Maxime Desalle

Maxime Desalle

By Maxime DesalleBusinessTechnologyInvesting
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Maxime Desalle episodes

  • Zcash Is Encrypted Bitcoin — The Winklevoss Twins

    My first interview with Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.

    Guests: Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss

    Watch on YouTube · Transcript · Follow Maxime on X

    Chapters

    • 00:00 — Intro
    • 00:47 — The 2012 thesis: digital gold
    • 01:46 — Bitcoin’s missing feature: privacy
    • 02:28 — The first internet-native money
    • 03:15 — Why they seeded Zcash in 2016
    • 04:47 — Money has always been private
    • 05:31 — The true separation of money and state
    • 06:20 — Privacy: where the state ends and you begin
    • 07:59 — AI and quantum as accelerants
    • 09:11 — Bullish AI means bullish Zcash
    • 09:27 — Bitcoin’s place in a Zcash world
    • 10:53 — Zcash in 5–10 years
    • 11:47 — AI cycles, not halving cycles
    • 13:37 — The biggest infrastructure build-out ever
    • 14:08 — Valuing Zcash as a percentage of Bitcoin
    • 14:54 — Zcash is encrypted Bitcoin
    • 16:04 — Gold is abundant in space
    • 17:27 — Why start Cypherpunk
    • 19:05 — The coming war on privacy
    • 19:55 — Flock cameras and mass surveillance
    • 22:18 — The encryption wars: Zcash is HTTPS
    • 23:47 — Wrench attacks and public blockchains
    • 25:10 — “I have nothing to hide”
    • 27:11 — Einstein at the patent office
    • 29:14 — Self-censorship in academia
    • 29:48 — Privacy forces you to engage with ideas
    • 30:41 — Outro
    • 31 min
    • Bitcoin Has Been Captured — Josh Swihart

      My first interview with Josh Swihart, founder and CEO of Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL), the team behind the Zodl wallet.

      Guest: Josh Swihart

      Watch on YouTube · Transcript · Follow Maxime on X

      Chapters

      • 00:00 — Intro
      • 00:45 — Zcash was objectively dying
      • 03:36 — What revived Zcash
      • 07:11 — Swaps: the killer feature
      • 08:41 — What was broken at ECC
      • 10:54 — A dev fund that looks like a government
      • 11:30 — The fork excuse
      • 12:20 — Why ECC went for-profit
      • 13:34 — Balaji: too big to kill
      • 16:05 — Zodl’s roadmap
      • 16:44 — The parallel polis
      • 18:25 — Building a parallel financial system
      • 19:10 — Seed phrases are antiquated
      • 21:57 — Desktop wallet, multisig & time locks
      • 24:50 — Bitcoin has been captured
      • 26:21 — Bitcoiners hedging into Zcash
      • 27:00 — How Zcash avoids capture
      • 29:25 — Do ETFs matter?
      • 30:25 — The biggest Bitcoin maximalist lie
      • 31:58 — Bitcoin’s quantum problem
      • 34:35 — Peter Todd and the soundness bug
      • 36:35 — Will Zcash overtake Bitcoin?
      • 37:23 — Zcash in the hands of billions
      • 37:39 — Store of value vs. currency
      • 38:43 — Should the transparent pool die?
      • 41:19 — Exchanges have no excuse (Gemini vs. Coinbase)
      • 44:00 — Quantum recoverability & the post-quantum roadmap
      • 45:58 — The most secure place to store funds
      • 46:19 — Tap-to-pay, Flexa & CrossPay
      • 49:08 — Stablecoins as the Trojan horse
      • 49:52 — Outro
      • 50 min
      • Why Billionaires Are Betting on Zcash — Will McEvoy

        My first interview with Will McEvoy, CIO at Cypherpunk and Principal at Winklevoss Capital.

        Guest: Will McEvoy

        Watch on YouTube · Transcript · Follow Maxime on X

        Chapters

        • 00:00 — Intro
        • 00:37 — Investing in a chaotic macro regime
        • 02:42 — What entropy actually means
        • 04:08 — Does AI create order or amplify chaos?
        • 04:35 — AI centralizes, crypto decentralizes
        • 06:25 — Zcash as private, unstoppable money
        • 07:25 — What Cypherpunk is building
        • 08:41 — Is Cypherpunk just a DAT?
        • 10:21 — The Berkshire Hathaway of privacy
        • 12:56 — What makes an asset pro-entropic
        • 14:44 — Why attacking Zcash makes it stronger
        • 16:34 — Where Bitcoin fits in
        • 18:51 — Why not gold?
        • 20:29 — AI as the forcing function for privacy
        • 23:03 — ZK proofs and information leakage
        • 25:16 — Will Zcash flip Bitcoin?
        • 26:42 — The Bitcoin maximalist cope
        • 28:41 — Toward a digital Bill of Rights
        • 30:34 — Cryptography vs. pinky-promise privacy (VPNs)
        • 33:22 — Why Zcash over other privacy coins
        • 34:22 — Complexity as attack surface
        • 35:20 — The spectrum of crypto privacy
        • 36:18 — Can Zcash avoid institutional capture?
        • 38:22 — Outro
        • 38 min
        • This Physicist Says There Are Millions of You — Sam Kuypers

          A conversation with Sam Kuypers, quantum physicist and fellow at the Conjecture Institute.

          Guest: Sam Kuypers

          Watch on YouTube · Transcript · Follow Maxime on X

          Chapters

          • 00:00 — Intro
          • 00:33 — Working with David Deutsch
          • 01:11 — Taking quantum theory seriously
          • 03:19 — Locality & local realism
          • 04:19 — Entanglement explained
          • 06:28 — Spooky action at a distance
          • 08:42 — The Conjecture Institute
          • 09:58 — What is Many Worlds?
          • 11:01 — The measurement problem
          • 16:28 — Collapse vs. Many Worlds
          • 19:00 — Branching & decoherence
          • 22:23 — The double-slit experiment
          • 25:20 — Where are the worlds? (Bekenstein bound)
          • 27:18 — What is Hilbert space?
          • 31:08 — Does Many Worlds violate energy conservation?
          • 33:57 — Is time real?
          • 34:20 — Newtonian time vs. internal time
          • 37:07 — Julian Barbour & timeless physics
          • 41:00 — The Page–Wootters clock model
          • 45:02 — Explaining time to a non-physicist
          • 47:19 — Free will in a deterministic universe
          • 50 min
          • This Cryptographer Has a 10-Year Plan for Zcash — Zooko Wilcox

            My first interview with Zooko Wilcox, co-founder of Zcash.

            Guest: Zooko Wilcox

            Watch on YouTube · Transcript · Follow Maxime on X

            Chapters

            • 00:00 — Intro
            • 00:40 — Why Zooko joined Cypherpunk as advisor
            • 01:42 — Quantum computing & Zcash’s position
            • 05:09 — Bitcoin vs Zcash culture
            • 07:18 — What is Crosslink?
            • 09:35 — Crosslink benefits: irreversible finality & security budget
            • 14:24 — Bitcoin’s security budget problem & NSM
            • 18:20 — The complexity critique of Crosslink
            • 21:23 — NSM, dynamic fees & voting confusion
            • 25:14 — Coin-weighted voting
            • 27:55 — Tachyon: scalability and post-quantum
            • 32:35 — Shielded Labs’ enterprise support services
            • 33:38 — The T-addresses debate
            • 38:30 — The political path forward for Crosslink
            • 43:25 — Turnstiles & canary networks
            • 45:28 — Zooko’s 10-year vision for Zcash
            • 49 min

            About Maxime Desalle

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