Episode 76: Sean Bowe on SNARKs, Trusted Setups & Elliptic Curve Cryptography

In this week’s episode, we welcome special guest Sean Bowe. Sean is an engineer at the Electric Coin Company (https://twitter.com/zcashco) and the author of the Sprout and Sapling Zcash trusted set ups and much of the underlying cryptography of the protocol. We had a chance to chat about his history, what got him into the topic, some of the joys & challenges to working with SNARKs, and what ideas are inspiring him. We also covered the story of Zcash and the Powers of Tau trusted set up, MPCs, the story of the bug, SONICs (https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/099.pdf), ZEXE (https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/962), the BLS12-381 Elliptic Curve Construction (https://z.cash/blog/new-snark-curve/) Early on in the episode, we mention the Radiolab episode about the zcash trusted setup: https://archive.org/details/radiolabpodcast17cryptozcash_ceremony Questions from the audience: https://twitter.com/AnnaRRose/status/1122818062061797376 We also mention some of our previous ZK centric episodes that can be found here: https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/zkseries Special thanks to this week's sponsor: Trail of Bits (https://www.trailofbits.com/) Trail of Bits is offering a service for young technology companies who could use expert security support, but aren't quite at a stage to hire their own team. The service includes staffing a #security channel to answer questions, review high risk PRs, and integrate the latest in continuous testing into your build pipeline. Visit www.trailofbits.com for help securing your product. If you like what we do: Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm (https://twitter.com/zeroknowledgefm) Join us on Telegram - https://t.me/joinchat/B_81tQ57-ThZg8yOSx5gjA Support our Gitcoin Grant - https://gitcoin.co/grants/38/zero-knowledge-podcast Support us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/zeroknowledge Or directly here: ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz ZEC: t1R2bujRF3Hzte9ALHpMJvY8t5kb9ut9SpQ