess that is, what is that, that's like 17% or something? Yeah.

Okay. Okay. And I guess potentially the remaining half of the network that hasn't staked their decred, they're potentially like using it or trading it or, you know, whatever they're doing. Is that? Sure. They could have it on exchanges. They could have it on a paper wallet.

I mean, it's much like Bitcoin, right? People will store in all sorts of different ways. You know, having your decred. participate in staking, you know, puts it, you know, on the machine, essentially, they need to be able to be online purchase tickets. For some people, their security model is such that, you know, they don't want their coins exposed that way. Everything's going to go on a hardware wallet or everything's going to go on a paper wallet. So there are different things we think we can do longer term to kind of accommodate that in terms of security because, you know,

we're all security nuts. We want to make things as secure as possible. But for now, we're pretty pleased with the levels of participation that we're seeing. And I know that you guys also talk about how DeCredit is supposed to be resistant to contentious hard forks. So can you talk a little bit about that, how the design discourages contentious hard forks? Sure. So basically what we're doing is we're allowing people to devote on these hard fork rules. So imagine we want to increase the block size to two megabytes or what have you. What basically happens is there'd be a multi-prong process. First, a developer would say, you know,

I'm willing to undertake this. I'm going to write a document out that explains, you know, how this is going to work. That'd be a DCP, which is very similar to Bitcoin's Bips, right? So the Decred Change proposal would be written describing exactly how this is going to happen, and then they would go put that up on Politea, the off-chain voting system. Now, that would be a great signaling mechanism for the community to come in and say, hey, you know, like, do we want this? Do we not want this. Now, if it can get 60% of the vote on Politea, it's a pass, right? So they could say, hey, I need some money to do this. This is what we want to do. And if that passes, that would then give them the signal to go write this code. Now, when they write that code, what we would do

is we would automatically put it into the client. It wouldn't be active, though. So next time when you upgrade your decred software, you're going to have this new agenda in there, this code that upgrades to two megabyte blocks. And what that does is when we start this voting period, everyone's going to get to see that. And if you're a stakeholder and you have tickets, you're eventually going to be voting on this. Now, when you're voting on this, you're not signaling as you were on Politela, you want this done. You're voting on code that is written. It's in the client and it's ready to turn on once, you know, the vote passes if it does, you know, 30, 30, we give it a grace period of 30 days after that so people have time to

upgrade their, you know, laggards. But, but that's pretty much how that works. So if 75%, so the bar is higher for consensus changes 75%. So you have a significant super majority there. If 75% agree that new code activates and everyone who's got it in the clients is now using those new rules, right? Now, in order to protest, you would need to start using older software. Now, what you're going to find is if you're using that older software is there's no miners mining those blocks and there's no validators, proof of stake people, validating those blocks, right? Because they've all moved on. As we saw with the toy car factory, you know, if we moved to a different factory and are producing different things and you're calling for inspectors, no one's going to show up because

they're all gone. So the probability of a minority fork being able to succeed becomes really slim. So we call it minority fork resistant as opposed to, you know, forkproof because, you know, forking is controlled, but we do it in a way that allows things to happen really smoothly. Yeah, I found that super interesting when I read about it. I mean, obviously I think it doesn't prevent somebody from just copying the code base and be like, I think deKrit should be designed differently and like, you know, don't want to go through this whole thing to like try to change the network. But in this case, when if there's some kind of like divisive matter, then yeah, like the losing side, it would be much harder for them to to take the minority chain and keep

that alive. Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head there in terms of that. I mean, we don't mind if, you know, people want to take open source code and go do their own things. But what this is really to do is to keep the community together. We always say, you know, you can fork code, but you can't fork a community, right? You know, people are going to choose one side or the other, and, you know, you can't copy people. And what has a lot of value in decredit is, you know, the people, the community, making all these intelligent decisions and writing all this great code and having a mechanism to stay together cohesively.

Because what you find out is that when you have a method of expressing yourself and a fair system to do it, you know, people aren't so angry when things don't go their way because, you know, there's a process that they've already bought into. So if I could give an example, like when we wanted to activate the primitives for Lightning Network, you know, we had these huge discussions in the community, oh, you know, is Lightning Good, is Lightning Bad? It's On-Chane, better than off-chain. And, you know, people were kind of fighting.

But what we found out is when that people voted on the actual change that, you know, had passed with over 98% support, which basically told us that, you know, the loudest people, you know, kind of can dominate conversations, but they're not necessarily represent. of what the average person wants. I would love it if we could translate that to our overall online communities and political system because I feel like I see that happen all the time where the loudest people don't represent what everybody else wants. But anyway, one other thing that I wanted to reference about some of your earlier remarks

was that actually I did have a question where I was going to ask you because I didn't actually fully understand that Politea and the hard fork changes were used in conjunction with each other. And I was thinking, oh my gosh, you have to write the whole code first. And then like, it gets decided on because what if you do all this work and you don't get paid? I just like I, you know, was a freelancer for like years and years. And I was just like, what? But okay, so that that answer is a big question because otherwise I was like, who in the hell is going to do that? One of our cornerstones is we don't expect people to work for free. I mean, I'm a volunteer. I've been volunteering full-time for like three years now. Our project lead is a volunteer, but we have 75 people who are paid. We pay them. Half of them are full-time, half of them are part-time about. And, you know, we're all about paying people to do good work. All right. So we have been referring to Politea throughout, but I'm going to ask you a question. And I think through this also, if you have anything left about Politea that you want to add, you can, you can, you You can do it. But one thing I also wanted to talk about was how the decred block reward includes,

well, basically it's split 60% to minors, 30% to stakeholders and 10% to the decred development pool. So if you could just fill listeners in on what that is and maybe even also how it works with Politea, etc. Sure. So this treasury is basically a huge pile of money that's been collecting over the last three years. You know, last I checked, there was, you know, $15 million or more that's, piled up of decred there, and it's constantly being refilled because every block, 10% of that block award is going there. And we're pretty conservative with the spending. So the new stuff that's being produced pretty much covers the monthly burn rate. So this pile of money is there and growing. And it's obviously dependent on the price of the cryptocurrency. So, you know,

in the depths of all winter as we are now, you know, that's, you know, not that high. But if, you know, the price goes up, you know, we have more money to work with. So contractors are are able to come work for the project and get paid in DECRED. And that process is organized on this off-chain proposal system called Polytea, which is where people can make proposals and get paid. And we have multiple ways of doing this. There's regular independent contractors that can come. You could be like, hey, I'm a dev.

I want to start hacking on DECRED. And it's a pretty informal process to get someone hired that way. you know, if a couple people who are your peers said, oh, yeah, you know, Laura's great at writing code. We've looked at her work. Now, let's start paying her. And that would just be, you know, two people who are already contractors would endorse you and you'd start working. But if you want to do something big, you're like, I got, I got my own devs. I want to build a big feature on decred. You know, you could become a corporate contractor and say, you know, I'm going to build X, Y, and Z if you guys want. I need a million dollars to do it over the next six months and

propose that on Politea and have a draw. schedule and we'd be able to look this over, get it peer reviewed. If there were consensus changes necessary, it would obviously have to have appropriate documents. And, you know, like fight it out and discuss it, you know, whether this is a good price, whether or not we want this feature built, and then we get to vote on that. And that's really the unique thing about Politeis and lets us vote on all the little things that aren't like super important long term. I mean, they're not going to make or break the network like consensus rules will, but it's still important path like finality to be able to make decisions. Yeah. So decisions. There is a new

decision that's been made, which is what we're announcing today. And it's basically about a new privacy feature that you guys are launching. So why don't you tell us about that? Oh, wow. Yeah. This has been about two years in the making. So I mean, as you know, Decreid is super conservative. It has a very iterative approach. And like, we don't like to do something just because, you know, it's trendy. We're not trying to win blockchain buzzword bingo. But, you know, when we think a feature actually is important, we work really hard to bring the best possible option forward. And that's kind of what we've done with privacy. Two years have been spent analyzing everything that's been, you know, written on it in terms of academic work and analyzing all the other implementations are out there.

and we come up with something that's very unique in its approach. Which is? Well, the privacy feature is actually based on something called a dice mix. So dice mix is kind of the follow-on to some work that was done by academics. They originally modeled it on the Bitcoin system, but it applies very well to decred for a number of reasons that we can get into. But it's actually really interesting because it's super simple. You know, the math, everything behind it is really straightforward,

well understood. It's only a few hundred lines of code that we've written to implement this. So, you know, it's going to be easy to audit, you know, low chances of fatal errors. It's kind of a little bit reminiscent of the way Bitcoin's built. You know, it's all these existing pieces in terms of cryptography and game theory. that are just put together in a unique way, as opposed to something that's like totally off the wall. So it's a creative use of existing technology.

And then, you know, it's also nice and adaptable because there are places we can pivot and go to different places with this to make it better. So the way dice mix works is basically, it's a mixing process with a server that basically allows people to take coins, send them to that send them to these special addresses

where they're mixed and then have you know clean coins come out and we can get a little bit into how that works if you like yeah well can you

sure I'll describe it maybe like technically first and then describe it like more basically so I'm kind of like a high level guy so like I'm not really into

the super nitty-gritty stuff but I'll do that a little bit so basically what it's doing is it's just allowing peers to do these mixes together. There's no, the server is centralized in terms of, you know, you need to talk to that specific server to be able to go into this transaction, but at no point holds custody of the coins or anything like that. So there's no risk there. So peers are going to like subscribe to these sessions that are going to take place, these mixing sessions. And then there's like a specific time window whereby

You subscribe, so let's say, every 300 seconds, I believe it is. It's like five minutes. People will be able to say, hey, you know, I want to mix some coins. And what you do is when you do that, you're going to be exchanging some public keys and creating these secret keys. And then peers are going to take these addresses and obfuscate them and then send that to the server. And then the server takes all that data together and solves a bunch of fancy math equations to get these anonymous payout addresses. And then essentially a mixing transaction takes place where there's a huge transaction aggregated, where all the peers verify it and sign that transaction, and then everything gets spit out.

So, like, that's a really long-winded way of saying, like, we take a hat, like, we break down our coins into small denominations. Like, let's say you have 100 and I have, like, 10 coins. Well, we'll break them down into ones. We'll dump them in the hat. You know, we'll shuffle them up. We'll make sure that we each get back an appropriate amount of coins, verify that. in those little lots, agree to that transaction, and then the person controlling that will spit them out, broadcast that transaction to the network, and we'll have, you know,

shuffled coins. And the way this works really well with decred, particularly, which is super interesting, is that, you know, originally the idea was based on Bitcoin, but as we talked about, you know, people don't really hold Bitcoins, you know, live, right? They put them in paper wallets, you know, they store them offline a lot. What we have with Decreter. is we have this transaction flow from the proof of stake tickets, right? Money's always moving. Tens of thousands of decredit every day are flowing back from tickets that have voted and going back into tickets that are being purchased.

So what we have is that we can enable people who are purchasing tickets to do so through this system, whereby they're providing anonymity for people who want to then go and mix coins. So when you're mixing your coins, let's say that you want to make. mix, you're going to be mixing them with everyone who's buying tickets and has this enabled. And that has a bunch of really interesting advantages that we can talk about. Actually, before we get there, I just wanted to understand you said that the mixing happens via a server. So it sounds centralized. So who's in control of that? And can that be hacked? And can people kind of find out who was using it?

Cool. All good questions. All valid questions. Yeah. So for our first cut, what we've done is we've essentially used a centralized server. Because our view is that, like, if you over-optimized this, you know, you're never going to release anything, and, you know, you're just going to create complexity. So these features were developed in secret because we didn't want someone else scooping us and, you know, taking our code off GitHub and, you know, doing an ICO saying, oh, we invented a new privacy coin. So they were done in secret for the first cut to get this stuff out there. But because the server is just used for coordination, basically it lets you and I talk to each other, but, you know, we're basically doing our own thing. it's not a huge risk. Now, you're right that someone could try and censor you by, let's say,

let's say your ISP blocked access to that server. They didn't let you connect to that IP. You might need to use Tor to get around that. I mean, in theory, the server could be dossed. So it's not a perfect solution yet. The iterative approach is that longer term, that server is going to be built into the Decred Demon, so that every single person running a DCRD,

running their own node is actually to be able to participate in that transaction and it'll be fully peer to peer. Before the first cut, we've kept it really simple and made it a centralized server. And one other thing I wanted to ask about kind of how you guys were working on this secretly. So did the community not have any input onto this? Or did they decide this? That's a great question. So what happened here is because, I mean, everything's community driven, right? If this required money, and it did, community would have to approve it, right? So it wasn't appropriate to, you know, use community money to build something in secret. So two interesting things are Jake and his team, well, Jake Bank rolled this out of his own pocket.

You figure, you know, this is something that we feel is super necessary. You know, we're all privacy advocates. We believe that, you know, to be a currency, you need fungibility, right? It doesn't make sense if, you know, you go buy a cup of coffee and then I'm able to figure out, you know, your net worth based on, hey, That went from that wallet to that wallet. And, hey, there's millions of dollars of, you know, decredit or Bitcoin in that wallet. So for us, it's fundamental to be able to have privacy. And this is something that we thought, you know, we're really going to need.

So those guys essentially built this for free. And because it doesn't require consensus changes, when people download this, they can download this and start using it right away. At first, it's just going to be CLI. So it'll be for, you know, like the nerds like me who'd like running their own CLI tools. What is CLA? Oh, command line. So there won't be a pretty interface to it so that people can use it from their mobile wallets and their graphical wallets yet. But we figure that in a few months from now, we'll integrate it into there. So first, again, it's an iterative approach. We start, you know, testing it with all the people who are really hardcore, you know, making sure everything's perfect and then integrated into the graphical user interfaces so that people can use it really simply and, you know, protect their anonymity. All right. So now, yeah, let's go back. There was a. point where you were going to dive into the details on how this works, why don't we do that now?

Sure. So a basic way to explain how, you know, how this transaction is happening is a secure sum example. And the way this works is, let's say you have three people, Alice, Bob, and Carol, and they wanted to know together how many coins they have, right, the total. Now, without revealing to any single party what their total net worth was, well, what they could each do is then split those coins up into three parts, right? Three unequal parts. Give each of the other two counterparties one of those parts. And each person would do the exact same thing.

And what that would do is essentially everyone would be holding a share of their coins, a share of and a share of the other two people's coins. And what they could do with that information is add. all those numbers up themselves, broadcast that number, right? And then take those numbers that have been broadcast and add all those numbers up and know what the actual sum of all their stuff is together without revealing anything to each other about their net worth, right? So that's basically what's happening. And the server is just acting as coordination for creating these transactions, signing them without revealing anything to each other or the server, and then solving this big math puzzle and broadcasting it.

And one of the things we think is super important, and this is an advantage. So there may be drawbacks to having a centralized server, but there's also a super advantage is that none of this stuff, none of these encrypted bits are hitting the blockchain. So if you look at like a Manero or Zcash, right, you have this chain being bloated by all these encrypted transactions, right? And you have this danger that, you know, if one day someone's able to break this encryption, they'll be, they'll have the keys to the kingdom, they'll be able to see

everything that was sent to everyone, right? Whereby here, since you're only getting the final transaction of everything being distributed after it's mixed, breaking the security really has no value unless, like, you were capturing somehow, you controlled the server and you were capturing what was happening on there as well. So for us, we see it as very scalable, which is amazing. So one thing is that for now, all it does is hide who is sending coins to whom? Correct. And so transaction amounts are exposed. So obviously, you know, just as would happen in any transaction where you're, for instance, paying in cash, there will be change from those transactions. So how do you handle the change so that people can't kind of like, you know, kind of work backwards to figure out how much people were spending and who was sending money to whom?

Right. That's a great question, actually, and it's a super problem. So our view is that eventually we'd like to get, you know, the transactions being hidden as well. It's on the roadmap in theory. It's going to require confidential transactions and consensus changes. But for a first cut, again, we're pretty much doing it kind of like the way Minero did it. Manero didn't have this transaction hiding until much later. So we think the most important part is, you know, the sender and receiver. So when you get that change, it's important that the wallet takes it and puts it into. another pile to be remixed in the future. So it's not going to come back to you in a way whereby, oh, I can spend this by mistake and then link all those transactions together. The change will go back into the mixing wallet and get down mixed in future transactions. So we need to be super careful with the way the change is carried because you're right. This is a big risk. And one other feature that Zcash and Monero have is a viewing key where, you know, for auditing purposes or really any purpose you can always reveal what happened in that transaction selectively to whoever you'd like. Is there going to be such a thing for your privacy feature?

Well, what's actually cool is we've obviated the need for that viewing key because you're actually having a transparent on-chain transaction. Yeah, so I can show if I need to, hey, look at this transaction. You give me an address and I can show you, oh, all these inputs got sent to this address. So we don't really need to have the ability to de-obscate a transaction on-chain. It's all clear their own chain. And again, what's nice about that is that, you know, it leads to a much cleaner chain that can be pruned, right?

So it's not these blobs of encrypted data that we know, we don't know what they are. We have to basically make everyone download all of them. They can choose what they want to download. So it's an opt-in system, and we think that that confers a lot of, a lot of, a lot of, a lot of strengths to the system. It's also much less complex, right? So when you have systems like Zcash or Nero, there's a chance for things like stealth inflation. But because everything's transparent on the chain, you know, if someone breaks this encryption, they're not able to mint decred secretly, right? So that's kind of like one of those big concerns a lot of people have

with Zcash in particular, whereas, you know, if they screwed up the trust setup, you know, it's one of those things where it's like, you know, we're in cryptocurrency because we don't trust anybody. But now you got like this big event happening where you have to trust these people that they did things right. And if it got screwed up, someone can secretly create unlimited money. For us, as a store of value, like protecting those store value properties are the most important thing. So we want to make sure that people know, you know, 21 million coins. It's never going to be more than that. And we can prove that on chain. It's all auditable. And that ties back into our proposal system. You know, if we're paying you through the proposal system, you know,

We need to be able to audit that. Anyone needs to be able to audit that. They don't have to have a special view key. They can see, you know, this group did this work. The Treasury paid them this amount of money, and it was all transparent on chain. So throughout we've been talking about features that Decredd wants to add to its system, even just with the privacy feature just announced. Obviously, you're going to keep flushing that out and iterating, as you've mentioned,

you know, adding privacy and transaction amounts. And it sounds like also at a certain point in the future, will it be less centralized? Oh, yeah. I mean, that's the goal. The idea is once we have this stuff working, get rid of that centralized server, have it integrated into the demon and go from there. Have the confidential transactions as well so that you don't know about the actual number, the transaction size, and then be able to take it to the next step. Yeah. And this is sort of a theme I noticed in the research, which is that.

in general, it sounds like kind of an overarching goal that you have is for even the governance mechanisms to also become more decentralized and autonomous. And in some of your materials, you also refer to something called decentralized autonomous entities. So at the moment, you know, you even talked about how just to roll out this feature, there was, you know, a centralized aspect where you guys worked in secret. So how do you imagine transitioning to that's sort of more decentralized autonomous version of governance? And what does that look like? Yeah, that's actually a great question. It's something we're struggling with constantly because our view is, you know, decentralize all the things, right? But there's a big difference between

saying it and actually doing it because there's technology that doesn't exist yet, right? So like, we had to invent Politea to do all these different things off chain because before that it was like just literally like a small core group of people deciding, you know, this is going to get funded, that's going to get funded. We needed a way to be able to pull all the stakeholders and have these binding votes. And even today, you know, there's still an area that can be improved in that, you know, when Politea payments are going out, that's still a centralized process. You know, someone is taking a bunch of people who are having these multi-sig addresses and signing that transaction and sending them out. So that's not great. I mean, as a stakeholder,

I should be part of that process, right, of making those payments. And that's actually the next step that you referred to, to have real decentralized autonomous organization. whereby we actually control the money on chain to release these payments after we voted for this or that. And that's actually a really complex problem. And we had someone who got a proposal passed to start working on that. And it's being worked on. And we're hoping that by the end of this year we'll have made significant headway to that there. So, I mean, it's a good problem to have that, you know, our treasury,

our decentralized treasury isn't totally decentralized. projects don't have a treasury at all. But it's still a problem that needs to be addressed because, you know, we don't like any single point of failure. So, you know, if someone gets hit by a bus, if someone decides they want to, you know, rob us or whatnot, that's not good. We literally want to have to trust no one. It does seem, you know, as we've mentioned some of these stats, like around 50% of the coins being staked in these high participation rates on some of the votes, it does seem that you guys have a pretty engaged community. And yet at the same time, the number of monthly active addresses has been going down. And then simultaneously, the NVT ratio, which is basically

the network value divided by the daily transaction volume, has gone up, which if that goes up, it can indicate something is overvalued, although your network is nowhere near what some of the other coins are at. But anyway, why do you think the monthly active addresses have gone down and how do you plan to get Decred more widely adopted? Right. That's interesting because, I mean, one of the things that Decred does by default is literally uses a new address for everything. So I think these things kind of ebb and flow naturally. You know, I wouldn't read too much into the active addresses because, again, you know, every time you're buying a ticket, you know, a new address is being generated, every time you're going to receive coins and new addresses being generated,

we're really against address reuse for the privacy reasons behind that. So I think that's just natural fluctuations. The number that I really focus on more is percentage of coins and stakes, as you alluded to, right? So when that's going up, it means, you know, people are engaged. And to your point about, you know, overvaluation, it's not something I worry too much about. I mean, I'm an investor myself. And, you know, in the short term, I see these markets as a casino.

the long term, you know, they're a test of patience, discipline, and focus. We're just at the beginning of, you know, really intelligent investors starting to get involved in this space heavily, and I'm very encouraged by what we're seeing around the Decred ecosystem. I mean, Decred is essentially ruled by the people that on the coins, and, you know, we got some of the smartest people in the space taking interest, so I'm very bullish on the future there. And for adoption and getting more usage of Decred, how do you, or how is the community, community thinking about how to make that happen? So, I mean, that's the beautiful thing about the community.

There's so many opinions, and we can actually take, you know, different approaches to it. So my view is I still see Decred as an amazing store value, you know, the properties that it has, the improvements to that it makes the Bitcoin to make it different, not necessarily better, because, I mean, again, Bitcoin's got these unique advantages from being the first mover and dominating the most pervasive hashing algorithm out there. But the things that make it a little bit different give us unique security guarantees. So hybrid proof of stake proof of work that we have makes it so that, you know, at 5% of decreds, of a Bitcoin's hash rate, let's say,

we get the same level of security because not only do you have to be able to control mining to take over decred, but you need to actually control all these tickets. So these unique security properties kind of make decredited natural store value. And a lot of people see it as a hedge to Bitcoin. So if you're going to own a bunch of Bitcoin, you know, you want to like address tail risks. Like, oh my God, what if something goes wrong with Bitcoin, right? It's probably not going to happen. But as any good investor will do is, you know, you're going to try and print everything

that could possibly happen. And, you know, we see this store value market as the only area in cryptocurrency that's really well proven as a use case. So there's a lot of cool stuff out there like, you know, various smart contract platforms and whatnot. But the only use case that's really shown real, real use and picked up momentum over the years, it seems, has been this kind of store value narrative. And that's the most basic type of smart contract, you know, transferring value from one person to another. So that's kind of like one of my views on it.

And the other is, you know, we want people to use it as a currency as well. So, you know, we'll do everything possible there. And Politea is one of those great things where, you know, people can kind of wallet developers and come and say, hey, we'd like to integrate decredit into our payment processing product or whatnot. And we need some money to do it. And because we have that money, we can actually bring on new developers to do that work. So it becomes kind of a virtuous self-sustaining cycle of, you know, new people can get paid, can come into this, come into this space and have a place where they can work and learn and earn. And what that does is just grow the demand and the use cases. for D-Cred. All right. Well, it's been super fascinating learning about D-Cred and hearing about your new privacy feature. Where can people learn more about you and D-Cred? They can go to D-Cred.org. I'm sure they can find me on there and they'll find all sorts of interesting information about the project for sure. Great. Well, thanks so much for coming on Unchained. Thanks so much, Laura. Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about JZ and D-Cred, check out the show notes

inside your podcast player. If you're not yet subscribed to my other podcast, Unconfirmed, which is shorter and a bit newsier, be sure to check that out. Also, find out what I think are the top stories each week by starting it from an email newsletter at Unchainedpodcast.com. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with helpful factual recording, Anthony Yoon, Daniel Ness, and Rich Truffalino. Thanks for listening.