Sun Jan 31, 2016 12:07 am

Hi! My name is Zooko. I've been privileged to spend almost all of my adult life working on the things that I love and care about: technology that protects and empowers people.At age 19, I joined the cypherpunks mailing list. At age 21, I went to work at DigiCash under David Chaum. Next I contributed a little bit to PGP (not much — just helped port it to HP-UX), worked under Eric Hughes, where I met Bram Cohen, then Bram and I were two of the four engineers who built Mojo Nation. I co-invented ZRTP with Phil Zimmermann, then I co-invented Tahoe-LAFS with Brian Warner. More recently I've been a co-author on BLAKE2 and SPHINCS (the most well-known of my co-authors on that one is Daniel J. Bernstein). At some point in my journey Aaron Swartz, Mark S. Miller, and I came up with an idea that Mark Miller named “Zooko's Triangle”.(If nothing in that paragraph makes sense to you, don't worry about it.)Today I'm the CEO of the Zcash Company. We just announced Zcash (formerly known as Zerocash and Zerocoin), and released the "alpha" technology preview code for other developers to start learning it, contributing to it, and building on top of it. Here's my initial blog post about what Zcash is and why we're creating it: https://z.cash/blog/helloworld.html We've received tremendous support from the community, for which I am deeply grateful. Here are some quotes from members of the community affirming that they too believe that privacy is important and that we have a chance to do something about it: https://z.cash/buzz.html There has been some mostly positive and mostly accurate press coverage of it. Here are a couple of my favorite pieces in the press: “Zcash, an Untraceable Bitcoin Alternative, Launches in Alpha” by Andy Greenberg (Wired) “Zcash, a Privacy-Focused Alternative to Bitcoin, Launches Technology Preview” by Giulio Prisco (Bitcoin Magazine)I will start at 19:00 UTC this Monday, Feb 1, trying to answer every question to the best of my ability. I look forward to meeting you and talking about Zcash. Please bring all your questions!(I'll have only three hours at that time — I have to do something else at 22:00 UTC — but I can circle back and try to answer any lingering questions later.)UPDATE: I just posted a blog post describing the corporate structure and funding model: https://z.cash/blog/funding.html