In this episode of Unchained Premium, Misha Komarov, founder of [alloc] init and co-founder of =nil; Foundation, joined Laura to talk about shielded Bitcoin, a way to bring Zcash-style privacy to Bitcoin using a cryptographic primitive his team calls Bitcoin PIPEs.
The conversation covers how witness encryption turns zero-knowledge proof verification into ordinary Bitcoin signature verification, so the upgrade needs no soft fork or hard fork. Komarov lays out why a shielded transaction runs about four times the size and fee cost of a normal one, why the verifier is pure cryptography rather than a company or person, and how his team is working with Sanjam Garg, the inventor of witness encryption, while running open hacking challenges on the scheme.
They also discuss how the team plans to avoid a repeat of Zcash’s Orchard pool bug, and why the shielded pool’s path to quantum resistance runs through Bitcoin’s own signature scheme.
Show Highlights:
- How shielded Bitcoin works with the Bitcoin PIPEs scheme
- Why shielded Bitcoin needs no soft fork or hard fork; how you transform ZKP verification to signature verification
- What using shielded pools would cost Bitcoin users
- Komarov’s team works with Sanjam Garg, who invented witness encryption about 15 years ago, and open hacking challenges on the construction
- Komarov’s journey from Ethereum sharding to Bitcoin privacy
- How [[alloc] init] is relying on a tool from Komarov’s =nil; Foundation days to avoid a repeat of Zcash’s undetected minting bug
- How the shielded pool could be made quantum resistant without touching Bitcoin
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