'True Privacy is When Users Decide Who Sees and Uses Their Data: Unhased 23' by musharrafff zeroknowledgeproofs partisiablockchain
For the 23rd version of Unhashed, I reached out to Kurt Nielsen, the Co-Founder & President of Partisia Blockchain, a Web 3.0 public blockchain built for trust, transparency, privacy, and lightning speed finalization. So, let’s dive straight into the interview.
In 2017, we started to build blockchain applications and, more importantly, to merge blockchain and MPC technologies, which are two technologies that are destined to melt together. Partisia Blockchain is the result of this effort. Second, while blockchain provides real decentralized control of money, private money is a different matter. As mentioned, traditional blockchain is, in fact, orthogonal to a true sense of privacy as discussed above. For this discussion, it is important to distinguish between confidential data and anonymous users. For the most part, the current blockchain technology provides full transparency about transactions and some sort of anonymity about the users.
Proof-of-Verification is a node-specific proof of the actual construction of the block in question. As such, this prevents nodes from blindly signing blocks without proper verification. Hereby it compensates for the concept of the “longest chain,” which is a very important property of Proof-of-Work i.e., that if you do not work on the longest chain, rewards are lost.
This provides a balance between transparency and privacy. However, since Partisia Blockchain is a generic network for the coordination of public and private information, it is possible to implement the auditability needed to justify any level of privacy.