Bryce “Zooko” Wilcox stands by as his brother, Josh “Za,” slices into his Lenovo desktop computer with an angle grinder. The metal on metal looses a dazzling cascade of sparks, which flicker through the harsh rays of the car headlamps trained on the scene taking place in a backyard in Longmont, Colo. A fire glows nearby.
“Can I try whacking it now?” Zooko asks from underneath the wide brim of a wizard’s hat.
Za obliges. Like Gandalf wielding a makeshift staff, Zooko unleashes the force of a sledgehammer upon the CPU tower. THWUANCK. “It’s kind of smoking, so I don’t want to touch it,” Zooko says, before picking up the mangled mess with his bare hands. Fragments fall to the gravel below. He pins the battered husk down with his foot and prods its innards with a crowbar.
Za’s wife, Jessica, enters the firelight. She begins clobbering computer chips with a hammer, just as the stereo switches to “Still,” the gangsta-funk Geto Boys track made famous in the printer-whupping scene from the 1999 film Office Space. Under her buffets, the circuitry explodes into shrapnel. The brothers grin.
Tonight’s carnage marks the conclusion of an event Zooko calls The Ceremony. With barbecue, whisky, and heaps of entropy, Zooko and his crew are celebrating the completion of an elaborate computation meant to spawn a new, more private digital currency. They call it Zcash.
The project involved six people with an assortment of machines distributed across multiple continents. Each member of the group, several of whom were operating under aliases, contributed shards, or fractions, of an unfathomably big number that will serve as the basis for what is essentially a secret, special cryptographic key. The end result of the clandestine crew’s efforts is a set of numeric parameters that will underpin a data-scrambling scheme capable of concocting a virtual currency with confidentiality at its core.
The work is spread out geographically to ensure that no malicious actor can sabotage the process or obtain the component parts. Traces of the computers’ leftover math—Zooko calls it “toxic waste”—may reside in memory; if salvaged, the material could grant someone the power to counterfeit infinite sums of virtual money.
Powering down just one of the computers should be enough to wipe part of the key’s recipe from the face of the earth. But in such a high-stakes scenario, one can never be too sure. Thus the total annihilation of The Ceremony.
Zooko tosses the electronic wreckage into the fire pit as Za sprays bursts of lighter fluid onto the crackling conflagration. Plumes erupt in response. The blaze reeks of melted plastic—literal toxic waste.
“And this, children, is why on Oct. 23 we have fireworks,” Zooko declares to unseen future generations with mock self-importance. His compatriots stand tall. To this observer, watching the festivities on video almost a year later, the entire act seems absurd. But the pyrotechnics will help ensure that Zooko and his troupe can responsibly bring into being the germ of a new digitized tender, Zcash, one that represents the best hope yet for imbuing the realm of cryptocurrency with an element it is sorely lacking: privacy.
Within a year of that fateful evening in October 2016, the market capitalization of Zcash will swell to just under $1 billion, making it a top 20 cryptocurrency. Its fundamental technology will be added to Ethereum, the decentralized computing network that, alongside Bitcoin, is spurring an exuberant $350 billion boom in crypto coins. And Zcash’s incipient parameters, hatched in the cool shadow of the Rockies, will be adopted by the U.S.’s biggest bank, JPMorgan Chase (JPM, +0.83%).
Despite the record-breaking values of Bitcoin and its ilk, most digital currencies have failings that make them problematic as a mainstream medium of exchange. For instance, the transactions are essentially public and easy to track, offering you, the consumer, less privacy than your credit card. Zcash aims to change that. If, one day, businesses and people come to rely on cryptocurrencies, they may have Zooko and his band of ravagers to thank for laying the foundations to make that possible.
Critics were split in the years following Bitcoin’s arrival in 2009. Its peer-to-peer system for verifying transactions, called the blockchain, allowed people to securely and electronically exchange money without having to rely on third parties like banks. To supporters, Bitcoin promised to be a sort of anonymous, transnational digital currency that eschewed the inefficiencies of today’s monetary system. To critics, it was a lawless thought experiment run amok. It didn’t help that most people associated the invention with the black market. From 2011, Bitcoin was best known for its association with the dark web bazaar called Silk Road, where unscrupulous folks used it to buy or sell drugs and other contraband under the guise of pseudonyms—the only basic protection Bitcoin afforded. They were in for a rude awakening.
“Criminals thought it was something that could never be traced back to them,” says Kathryn Haun, a former federal prosecutor who now serves on the board of Coinbase, the highest privately valued digital currency startup. “People weren’t thinking ahead.”
The truth is that Bitcoin is radically transparent, a major strength and weakness. Think of the blockchain, the central accounting innovation at the heart of the system, as a giant billboard broadcasting everyone’s holdings and financial activity at all times. The whole point is to display a public record of transactions. Anyone with some rudimentary computer skills and a familiarity with the technology can inspect the digital ledger to see who traded what with whom. The transparency helps ensure the integrity of the system. Without it, people could potentially lie about what they spent, recycling the same money in different places—a would-be disaster.
But the lack of privacy for Bitcoin and just about every other cryptocurrency is not only a problem for crooks, it’s also a major barrier to adoption for regular people and businesses. There are countless transactions you might wish to keep out of the public eye: your paycheck, a surprise anniversary gift, a visit to the doctor. Bitcoin effectively exposes all of that. The same is even truer for corporations. No executive in his or her right mind would conduct business in a way that exposes trade secrets, like the amounts paid to suppliers or partners. Most cryptocurrency payments make complying with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and other data-privacy regulations nigh impossible, ruling out key industries. For many, these deficiencies are nonstarters.
“Bitcoin is the least private financial system ever invented,” says Matthew Green, a cryptographer and professor at Johns Hopkins University.
Green spent the first years of Bitcoin’s existence trying to find flaws in its code. Once he considered the premise sound, he focused on figuring out how to add privacy to the system. His motivations arose not from a desire to aid and abet baddies but rather from a compulsion to create safeguards for everyday users. So he and two graduate students, Ian Miers and Christina Garman, devised Zerocoin, a protocol that could obscure the parties to a transaction using encryption while maintaining the auditability of the shared ledger with a set of advanced mathematical techniques called “zero knowledge proofs.” These nifty concepts, developed at MIT in the 1980s, allow people to prove a statement true without revealing any other details about the item in question. The technology miraculously ensures everyone stays honest even as it blinds data.
“This is not some scam to help criminals do their job,” Green says. “It’s technology we need.”