Excuse the clickbait, but I think we live a dramatic shift in human history. Compared with what lies ahead, one more clickbait is irrelevant.
But first things firs: let me introduce myself.
The Paradise That Wasn’t Just Imaginary
I had the chance to be born in a time when there were no cell phones. To be honest, even land lines were kinda scarce. I spent a big part of my childhood in the countryside. I ran with chickens and got scared by pigs, I made long lasting friendships with dogs and cats and guarded cows for days. I drank fresh milk and ate strawberries right from the garden. I fished with my bare hands in creeks. I slept under the clear sky and roamed endless forests.
I was fortunate. This wasn’t just a dream. It was real.
There is still a very powerful image of that childhood in my mind: it’s a clear night, I am out in the front yard of my grandparents, it’s crisp and silent and the air is filled with fireflies. Thousands of fireflies filling the space with floating points.
The green, scintillating light of those points going up and down is strangely resembling the green light of random digits on a black monitor, Matrix-style. But hey, at that time, I had no idea what Matrix is. I was just enjoying beauty in every form.
40 years later, that dormant image was awaken by another one, from Avatar, the movie.
The First TV Broadcasted Revolution
At the age of 18, I served as a soldier in the Romanian army. During my service, the communist regime of Ceausescu fell down. Not gently, as you can imagine, but with a lot of violence and chaos. As a solider, I got a seat in the front row at this bloody and strange carnival and it was a traumatic experience.
Years later, what still strikes me really hard, is the role that public television played in that scenario. Probably the first military objective that was captured by the insurgents was the Romanian National Television. They were broadcasting live the revolution. It was, and it will remain in history, I guess, like the first live broadcasted revolution ever.
That was just 27 years ago. A lot has happened since then. TV broadcasted revolutions became as popular as soap operas, sometimes even cheaper to make.
And I dare say that even TV, as a media, became obsolete: broadcasted revolutions or state coups are now on Twitter or Facebook first, before they get to the big screens.
The New Money. Crypto Money, That Is
7 years ago, another disruptive event creeped in, but this time in an eery silence: the invention of crypto money, namely, the Bitcoin.
In the beginning, it was just borderline anarchy stuff, mixed with some economics principles and it was all marginal (and marginal may include shady parts of our life, hence the usage of bitcoins in silk roads and the likes).
But in just 2-3 years something made that bitcoin thing fly off. It’s now mainstream: you can buy stuff from Amazon with it, or put it down as a payment for your future Tesla.
Some say it’s because decentralization, some say is in fact the transparency of transactions and probably they’re all right. Thing is we live in a world now where for the first time in history, money lives in a decentralized ledger, not controlled by a bank.
And we talk about serious money, 10 billions dollars worth of money, the kind that would equal the GPD of countries like Armenia, Malta or Bahamas. source
Zero Knowledge Proof - Introducing Zcash
But bitcoin was just the beginning. It was just like dipping your tows in the water. Here’s where things are getting interesting.
Bitcoin gained traction because of a very simple thing: the distributed protocol that makes the entire virtual network in which that money lives can prove that a transaction really took place, with total certainty. I won’t go into details, because many of you already know about that. Simply put, everybody knows what everybody did, and even more, they know the amount of money that was moved around. Of course, there is no verifiable link between a bitcoin address and a real person. That adds a certain layer of privacy.
Introducing zcash, or “zero knowledge proof”. This protocol not only ensures that a transaction actually took place, but it completely hides the details of that transaction.
In other words: it’s certain that something happened, but we don’t know exactly what. No amount of money, no source, no destination, no identity. Nothing.
As I understand it, the protocol still allows a participant in a transaction to reveal the details, but that’s just optional and can’t be enforced at the protocol level. It’s entirely dependent on the free will of the participant.
At the moment of writing this article, Zcash was not yet launched, but it’s a matter of hours. The excitement on the financial markets is unparalleled. In some futures exchanges, Zcash futures are selling for the price of 1 Bictoin, which is more than $600.
$600 for something that doesn’t exist yet!
And the amount of mining power aligned for this and ready to dig in is astounding.
The Trust Ceremony
If you made it so far, congratulations. You’ve read a solid 1000 words so far, that’s not easy. And it’s just the main setup.
From now on, things will get not only serious, but absolutely disruptive.
And I’m not talking about money.
I’m talking about religion. To be more precise, about a new type of religion.
Bear with me, please, just a few more minutes.
And prepare to be blown away.
Ok. Back to the story.
So, this “zero knowledge” protocol, like any algorithm, needs a way to be initialized. It needs some preliminary keys to make it rolling. But here’s the catch: the keys that makes it rolling can be used to decrypt the whole thing. These are the so-called “unlocking keys” of the entire “zero knowledge” protocol.
Please excuse the populist lingo, I know many of you are very crypto-currency savvy, and know exactly what I mean by “unlocking keys”, I’m just using these terms for those who are not very well versed in this universe, yet.
So, these “unlocking keys” mustn’t be controlled by anyone. They just have to be created, and then destroyed. And this process must be completely trustable, transparent and effective. Ok, are you ready?
For this thing to happen, an entire Ceremony has been organized. The protocol used for this ceremony is mind blowing (read the story here ). People sitting in different places around the world, each creating a public key, then destroying the private key, then combining everything together and, on top of that, some of the participants had their identities hidden.
Please stop for a while to digest this.
A Trust Ceremony, in order to establish the validity of a protocol which hides everything in a transaction, except the fact that the transaction actually took place.
Think for a moment. Ok, when you head stops spinning, read on.
Believe And Do Not Doubt - A New Religion Has Been Born
When zcash transactions will start to roll in, we will know that a thing happened with all certainty, but we will have no data whatsoever about that thing. We will just know that it’s true, without a doubt.
Let’s try to imagine the consequences.
Right now, the zcash blockchain is hosting only cryptocurrency transactions, but experiments like Ethereum showed us how easy is to add a new layer of complexity on top of that.
Even the very article that you read right now is not your regular, Linux hosted, Apache served, Mysql pulled, and PHP programmed blog post, like it used to be for the last 15 years. Nope. It’s a blockchain-based, distributed app, built on top of cryptocurrency called Steem and it’s served from everywhere.
So, on top of the zcash blockchain one could also add something like a “smart contract”. It’s not that difficult.
Zcash protocol could enable, in an optimistic scenario, the creation of a real, trustable digital vault. Sort like the deposit boxes you get now in a bank, only on the internet. You can store in that blockchain "things" that are true, but no one will be able to see their content.
In the pessimistic scenario, Zcash could enable the creation of incredibly powerful forms of governance (on the verge of dictatorship), where decisions are made, they are truly established, but nobody knows their content. You will know that somebody is doing something, but you will have no idea about what exactly they are doing.
As a kid raised in a former communist country, I get the chills only thinking about it.
Rational to Irrational to Spiritual
I am fortunate enough to have been born in a time when there weren't smartphones. Even land lines were scarce. I could roam free and enjoy time in nature.
But what I'm experiencing right now, along with other 7 billions people, is the dawn of a new era. One in which consensus will be arbitraged by computers, where all our ideas about value and the exchange of it will be so skewed and distorted that they'll cross the path of the rational into the irrational. We won't know why a transaction (being it sending money to somebody else, or buying a house, or getting a job, or getting married) is valid, but we will know it will be valid. We will just know.
Just like 40 years ago my grandparents knew that God will take care of everything. They didn't need to know His ways. They just knew things will going to work out.
The biggest disruption of this new crypto currency is not in the financial markets. It's at a much deeper, philosophical level.
Who you gonna trust form now on? And why?
As I finish writing this, I feel the whirlwind of a new religion slowly, but steadily forming under my feet.
I think it’s just a matter of years until we will be all swept away in a major disruptive event, something that may be called by our grandchildren "the Great Awakening", or "the New Dawn", just like people 2-3000 years ago were speaking about new Messiah or new Prophets.
Or, and that is the really pessimistic scenario, we are already swept away in this new beginning, but we just don't realize it yet.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
