Andrew Miller and Ryan Pierce, creators of Zcash (ZEC/USD) protocol and cryptocurrency, have found a way to use the radioactive material from Chernobyl to help safeguard the privacy of their clients’ transactions, Motherboard reported.
As part of their ‘Powers of Tau’ ceremony designed to create and then dispose of cryptographic "toxic waste,” Ryan Pierce and Andrew Miller used radioactive graphite sourced from the core of Chernobyl’s infamous nuclear facility to create low-level gamma and beta radiation – which were then converted into random numbers used to generate Zcash’s public cryptography parameters.
To guarantee that the digital ‘waste’ didn’t fall into the wrong hands, Pierce and Miller performed the procedure flying aboard a plane some 3,000 feet above the ground.
Unlike Bitcoin (Bitcoin), Ethereum (ETH/USD), or other blockchain-based currencies, Zcash is designed to be more anonymous using new and experimental cryptography.
Zcash also uses a blockchain, but it’s also able to validate transactions while hiding potentially identifying information thanks to zero-knowledge proofs—or zk-SNARKs.
For zk-SNARKs to work, shared mathematical parameters for everyone on the network need to be set by generating random numbers. These random numbers are known as “toxic waste” since they must be disposed of after being used to generate the public parameters for security reasons.
Powers of Tau is a global event wherein each participant securely generates random numbers that constitute part of a Zcash parameter.