Bitcoin, Privacy, Randomness, Security & Consensus Mechanisms with Matthew Niemerg

The Charlie Shrem Show

Today’s guest is Matthew Niemerg, a distributed ledger technology researcher. He advises and is integrated with various teams on multiple projects in the blockchain space. He provides technical expertise in a wide range of areas within this field: economic incentive of tokens, i.e. game theory design; security and consensus protocols; cryptographic schemes; business logic; and much more. He is currently the co-founder of Aleph Zero (https://www.alephzero.org) and is leading the team at Cardinal Cryptography (https://www.cardinals.cc). He is also an advisor for OneLedger (https://www.oneledger.io, Helix Cognitive Computing (https://www.hlx.ai, KardiaChain (https://www.kardiachain.io), and Ternio (https://www.ternio.io). Aleph Zero is a privacy-enhancing, Proof-of-Stake public blockckchain with instant finality. Its enterprise-ready, high-performance network is built on a novel, Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based consensus protocol that has been peer-reviewed and presented at an ACM conference. Aleph Zero uses the DAG as an intermedriary data structure, but can still be categorized as a blockchain. In 2023, Aleph Zero plans to enable privacy-enhancing features based on secure multi-party computation research (sMPC) and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP). We discuss a variety of different topics including Aleph Zero, Bitcoin, Privacy, Security, Consensus Mechanisms, and much more. We begin our conversation to discuss the differences between cryptography and DLT and how the two overlap in the crypto landscape. We discuss how crypto has the appeal for both consumer and enterprise. We discuss the various possible paths for crypto to become mainstream. We transition our discussion to focus on Aleph Zero. Matt discusses how Aleph is providing an infrastructure layer for the future of crypto that builds off the decades of research and advancement of decentralized systems theory and cryptography. Matt explains various different problems that arise when trying to construct a secure and decentralized network. We dive deep into the concept of true randomness. Matt explains how randomness is applied to security. We discuss the difference between privacy and anonymity. We discuss what kind of privacy features enterprise clients are looking for and crypto can fulfill those requirements. We also discuss privacy preserving technology and the importance of preserving privacy for a sovereign society. We transition our conversation to discuss consensus mechanisms. Matt explains the differences between the various different consensus mechanisms. Please enjoy my conversation with Matthew Niemerg.