The Plan to Make Bitcoin Private | Misha Komarov & Clara Shikhelman
What Bitcoin Did“Imagine tomorrow you hear that the US government started putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet. Guess what happens next? Everybody tries to front-run it. Everybody and their mother tries to front-run it.”
Misha Komarov and Clara Shikhelman of [[alloc] init] join me to discuss Shielded Bitcoin, their plan to make Bitcoin private.
We get into how Bitcoin PIPEs use witness encryption to lock Bitcoin behind a cryptographic proof, how a shielded transaction actually works, why you leave with someone else’s deposit rather than your own, and what it would cost compared with a normal transaction.
We also discuss why governments and institutions will need privacy, whether brand new cryptography can be trusted with billions of dollars, how the team plans to pay people to break it, and why they wouldn’t be comfortable with large amounts in it today.
Finally, we get into whether Bitcoin’s resistance to change is a feature, whether soft forks are dead, why quantum resistance is a must-have upgrade, and the legal risks of building privacy tools after the Samourai Wallet case.
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Clara Shikhelman: https://x.com/ClaraShik