This is our 4th and final debate for the year (1, 2, 3). Previously, we have spent time investigating the scaling debate and its many facets. We are now going to switch gears and focus on the topics of privacy and fungibility in public blockchains.
We will spend the first 15-20 minutes going over the history of privacy preserving protocols in the ecosystem. Because most of these protocols require either a hard or soft fork to implement there will naturally be some contention around them; coupled with the already controversial question of anonymity, we should be in for a fun debate. Feel free to post any suggested debate questions/topics in the comments.
Debate questions:
- Why is privacy important (or not)?
- Why is fungibility important (or not)?
- Can you have privacy and fungibilty in a public blockchain without full anonymity?
- Privacy preserving protocols take up a lot of space on the blockchain, should we jeopardize capacity for them?
- How should these protocols be implemented (e.g. extension blocks, sidechains, alt. coins)?
- Some of the protocols use very new "moon math" -- how willing are we to experiment with peoples safety and finances in the high stakes environment of a public blockchain?
Relevant Protocols:
Merge Avoidance
Traditional Mixers
CoinJoin
CoinSwap
OWAS
CoinShuffle (++)
Confidential Transactions
Payment Channels (TumbleBit)
Zero Knowledge Contingent Payments
MimbleWimble
MAST
zk-SNARKs
Ring Signatures
Secure Multiparty Computation
RingCT
