Riccardo Spagni Wants to Tokenize All Your Digital Assets — Provenance Summit Seoul 2018
Fluffypony sat down to share his thoughts about privacy, human rights, and your bank account.
This past week at Provenance Summit Seoul, we got to sit down with Fluffypony, otherwise known as Riccardo Spagni, to talk about Monero. This was a special opportunity since he rarely makes official public appearances in Seoul.
Riccardo is the project lead on Monero, one of the top privacy coins on the market today. It has steadily gained traction among crypto enthusiasts and tech insiders for its exemplary fundamentals and potential in various use cases. Here Fluffypony gave us insights into his philosophy behind privacy, developments on TARI, and the possibilities for the future of privacy coins.
BN: What got you started in crypto?
RS: In early 2011, I read about a Google engineer who was interested in Bitcoin. I figured that if he found it interesting, then maybe I should too. Upon further reading, it seemed to be just too good to be true. I started creating tools to challenge the network and maybe even change the way Bitcoin works. Eventually this led to my interest in altcoins at a time when innovation in the field was limited to things like Namecoin.
BN: Was there anything in particular about Monero that attracted your attention?
RS: The privacy aspect was the biggest part for me. I think privacy is a basic human right and I think it’s largely undervalued and underappreciated. There were also enough hardforks and copies of Bitcoin at that point that a new direction was needed.
BN: So you obviously saw deficiencies in Bitcoin which hindered its usefulness in some cases. What other use cases or solutions can Monero provide other than secure payment options?
RS: We are working on TARI, a decentralized assets protocol. It’s being designed for people to issue, transfer, and use natively digital assets which have no physical equivalent. Think about loyalty points, in-game assets, tickets, and security tokens as natively digital. My goal here is for users to be able to seamlessly switch between digital assets. So let’s say you have a bunch of loyalty points for an airline but you want go to a Katy Perry concert. With TARI, you will be able to transfer the value of the loyalty points into concert tickets.
What happens to the gamers with a 5-year profile of vastly upgraded items who want to switch to a new game? Wouldn’t it be nice if they could sell or even just lend out their upgraded shield or axe? They could take the value of those digital assets and spend it on their new game of choice.
BN: Bitcoin may some day be accepted as a perfectly legal currency in no small part due to the fact that every transaction is clearly traceable. How do you reconcile the foundation of those regulations with Monero’s fundamental difference in that it is meant to keep transactions private?
RS: Monero is optionally trackable. You can give out your view key which gives someone a view into your wallet. You would give your view key when purchasing Monero at an exchange to ensure transparency and correct reporting.
BN: Wouldn’t forfeiting a view key defeat the purpose of a privacy coin?
RS: Not necessarily. If you withdraw cash from the ATM, you’ll generally be fine. But if you withdraw $150k, there will definitely be some red flags waved. If you under report that, you may be confronted about it. It doesn’t stop what you do with that cash. That same state as digital cash is what we want to get to with Monero, so it must act as cash. The forward secrecy of the view key is the point of all this because it provides your privacy in the very first step.
BN: That forward secrecy is kind of like the 2FA for your crypto purchase, then. Moving forward, how does Monero plan to stay competitive against hardforks and other privacy tokens like Verge or Zcash?
RS: There are three reasons why Monero exists as it does and MoneroV does not: Monero has grassroots community support, developer support, and incentive for miners. If you fork Monero, like with MoneroV, what of those three do you get?
I’ve created five pillars for evaluating privacy currencies. Is it untraceable? Is it unlinkable? Can we hide transaction values? Can we hide the originating IP address of a transaction? Finally, is privacy mandatory? Zcash is very powerful but it fails at managing privacy. If there is a blockchain with 100,000 users and a cloud of private users of only 100 like Zcash, the real privacy set is 100 at most. Verge is a scam. It’s not worth giving them any more attention.
Ultimately I can imagine a future where Bitcoin enables confidential transactions. Lightning Network will provide a powerful level of privacy. Soon we may not even be able to guess the movement paths of those coins. The real trick will be to make privacy measures mandatory and widespread.
Big thanks to Riccardo for his time and the organizers from Provenance Summit Seoul!
