Zooko 談 Zcash：隱私貨幣的十年一夜成名與未來挑戰

0:00Zcash 的誕生與使命

0:00大家好，感謝你們今天來聽這場演講，也謝謝你們的參與。我叫 Zooko，今天要跟大家介紹 Zcash。Zcash 是什麼？Zcash 就是金錢，是為無限文明而生的貨幣。我是眾多 Zcashers 之一，我們都致力於支持 Zcash。原因很簡單，我們希望能為我們和我們的孩子打造一個更自由、更公平、更安全、更強大、更繁榮的文明。Hello, thank you all for coming and listening to this today. Thank you for being here. My name is Zooko, and I'm here to tell you about Zcash. What is Zcash? Zcash is money. Money for an infinite civilization. I'm one of many, many Zcashers, people who are devoted to supporting Zcash. And the reason we're devoted to that is because we want a freer, fairer, safer, stronger, more prosperous civilization for us and our children to live in.

0:44接下來我要跟大家分享我們是怎麼走到這一步的。正如 Raj 所說，Zcash 在過去一年左右成為全球最受討論、最有價值的代幣之一。今天我要講的是這個「十年一夜成名」的故事。And I'm going to tell you the story of how we got here because, as Raj said, Zcash is one of the most talked about and the most valuable tokens in the world over the last, like, one year or so. And so I'm going to tell you the story of the 10-year overnight success.

1:05從比特幣到零知識證明的突破

1:05這一切始於 2008 年 10 月，Satoshi Nakamoto 發表了比特幣白皮書。三個月後，我成為網路上第一個寫比特幣部落格文章的人。2009 年 1 月，我寫了關於比特幣的文章，因為我覺得它超酷。很快地，Satoshi 在比特幣 0.1 首頁上連結了我的網站，當時他只連結了三個網站之一。It started in October of 2008 when Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin white paper. And three months later, I was the first person to write a blog post about Bitcoin on the internet. January 2009, I wrote about Bitcoin because I thought it was awesome. It was really cool. And immediately thereafter, Satoshi posted the Bitcoin 0.1 homepage, and he linked to my website among a total of three websites that he linked to at that time.

1:55雖然我很喜歡比特幣的去中心化和難以被關閉的特性，但我認為它有個根本性的缺陷，就是它會讓使用者的隱私在網路上暴露給陌生人，這是無法避免的。我一開始就看出這個問題，Satoshi 其實也看到了。Even though I loved something about Bitcoin, which was that it was decentralized and hard to stop, right, hard to shut down. But there was something that I thought was fundamentally broken about it, which was that it exposes its users' privacy over the network to strangers. And there's no way around that. And I could see that right away as soon as I saw it. And Satoshi saw the same thing. So.

2:212010 年，出現了一個新的密碼學概念叫做零知識證明，大家有想過這個想法，但沒有人知道怎麼實作。Satoshi 曾經在論壇上發文問：『我們要怎麼用零知識證明？』他說，如果能找到解決方案，比特幣會有更好、更簡單、更方便的實現方式。In 2010, there was a new cryptographic concept called zero-knowledge proofs that people had thought of, but nobody knew how to create zero-knowledge proofs in practice. And Satoshi wrote this. This is a post that Satoshi wrote. He's the author of this, and he wrote, How do we use zero-knowledge proofs? He said, If a solution was found, a much better... Better, easier, more convenient implementation of Bitcoin would be possible.

2:52大約 11 天後，他在論壇上看到我，還特別感謝我幫忙。六個月後，還是沒有人找到解決方案，沒有人知道怎麼讓大家用的錢不會在網路上暴露給敵人和駭客。這個問題一直沒解決，六個月後 Satoshi 就從網路上消失了。And then, like 11 days later, he saw me on the forum and he said, Hey Zooko, thanks for helping out. And then six months later, nobody had found a solution. There was still no solution for how to give people money they could use that did not expose them to enemies and hackers over the internet. It was unsolved, and at that point, six months later, Satoshi stepped away. He disappeared from the internet forever.

3:26零知識證明的誕生與 Zcash 的起步

3:26Satoshi 消失兩年後，終於有人找到了解決方案。他曾說過，如果找到解法，比特幣會有更好、更方便的版本，但當時沒人知道怎麼做。2013 年，有位電腦科學家發現了如何實作零知識證明。這件事發生在 2013 年，接著一個月後，他們去參加了聖荷西的比特幣大會，這是史上第二場比特幣大會。And two years after Satoshi disappeared, a solution was found. So Satoshi had said, if the solution was found, a much better, easier, more convenient version of Bitcoin would be possible. Nobody knew how to do it. And then in 2013, this computer scientist discovered how to make zero-knowledge proofs. Okay, that happened in 2013. The first thing they did was one month later, they went to the San Jose Bitcoin Conference. This was the second Bitcoin conference ever held.

3:57那場大會很特別，因為有創投和 Winklevoss 雙胞胎來參加，當時比特幣還只是個小眾的奇怪東西。這些發現零知識證明的科學家在大會上提議把零知識證明加進比特幣，但當時在場的 Bitcoin Core 開發者拒絕了。於是這些科學家轉而找我幫忙，他們打電話問我願不願意一起讓零知識證明成真，讓大家能有保護隱私的去中心化貨幣。And it was really weird and exciting because venture capitalists and Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss showed up, and that was surprising at the time because Bitcoin was just this tiny niche weird thing. And so these computer scientists who discovered the zero-knowledge proofs went to this conference, and they proposed to put zero-knowledge proofs into Bitcoin, and the Bitcoin core devs who were present at that conference said no. So the computer scientists turned to me. They called me and said, Will you help us make zero-knowledge proofs a real thing so that people can have decentralized money that protects its users' privacy?

4:46其實我一開始也拒絕了。那位發現這個密碼學突破的科學家打給我，我說：『不，因為比特幣已經開始了，它可以成為大家都能用的主流東西。如果我們再發明一個只有少數人用的小眾東西，對社會幫助不大。』所以我一開始拒絕了。And actually, I said no as well that first, that first time. The computer scientist who had discovered the cryptography called me, and I said, Well, no, because Bitcoin has already started, and... Bitcoin can be the mainstream thing that everyone can know and use. And so if we invent a niche thing that only a few people would know and use, that wouldn't be good enough. It wouldn't help society enough. So I said no.

5:20但我隔天睡醒後，打電話回去跟他們說：『其實，我改變主意了。因為主流的東西必須要能保護隱私。』如果你要經營事業、為自己或家人買賣東西，或在網路上做任何事，你都需要掌控誰能看到你的行為、誰能干擾你的生意。所以這個新發明其實可以成為主流，甚至取代比特幣。我就答應一起做了。But then I slept on it, and I called those guys back the next day. And I called them back and I said, You know what? Actually, yes, because the mainstream thing that everyone can know and use. It has to protect privacy. If you want to run a business, or if you want to buy and sell goods for yourself or your family or anything and everything that you want to do on the internet, you need to control who can watch you and who can interfere with your business. So therefore, this new invention can be the mainstream thing. can take over in place of Bitcoin. So I called them back and said yes, I would do it.

6:04那大約是 2013 年，花了我們兩年半到三年才把 Zcash 實作出來並正式上線。Zcash 在 2016 年正式推出。And that was in 2013 or so, and it took us two and a half, three years to implement Zcash and launch it. And it launched in 2016,

6:16Zcash 上線後的挑戰與堅持

6:162016 年我們完成了 Zcash 的第一個版本並正式上線。當時有位對我很有幫助、教我很多商業知識的導師打電話給我，說：『做得好，這是我見過最棒的之一，接下來才是最難的部分。』他說得完全沒錯。Then, so it was 2016 when we finished the first version of Zcash and we launched it, and someone who had been a good mentor to me and taught me a lot about business called me after we had launched it, and he said, Good job. One of the best I've ever seen, and now for the hard part. And he was totally right.

6:48上線後的八年半到九年，我們都在努力修 bug、保護使用者、提升功能和安全性。你們可能也聽說，差不多一年前，大家開始大量買進 Zcash。這就是我們現在的位置。After we launched it in 2016, then we had about eight and a half or nine years of grinding to—Fix all the bugs, protect all the users, improve the functionality and the security. And then, as you might have heard, about a year ago, people started buying Zcash. And this is where we are today.

7:22Zcash 的四大金錢特質

7:22Zcash 有四個簡單的特質。這裡歷史課就結束了，這是我演講的前半段，現在你們知道 Zcash 的十年一夜成名故事。接下來我要講金錢的本質。Four simple aspects of Zcash. Okay, this ends the history lesson. This is the first half of my talk. Now you know the 10-year overnight success. And now for the—The qualities of money.

7:39金錢有四個大家都想要、每個經濟體都需要的特質。第一個是稀缺性。我們這點是直接從比特幣抄來的。2015 年我們在設計 Zcash 時，沒什麼可以參考的範本，就直接照比特幣做。Zcash 只會有 2100 萬顆，發行速度會越來越慢，總量永遠不會超過 2100 萬。這規則很簡單。There's four simple aspects of money that everyone wants for themselves and that you need to have for your economy. And the first one is scarcity. So we copied this from Bitcoin, just like you know, we were inventing Zcash in about 2015, and at that time there weren't very many models to look at. We just looked at Bitcoin and said, we're just going to copy whatever Bitcoin does. So just like Bitcoin, there's only 21 million Zcash that ever exist, and new Zcash gets issued. Continuously, but at a slower and slower rate, so that the amount of Zcash will always go up, but it will never exceed 21 million. And that's it. That's a simple.

8:28我以前以為要讓經濟體用的錢，規則要更複雜，像是根據生產力調整貨幣供給。但後來有人告訴我，這些都不需要，最重要的是可預測性。只要大家都能預測 Zcash 的總量，就能依此規劃經濟。It's a very simple rule, and I used to think that you needed a more complicated rule if you wanted money for people to use in an economy. You wanted the amount of money to go up and down in response to how productive people were or something. And then someone taught me that that's all unnecessary. All that you need for people to plan their economy and make their plans and execute their plans is predictability. So everyone can predict how many Zcash will exist, same as with Bitcoin, and you can make your plans around that.

9:08第二個特質是可替代性（fungibility）。我從一開始寫比特幣部落格時就知道，比特幣在這點失敗了，而且無法修正。可替代性就是你拿到兩張 100 美元鈔票，哪一張都一樣，價值完全相同。這對經濟很重要，因為這樣你才能用錢分配資源，不會被追蹤或控制。沒有可替代性，就不是真正的錢。The second quality that you need for money in a real economy is fungibility. And this is what I knew from the first start. From when I wrote the first blog post about Bitcoin, I already knew it failed at this and couldn't be fixed. Fungibility means that if someone offers you two $100 bills, it doesn't matter which $100 bill you take. They're both worth the same as each other. And that's important for an economy so that you can treat money as a way to allocate resources for yourself and your society without exposing yourself to being tracked and controlled. Fungibility is just a necessary basic property of money. If you don't have fungibility, it's not really money.

10:06這點需要科學上的突破才能做到。Satoshi 當年就說過，如果能做到這點，比特幣會更方便、更實用，但他當時不知道怎麼實現。要做到這點，Zcash 的做法是把每一顆幣的歷史加密，這樣大家有一個共享的全球帳本，所有人都知道交易發生且不可逆、可信賴，但交易的歷史細節是加密的，沒人能看到。Now, this is the one that it required a scientific breakthrough to achieve. This is the one that Satoshi was saying, it's very interesting. It would enable a more convenient, useful implementation of Bitcoin if it were possible, but he didn't know how it was possible at that time. Because in order to achieve this, the way we do it in Zcash, and in my opinion the only way that it can actually work at scale, is to encrypt the history of each coin so that you have a shared global ledger that everyone can rely on, and everyone knows that transactions have happened and that transactions are final and trustworthy, and yet the history of what came before is encrypted and is not visible to anyone else.

10:55這就是零知識證明的科學突破，Zcash 是第一個實作這技術的專案。現在這已經成為 Google 等大型公司用來保護網路資訊的通用工具。Okay, so that was a scientific breakthrough that is called zero-knowledge proofs, and Zcash was the first thing to implement it, and now it's become a general-purpose tool that's used by all major companies like Google and so forth to protect information on the internet.

11:20耐久性與開發者基金

11:20第三個特質是耐久性（durability），也就是你會覺得長期持有很安全。這對於人們規劃、儲蓄和執行計畫很重要，對經濟體也很重要。Zcash 有個和比特幣完全不同的地方，就是新發行的幣不是 100% 都給礦工，而是 80% 給礦工，20% 給開發者，這叫做 Dev Fund（開發者基金）。我本人和我的公司都沒有拿這筆錢，我們只靠 Zcash 持有者和支持者的捐款。The next quality that you need of money is durability, which means you feel safe holding on to it long term. That's important for people to plan and save and exercise their plans, and that's important for an economy. And there's an interesting thing about Zcash, which is totally different from Bitcoin, which is that instead of 100% of the newly issued coins going to the miner, 80% of Zcash goes to the miner and 20% goes to the developers. This is called the Dev Fund, and I myself don't receive any of this funding. Me and my company, we only rely on donations from Zcash holders and supporters.

12:16所以我可以很坦白地說，Zcash 區塊鏈支付開發者這件事是好事，你可以相信我，因為我不是拿這筆錢的那群人。這筆錢是給其他開發者，我認為這是 Zcash 能夠撐過十年、成為一夜成名的關鍵。因為這十年來，區塊鏈本身一直在支付開發者改進和保護它。So that I can tell you, I can tell you about this, and I can say this dev fund thing where the Zcash blockchain is paying developers, that's a good thing. And you can believe me because I'm not one of the developers getting paid. It's paying a bunch of other developers, and I think that's a critical fact for why Zcash survived for those 10 years that it took to become an overnight success. It was because all along. The blockchain itself was paying for developers to improve it and protect it.

12:50安全性、AI 與密碼學新挑戰

12:50最後一個特質是安全性。過去 12 個月，大家都見識到 AI 驅動的安全危機。駭客早就已經在全球各地搶劫、勒索、利用人們，但 12 個月前，攻擊者獲得強大的 AI，情況變得更糟。我們 Zcash 團隊很重視安全，對密碼學和安全性非常執著，幾乎整天都在想安全。我們很早就預見到 AI 安全危機會來臨。Now, the last quality that we need, the final one of four qualities that we need, is security, and this has been dramatically demonstrated to everyone over the last, like, 12 months or so because of the AI-powered security apocalypse, right? It was already bad to where hackers were robbing people and extorting people and taking advantage of people worldwide for years and years before this. But 12 months ago, it got even worse when the attackers got powerful AI. And in the Zcash team that I'm part of, we saw this coming because we're really security focused. We're really into cryptography and security. We're kind of obsessive about it. We totally think about security all day long. Security is our favorite thing, and we saw—That the AI apocalypse was coming in about, I think it was maybe February of this year, I think.

14:00所以我們緊急利用 AI，搶在壞人之前找出漏洞。我們請到全球最厲害的人才，讓他在美國政府禁用 Mythos AI 前兩天就取得存取權。我們成功了，搶先發現並修補了一個本來會毀掉 Zcash 的漏洞，壞人還沒發現就被我們修掉了。很多其他專案和軟體沒這麼幸運，世界各地都發生了很多損失。And so we hastily raced to take advantage of AI and to find any flaws before the bad guys could find the flaws and exploit people. And we won that race just barely. We hired the best person in the world for that. And we got him access to the Mythos AI two days before it was banned by the American government and so forth, and—We succeeded. We found a bug in Zcash that would have destroyed it, and we fixed that bug. We found it first before the bad guys did and fixed it before the bad guys could take advantage of it. And a lot of other companies and projects and software. Packages in the world have failed at that, and there's a lot of damage happening all around.

14:58現在我們又在做同樣的事，這次是針對密碼學。2026 年我們成功保護了所有 Zcash 使用者，沒讓 AI 找到軟體漏洞。如果你的程式有 bug，被敵人發現就可能被利用、使用者被盜。現在我們把這問題延伸到密碼學本身。密碼學是加密、數位簽章、區塊鏈和所有電腦安全的基礎數學。你的作業系統、伺服器、網路連線、甚至全世界的軍隊，都靠現代密碼學來保密和防駭。And currently, we're now engaged in doing the same thing again, and this time for cryptography. That last time around, over the course of 2026, we successfully protected all the Zcashers from AIs finding software bugs, right? If there's a bug in your program, then an enemy who finds that bug might be able to take advantage of it and abuse or rob your users. Well, now we're applying the same question to cryptography, right? Cryptography is the science of encrypting and digital signatures and the fundamental mathematics that underlies not only all of blockchain, but it's the fundamental mathematics that underlies all of computer security. Your operating system, every server, every internet connection. All of the devices and all of the militaries of the world, all of this relies on modern cryptography for confidentiality so that enemies can't read your traffic. And it also relies on cryptography for integrity so that enemies can't hack in and take over your systems.

16:09AI、量子電腦與未來的密碼學戰爭

16:09我們正處於一個既刺激又危險的時刻，AI，甚至量子電腦，都可能威脅現代密碼學。你看台上寫著 post-quantum crypto，沒錯，量子電腦確實很有趣。但除了量子電腦，AI 也已經進步到我們無法百分百確定它們是否能破解現代密碼學。And we live in this really exciting, interesting—Dangerous moment when AIs, not to mention quantum computers. It says post-quantum crypto up there, and that's true. Quantum computers are also a thing and also very interesting. But in addition to quantum computers, AIs have just now gotten, have just now accelerated to the point at which we don't 100% know if they could break modern crypto.

16:38我原本已經寫好這場演講的內容，結果今天早上醒來，看到最新的 AI 剛剛宣布有 174 項數學突破，就在兩三小時前。這 174 項裡，隨便一項放在一年前都會是年度大事，現在這些突破越來越快出現。So I already had written the concept of this speech when I woke up this morning and saw that the leading AI has just now announced 174 mathematical breakthroughs as of like two or three hours ago. Any one of these 174 mathematical breakthroughs might well have been like the biggest event of the year. Among human mathematicians a year ago, and now they're coming faster and faster.

17:13這就是我們認為 Zcash 對人類文明很重要的原因之一。我們必須像當年推動零知識證明一樣，解決社會賴以為生的基礎科學難題。只有這樣才能有安全性，只有有安全性，大家才有可以信賴、能保護整個社會和文明的貨幣。So that's part of. Part of what we consider it's necessary to do for Zcash, because we think Zcash is important for human civilization itself, and one of the things we're going to have to do, like we did before with zero-knowledge proofs, is solve fundamental science problems that everything in society relies on. Because you've got to do that in order to have security, and you've got to have security in order to have—have money that protects people that they can rely on and that can protect and empower whole societies and a civilization.

17:53Zcash 的歷史與未來

17:53謝謝大家聽我分享 Zcash 的歷史。請持續關注未來的發展，謝謝！Thank you for listening to my talk. This has been the history of Zcash. Stay tuned for what happens next. Thank you.