# Audrey <> PSE

## Discussusion items
- Intros
- PSE
- History & tranformation (explorations --> impact)
- Govts as users
- Problem spaces

## Notes
- Parts of ecosystem that are maturing
- Tooling & infra
- Education
- Technology is out of the "uncanny valley" of usefulness. Now finally usable
- ZCash took 90 seconds to send tx on desktop. Now we can prove things on our phones in ~1 second. It's reached the threshold of: "why put something in a ZK proof?" --> "why not?"". We're now at the "why not?" stage.
- Things that weren't true 1-2 years ago. Up until then, would stall at PoC. Things took too long. Switching to "why not? mentality. Removing cached assumption from devs / ecosystem that it's too expensive to be useful
- Govts as users
- Interview w/ NYC-based reporter of Atlantic
- Forwarded invitation to Aya in infra use cases
- Topic: crypto's next act? Instead of speculation / degen stuff, another angle that decouples: ProgCrypto as infra
- Reporter likes the angle
- Talks about govt interop. Go-to example?
- Quark ID from BA. DID wallet Taiwan. ? from Australia
- Quark ID a good example of ZK app for govt?
- V: Quark is not the only solution. Rarimo moving from Cosmos to Ethereum ZK rollup architecture. Petitions & ID wrapping for Montenegro. Early exploration aspects are useful but value in standardization, value in preventing needless points of ownership
- e.g. Rarimo: older design, RMO token, token based registry. If you were to use system as govt, you'd need to pay RMO tokens. Suggested somehting more useful like ETH. Consider monetizing high-level social applications. Nuetrality considerations
- A: are we spreading awareness? Or general direction we want to herd the cats?
- V: Yes, we want to move beyond awareness
- Govts focused primarily on identity
- Why? **Urgent challenge (bot or not?)**
- Intuitively this is answered by govt tracing all your activity but that's the bad answer. ZK in this context seems natural. Not a solution for this problem. e.g. Passports to sign txs. No need for them to know who it is, or service providers to collude & share data with each other to link users. They just know someone from X country did Y
- Too early to say which uses?
- Range of dogs on the internet to govts know everything about everyone on the internet. Finding the middle ground w/ ZK... Can prove I'm not a dog but can't clone myself into 1000 dogs
- Govts: always willing to make smart pilot (always have budget & ability)
- Next question: **what to point them to?**
- Voting (with anonyminity)?
- Notary-like use-cases?
Proving things without going through paper
- Interoperable, verifable credentials (e.g. via Email, followed by TLSN)
- Easiest painpoints to tackle first?
- Govts care about inclusion. People who don't have / cannot have the willingness to use digital services. Insist on the analog
- **Anything that increases the willingness of people to use govt services would be a big win**
- Problem. If they don't use digital services, is it mostly privacy concerns? Prob not. Mostly habit: Used to face to face interactions, e.g. local offices
- **Find something that is uniquely delivered over the internet. Not just digitizing existing services.**
- New service delivery
- Online as a new form factor
- e.g. voting abroad
- e.g. certifying who are you are over the internet
- When you were in govt in Taiwan, how did transition go into more technology (e.g. those who are not as tech savvy)?
- e.g. Bhutan working on DID. Shifting it to Ethereum L1.
- Brought up painpoints: accessibiltiy? What about people who can't use the technology?
- Started w/ tax filing. Everyone wants to minizmize the time. Anytime you spend to prove you are yourself. This shortens the service delivery cycle. Most people use FIDO or strong auth method b/c tax filing
- If you can't verify you are youself, you have to prepare your own tax files. So BIG incentive to go through the online portal & authenticate
- If you can, you just sign once & tax agency in Taiwan (since 2018) will prepare everything for you. All you have to do to prove yourselv
- mydata at Taiwan service
- Prove you are yourself
- Download anything
- Ultimately the pain of createing a new ID (online registration) is smaller than doing the taxes (having to prepare everyting yourself)
- DID wallet sovles this in granular way. e.g. income in a certain range. Classic ZK stuff
- Recieve requests to advise govts?
- Yes. e.g. Colombia part of upcoming travel. Govt of ICT wants to give a keynote on digitizing Colombia. Invited by finance superintendant to intro financial inclusion. Fraud is main worry. Interested in any tech to counter fraud. **If we have a shared narrative**, we can bring keynote in Bogota
- Quark ID
- Is this a good example to mention?
- Aya has spoken with them
- Idea: become more open. Not just ZK Sync. Involving other ecosytem players (diff govts have diff needs)
- Top priorities for govts? List of items/services to digitize?
- They typically publish a roadmap. Milestones with those things. Get budget year by year. Within each year, can run pilot (new technologies) to achieve those years. Only 2nd year on, can pivot it meaningfully
- Working with existing roadmap MINTIC. Also pointing out holes with roadmap (e.g. here are gaps)
- Typiclly reminding that you're missing a new possiblility. More humble. more humble approach. if you say "blockchain" or "cryptography". May be defensive with this.
- Audrey recommends the humbler, more boring approach :)
- Maybe focusing on upgrading the backend experience.
- e.g. ZK range proofs for online data. for ordinary people, no experience difference. Just makes collection of data harder. Proba good thing
- People / functions
- Depends on product implementation / design...
- A) consulting service for govts?
- B) OR just offer SDKs, let others do the groundwork
- If we want to understand the painpoints, need to be there. Otherwise if we offer "stronger materials" e.g. like steel. The melding/shaping still must be done (by local parteners?). If then, don't need sales people or consulatants or project implementation managers
- Sam: Don't think EF wants to be in the consulting game
- V: Aztec has started to build out this consulting
- Aya: govt consulting businesses don't have talent/knowledge in ZK. If we have others (e.g. Audrey) who can do the advising, we can focus on infra. But people will always need to help onsite & implementations. Chicken & egg. Will always need people in between
- Consider how Quark ID went about this
- Seeing smaller implementations (e.g. Montenegro). In these casess, key people were there (in person, making it happen)
- A: Asia blockchain summit. Vitalik. ZK vote with a blockchain? Or can we just use it with ProgCrypto? Still useful because it's a publicly trusted notary/securiy thing. The property of it is useful. Replicating it is hard
- That also shows: pilot phase, perhaps don't need full blockchain route
- e.g. DMV in California. Private L2 on Avalance. They udnerstand they lose by not useing public blockahin. For pilots it doesn't matter
- **How can we learn from this?** What are smaller projects we could pilot? Not the "full implementation". e.g. could we do voting but just with ZK, not also on-chain?
- Pilots can start small. e.g. Not collecting PII, just proof of ID. Doesn't yet require blockchains. BUT by the time you need auditability, more parties involved, you bring in the blockchain pieces (pilot v2)
- Narrative?
- Terminology?
- ZK? ProgCrypto?
- ZK is understood. Don't disclose more than you have to. ProgCrypto.
- e.g. contract tracing in Taiwan. Scan, send number to 1192. Telecom knows nothing about where you came to (random number). But allows for recursive notifications. Technically could call it oblivious multi-party storage. Alos could say: it's a zero-knowledge contact tracing. Maybe not technically true. But idea holds
- lowercase zk. no dashes. :)
- Narrative?
- Other areas that aren't clear?
- ZK Email. Can see ovvious uses. account recovery
- TLSNotary. Private verifying of data. Proof of assets. Where does it makes sense? e.g. Visa issuance. Proving a few things
- Residency, loan approval, paper-based doc that used to require a notary - now a single API. Good framework, still need a one-liner
- Upcoming events/travel
- Audrey won't be in Chiang Mai
- Will be in Nashville
- Then SF (20th - 29th)
- 0xPARC to speak with. Others?
- Colombia
- Audrey will advocate Colombia for these things
- Devcon
- Audrey is happy to come. Can only attend 1st couple of days. Nov 9 & 10 invitations. Can stay until 12th. Need to be in Japan afternoon of 13
- 13th event. Morning could participate.
- Meeting w/ vice governenor of 14th
- Should arrive earlier?

## Action items
- [ ] Sam: one-liner for TLSN / zkTLS - key usecase for govts
- [ ] Sam: think on v1 pilot projects (e.g. for MACI)
- [ ] Audrey: bring ZK narrative to Colombia
- [ ] Aya: share Devcon agena w/ Audrey