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Ryan Gentry Profile picture
@RyanTheGentry
Sep 24, 2019 • 5 tweets • 1 min read • Read on X
0/3 @mattshap1 and I just published "Privacy is a Feature, Not a Product"
multicoin.capital/2019/09/24/pri…
1/3 In the essay, we argue that privacy is a feature of valuable cryptocurrencies, not a product offering in and of itself. Users should not have to take balance sheet risk (e.g. by selling some BTC or ETH for ZEC) on less valuable and less secure cryptocurrencies
2/3 in order to achieve financial privacy. At the end of the essay, we study the nascent privacy pools on Bitcoin and Ethereum to evaluate if they offer sufficient privacy guarantees for most users to never need niche privacy-focused blockchains.
3/3 I hope you enjoy the read, and I definitely hope curious minds dive deeper into our "Cost to Deanonymize" metric. We made a lot of assumptions, and it would be good to see the results of a more rigorous study.
4/4 Disclosure: Multicoin Capital is long BTC-USD and ETH-USD; and short ZEC-BTC and XMR-BTC.

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More from @RyanTheGentry

Ryan Gentry Profile picture
Aug 31, 2022
Apropos of nothing, here's a thread of recently published research focused on #bitcoin and Lightning.

I don't know if these researchers submitted their work to the Science of Blockchain Conference (SBC), or if SBC denied their applications. But it's clear they're researching!
"zk-PCN: A Privacy-Preserving Payment Channel
Network Using zk-SNARKs"

Published Aug 20, 2022 by researchers from Shandong University, Indiana University, Purdue University, and the Singapore University of Technology and Design
arxiv.org/abs/2208.09716
"Revoke and Update: A More Flexible Payment Protocol for Payment Channel Networks"

Published Aug 15, 2022 by researchers from the Delft University of Technology
repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/obje…
Read 12 tweets
Ryan Gentry Profile picture
Sep 16, 2021
On platform risk:

Smart contract platforms have seemingly found PMF with DeFi over the last year. App devs are flocking to said platforms in hopes of launching the next COMP, UNI, SNX, etc. and cashing out life-changing money after a few months of work.

Too good to be true? 🧵
The canonical platform risk case study is Facebook vs. Zynga. Zynga built a $10B company on Facebook's platform, until March 2011 when Facebook cut off Zynga's access to their APIs and cratered their business.
venturebeat.com/2016/06/30/fac…
Ethereum's narrative from 2014-2018 was that it existed to fix this problem.

A "world computer" running "unstoppable code" where nobody could pull the rug out from under you like Facebook did to Zynga.

Inspiring stuff! Have they lived up to it?
consensys.net/blog/news/prog…
Read 16 tweets
Ryan Gentry Profile picture
Jul 16, 2021
I've had a lot of people reach out recently and ask what's been driving the #LightningNetwork's latest exponential growth phase.

I think I'd attribute it to four main sources:
🧵👇
1) The combo of @getumbrel, @RaspiBlitz, and @voltage_cloud with the host of node & liquidity management guides produced by @LeoAW and @hmichellerose have made it stupid easy to get a node online and connected.
docs.lightning.engineering
This laid the groundwork for some super vibrant communities of node runners to pop up a la Ring of Fire and Plebnet. These groups are the primordial soup out of which the next wave of LN startups will emerge IMO... lots of tinkering and lots of great memes
Read 9 tweets
Ryan Gentry Profile picture
May 14, 2021
Recently, I've been thinking about this chart from @hasufl and @nic__carter concerning the changing #bitcoin narrative. I think the recent focus on NgU has been misguided, and we've lost sight of the true common thread tying all of these together:

#Bitcoin is freedom money.
One thing I've learned from watching DeFi over the last year is that NgU tech is not unique to #bitcoin. Supply side liquidity crunches can be programmed in a few lines of Solidity.

But true monetary freedom cannot. #Bitcoin is the money chosen by people seeking to be free.
As the FUD machines spin up and market dominance wanes, I think this is very important for us to internalize. #Bitcoin guarantees its adopters that they will be free. Being free does not guarantee being rich. And if freedom is not continually fought for, it will disappear.
Read 9 tweets
Ryan Gentry Profile picture
Oct 15, 2020
So I have a lot of thoughts about this. History is definitely rhyming as we build the Internet of Value today in a similar manner to how the Internet of Communications was built from the 1970s to now. But many people are applying the wrong lessons from the past to the present!
Email (SMTP) was invented in 1982, and was the Internet's (TCP/IP) killer app for 30+ years and arguably still is. When @ChairmanHeath says "Internet" he's prob referring to HTTP, invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee and popularized by the browser, the Internet's second killer app
I can't remember where I got this screenshot, apologies, but it perfectly distills what HTTP brought to the table: more media types beyond text!

Similarly, Bitcoin only transfers BTC, while Ethereum allows for many types of "value" transfer. Pattern matching to HTTP isn't crazy.
Read 11 tweets
Ryan Gentry Profile picture
Oct 2, 2020
So now that we all agree that globally available blockspace is not scalable for actual computation, but is best used for verification of off-chain computation instead, here are some thoughts on Ethereum's approach to scaling vs. Bitcoin's.

~👇~Thread~👇~
First, definitions:
1) broadcast txs: all-to-all gossip comms that succumbs to the scalability trilemma (all L1s)
2) unicast txs: 1-to-1 direct comms that occurs between two peers only (LN)
3) multicast txs: 1-to-many comms between a subset of peers (rollups, sidechains)
Both Bitcoin and Ethereum's L1 use broadcast txs. But because of (IMO) Bitcoin's use of UTXOs vs. Ethereum's use of accounts, Bitcoin has prioritized unicast txs via LN first, whereas Ethereum's initial unicast txs projects have been discarded in favor of multicast txs.
Read 20 tweets

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