zkSNACKs Handbook

As more contributors are joining, the less they know what's going on. This document is your antidote to chaos on the land of cypherpunks.

Principles

zkSNACKs is not an ordinary company. It is a collection of like-minded individuals who want to fix the world by fixing the money.

Bitcoin Only

• We all hate wasting our time
• Cryptocurrency is the future
• Good money drives out bad money

As long as Bitcoin is the largest cryptocurrency, dealing with altcoins is a likely way to end up on the wrong side of history. As of 2022, altcoins are noise and Bitcoin is the signal.

.NET/C# Only

Things work best if we all speak the same language and this language is C#.

Accept Bitcoin

Store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account: the functions of money. zkSNACKs uses BTC as store of value and medium of exchange, and USD as unit of account. As a consequence zkSNACKs contributors receive their payments in Bitcoin, and agreements and contracts are denominated in USD.

Spend Bitcoin

While occasional fiat payments are inevitable, we only accumulate recurring costs in Bitcoin.

Open Source

Value creation is not a zero-sum game. Individuals organizing into groups to pursue the same goal will create more value than if they would have tried to do it individually. While this is great, groups also corrupt. Publishing all your work keeps us accountable to the public, as well as the large body of publicly verifiable work you accumulate throughout your journey with us will give you a strong competitive advantage finding a new job when the time comes for you to move on.

Zero Knowledge

We build systems those can't be evil. zkSNACKs is a wordplay, originating from the Block Digest podcast, on the zkSNARKs (Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge) and zkSTARKs (Zero-Knowledge Succinct Transparent Argument of Knowledge) cryptographic concepts. But it goes beyond that. Zero Knowledge Snacks implies the Snacks should know nothing about their consumers. Anyone should consume these snacks without the snacks knowing who they are being consumed by. The snacks are the products, like Wasabi Wallet, and the consumers are its users. The wallet provider should not be able to take the funds of its users and figure out who their users are. This isn’t ensured by the wallet provider choosing to not collect information. This is ensured on the architectural level. The wallet provider cannot collect information even if it wanted to.