🌲 Forest for the Merkle trees

There’s “Bitcoin,” and then there’s “crypto.”

How are they separated in your mind? Are they two distinct circles — like a Venn diagram without the overlap — or is Bitcoin an enormous oak tree at the heart of a sprawling forest?

For all that separates Bitcoin from the rest, the further you go back, it becomes obvious that the two distinct spaces share the same, incredibly deep talent pool.

Eli Ben-Sasson, today’s guest on the Supply Shock podcast, is a clear example. The computer scientist has been advancing zero-knowledge proofs for Bitcoin and other blockchains since at least 2013.

Ben-Sasson ended up applying his zero-knowledge proposal to an alternative cryptocurrency, Zcash, which launched in 2016, and more recently at StarkWare, the Ethereum-forward startup he co-founded in 2018. 

A zk proof would not be verified on Bitcoin until last July as part of an open-source effort built around rollup protocol BitcoinOS, sponsored by StarkWare.

“To me, the most interesting, and I would say the only interesting thing about Bitcoin is Satoshi's innovation and ingeniousness in the way [they] basically took the social construct of money and based it on just this beautiful new, democratic, decentralized, broad basis for the first time in the history of humanity,” Ben-Sasson told Rizzo.

He added that those principles can and should be applied to other areas of economics and society more broadly, beyond bitcoin serving as digital gold.

“I think it is really important that they be applied to more and more areas of our economic and social activities. And for that, you know, I would like that to happen actually on Bitcoin, under Bitcoin's purview and principles, but today it's impossible unless we go through some soft forks.”

Catch the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and X.

— David

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