Podcast: The Ceremony, the birth of Zcash

Profile image of Mattias Geniar

Mattias Geniar, July 19, 2017

Follow me on Twitter as @mattiasgeniar

This was an interesting – an unexpected – podcast from the the folks at Radiolab.

Last November, journalist Morgen Peck showed up at her friend Molly Webster’s apartment in Brooklyn, told her to take her battery out of her phone, and began to tell her about The Ceremony, a moment last fall when a group of, well, let’s just call them wizards, came together in an undisclosed location to launch a new currency.

It’s an undertaking that involves some of the most elaborate security and cryptography ever done (so we’ve been told). And math. Lots of math. It was all going great until, in the middle of it, something started to behave a little…strangely.

Source: The Ceremony – Radiolab

The story is about the birth of Zcash & the paranoia involved in creating the initial keys to launch a new cryptocurrency.

After this episode I’m still stuck with lots of questions;

  • Who choose the location of the computenode purchase?
  • Who vetted the recording equipment?
  • If a phone got compromised during key initialization, why didn’t they abort?

For a team this paranoid, it sounds like they made a couple of strange choices along the way. Or at least, it was portraid as such in the story.

Either way, it was a fun listen and interesting to hear terms like RSA 4096, Diffie-Hellman and cryptocurrency get mentioned in an otherwise rather sciency-podcast!