Argo Garbling Scheme BitVM Bridges & Shielded CSV | Bitcoin 2026

Hi everyone. >> Hi. >> Who here identifies as a cipher punk? Who likes your original vision of cipher punk money? >> Yeah, we are going to talk about that today because we think that's the most important thing about Bitcoin. >> Um, we are Ideal Group and we are a company building for privacy and scalability on Bitcoin. So, my name is Ingong. >> Uh, I'm Liam. >> I'm Robin. >> And today we're going to talk about the central vision of Bitcoin as money. Why we need privacy and scalability for it and why we need a culture shift back to the original cipher punk money that we were promised. >> I think uh Yeah. Yeah. As we all know, Satoshi's original vision was that we all buy micro strategy stocks and we just No, obviously that's not the case. Uh, it is about cipher punk money and I think we should refocus the entire Bitcoin culture back on cipher punk money. >> There's been a big transition away from that over the last several years. People who've been in the space for a long time can probably feel it. and uh we think that we have a way to kind of bring it back and achieve what Bitcoin was meant to be. >> So before I joined Ideal Group, I worked on other coins and I think compared to Bitcoin, um other coins don't have the distribution or the influence that is needed to make this a reality. I think our best shot at cyberpunk money is Bitcoin. Um the problem is that Bitcoin today it does not work for payments. It does not have the privacy and scalability that we need to actually bring it to billions of people. And this is what's motivating Ideal Group to build secure bridges to build private and trustless payment protocols. Yeah, Bitcoin has a really unique opportunity as like such a large and influential asset with such a strong ethos and so many people who believe in what it can be that it's in my opinion maybe our only chance to like uh achieve the freedom money that we all want and uh yeah um >> and we have developed a protocol called shielded CSV which is a second layer protocol on top of Bitcoin and um it has a lot of very interesting properties. Um, first of all, it gives you basically perfect privacy comparable to Ccash. Like it obuscates both the transaction amounts and the transaction graph. And um, it's not just private, it's also way more scalable than regular Bitcoin transactions. And that is basically a match made in heaven because now you're incentivizing people to use private transactions instead of regular transactions because they're just cheaper and uh, yeah, also more scalable. And um it can increase the throughput of the of the base layer to about 100 transactions per second. So it gives us like roughly 20x improvement of throughput. And the interesting thing is that um sheeted CSV transactions are actually very uh cheap to verify for full nodes. Actually you can just ignore them if you're not participating in the protocol. And like a block full of shielded CSV transactions would be actually easier to verify than um a block full of regular Bitcoin transactions. And um yeah, that gives nice scalability pro properties. And um yeah, it's it's a way to yeah make Bitcoin both private and more scalable in the end. Yeah, I used to work on Zcash as a cryptographic engineer for two years and shielded CSV offers the same privacy guarantees as Zcash, namely that your anonymity set is the whole of every note commitment that has ever existed in the payment system. And I think privacy is crucial for Bitcoin to become a viable payment system. that is truly censorship resistant. We must have it such that the validators um the miners cannot distinguish between uh one person's transactions and anothers. >> Yeah. Without privacy, Bitcoin is not fungeable. So, Bitcoin can be discriminated against people. It can be identified. it can be sequestered from the rest of the supply and it it fundamentally undermines its value as uh money and you can have these de facto kind of uh forks essentially where you have pools of Bitcoin that are not usable by other people and uh yeah and um it's fundamental to Bitcoin actually being able to um be a store of value because in the long run like If we continue this path of like giving more and more of our money to institutions who then give it in custody to Coinbase or whoever that centralizes the supply and um it also centralizes the on and off ramps like it centralizes the interface for people to interact with that system and that's uh taken away all the fundamental properties of Bitcoin because um the fewer people are using self- custody the less we can be certain about the total supply. Uh because you don't know if Micro Strategy actually has all the Bitcoin that they are promising to everyone. They can promise bitcoins multiple times to people and effectively increasing the supply um by just yeah creating these promises out of thin air. I'm not saying they're doing it, but I'm saying this fundamental property of Bitcoin of being actually scarce is only guaranteed if we actually use it self-custodial. And that's why it's so important that that Bitcoin is actually accessible and usable for billions of people to yeah use it directly to guarantee the fundamental properties to everyone. I think Bitcoin's value derives from its ethos and its utility in like a permissionless payment system. And uh I think that these things are are like tightly coupled, right? A lot of people are are focused on the price and for many people it seems like Bitcoin is becoming something like an institutional memecoin, right? It's just like an instrument that you buy and you don't really care about anything. But I think that this is a really dangerous path to go and the network can become centralized by institutions holding all of the Bitcoin and holding it on behalf of other people. And it the whole thing is is much more fragile than people realize. And so we have to pursue this like original vision of Bitcoin in order to like you know make it work at all. So this being the open-source stage um we're going to go into some detail pretty high level on the actual solution that we're building. So as they've mentioned um this is shielded CSV and CSV here stands for client side validation. Um besides all the properties that Robin mentioned such as high throughput and cheap verification um crucially shielded CSV can be instantiated today on Bitcoin without a soft fork. And in this sense it's a meta protocol that uses Bitcoin L1 consensus for double spend prevention and for canonical state. But besides that, shielded CSV moves all of the client state and client state validation offchain. And for this reason, it's extremely high throughput and extremely efficient in terms of its use of block space. So I think for for the benefit of someone new to Bitcoin or someone new to privacy solutions on Bitcoin, I wanted to ask you guys um how do you think shielded CSV compares to other existing privacy solutions or other popular alternatives for private Bitcoin? So there are uh ways that you can use Bitcoin more privately um like coin joints or maybe with lightning, but none of the existing um suite of techniques for making bitcoin private today are able to deliver like the so-called perfect privacy where you cannot identify any information at all about the transaction by looking at what's published on chain. Um most of the existing techniques have uh complicated trade-offs. So maybe they require livveness assumptions or complicated liquidity management. And the nice thing about shielded CSV is it's just a pure transaction protocol. It doesn't it doesn't have any of these uh additional like um issues. >> And also the anonymity set as Incom already mentioned is um basically everyone who's using the protocol for coin joins. It's just the people who participated in your particular coin join which might be like a 100 people or something but there are ways to deanonymize it in particular like if if if the attacker participates in the coin join they can uh learn more about or like they can try to dean an anonymize um and um in sheeted CSV the anonymity set is basically every transaction that ever happened and um yeah that gives you way stronger privacy protocol uh privacy properties And um it is yeah I would say best-in-class privacy um comparable to Zcash or other um um protocols that give you like the highest possible level of privacy. >> In contrast to these other protocols however it does not introduce like higher burden on nodes. It's actually cheaper to verify um and it uh doesn't require publishing proofs. So it requires much less communication overall. It's uh I don't know. I've been working on these kinds of things for a long time and I I really think it's it's perhaps like the best way even possible to do something like this. >> Yeah, in Zcash even though we keep their transactions offchain we do have to publish the proofs of their validity onchain and the Zcash consensus incurs this cost of having to maintain these proofs and validate them. uh whereas in the case of shielded CSV this is moved client site and this history of transaction and account validity is proven using a chain of recursive proofs and these proofs are always constant size and constant time to verify. Um and the point here as well is that these proofs never have to be submitted onchain. And so really shielded CSV is the lowest cost um private payment protocol possible. Um >> to give you a high level intuition of how it works. Um like the key idea behind it is that we should use the blockchain for which the blockchain is good for which is an immutable ordering of commitments to prevent double spending. Uh we don't need the we don't need a global consensus of like every detail of a transaction. We only need a global consensus on like commitments to prevent double spending. And uh just to to make the strawman construction to like get an intuition of how it works um like I as the sender can you send the recipient um the entire coin history theoretically. Of course it's not not efficient if I would actually send you the entire coin history. But if I would send you the entire coin history offchain, you could verify the entire coin history and convince yourself that the history is valid giving the coin value. The only thing you cannot verify on the client side or like offchain is that no double spending occurred. But everything else you can verify on the client side offchain. So that's the key idea behind this protocol that we are basically having this interaction between sender and recipient and the recipient is the only person in the system who is actually incentivized to verify the entire coin history. And um the only thing we need from the blockchain are these small commitments to prevent double spending to make the history unique to prove to the recipient that you did not split the history and like gave the same coin to someone else. And that makes it so efficient that we don't put the transaction on chain. We only put like very small commitments on chain to prevent double spending. And this thing of like sending you the history sounds very inefficient and actually it would be very inefficient. But there's a very um basically magical technology called ZK Snarks that is a cryptographic compression technique that allows you to compress sheer infinite amount of computation into a very succinct proof that is as convincing as the original data. And I can create a proof of this entire coin history and send you that proof of the coin history. And that is as convincing as if I had sent you the coin history itself. And that makes it very efficient um also on the client side. So I don't have to send you the history. I just send you that proof that the history is correct. And that is cryptographically convincing uh as convincing as if I had sent you the entire coin history. >> And uh people in Bitcoin may maybe have heard of zero knowledge proofs. We've been talking about them for a long time. And uh my background is also in in sort of ZK research. But these are feasible to generate now on a phone. We can do this. Um part of the reason why protocols like this were not sort of pursued in the past is just because it was not technically feasible, but it is now. And the proofs can be postquantum. um they're extremely fast to generate and uh yeah the >> so I have a question which is um this is a Bitcoin meta protocol and um we can deploy it today without a soft fork but basically how are we going to solve the problem of bridging from Bitcoin L1 into the shielded CSV meta protocol >> that is Actually the fundamental crux of the protocol um the protocol is actually just a token protocol. Maybe you've heard of RGB or like Taproot assets and it's very similar to that. So it is like a token protocol on top of Bitcoin. But of course we don't want to sell you any crazy tokens or something. We want to have Bitcoin in there. So we want to bridge the Bitcoin asset from L1 to a shielded CSV protocol. And one way to do that is BitVM. Um yeah um bitvm bridges enable that um that is a way that we can like there's a way to enable bridges like right now without any softks. So that is a solution. However it comes with trust assumptions like bitvm relies on a so-called one of n trust assumption. So you have like basically a trusted setup where let's say 10 to 100 people come together and as long as one of them is honest then nobody can steal money from the bridge but you still need to trust that at least one of them is honest and of course that is like not a super desirable property. Ideally we want it to be completely trustless and that is currently not possible unfortunately but um yeah with a consensus change >> um that could become possible. So we could get rid of this trust assumption and make it fully trustless. >> Yeah, Robin and I have been working on um these kinds of BitVM bridges. I mean Robin is the creator of BitVM and uh we at Ideal have uh the state-of-the-art basically in in terms of how how good it is possible to do this. Um and uh I think Robin is also probably the best uh Bitcoin script wizard hacker uh in the world. And uh we've tried really really hard to figure out how to do this as best as possible without changing Bitcoin. And I think it can be done. But in order to realize this like vision of permissionless um private scalable payments, we really need the ability to have a trustless bridge. A bridge that doesn't have any operators, doesn't have any signers, can just run and be verified by consensus. And this is possible. We can do this. We know how to do this using snarks and zero knowledge proofs. It's just a matter of getting the word out and making people understand that this is the most viable path towards what Bitcoin is supposed to be and uh articulating exactly how we want to do that and we have simple software proposals that would allow us to do this. So, >> welcome to predict. The world is a market. Everything is a market. Every headline moves the line. Every moment is your market. Call the moves. Bet on your instinct, your prediction, your edge. Dual bits predict where everything is a market. >> There are actually um a few proposals that would give us what we want. Um, for example, there's great script restoration that has been discussed for a while. Um, basically reactivating op codes that have that are that used to be in Bitcoin, but Satoshi like one day he found a bug in one of them and he got paranoid and then he deactivated like half of them. Um, and um yeah, there's um like um Russell Okconor Russell Okconor from Blockstream. He's working on great script restoration. So that would would be one proposal that um would allow us to build a snark verifier in Bitcoin script. Another solution um would be simplicity. Maybe you've heard of that. Um it's um another new scripting language developed by Blockstream and um that would also allow us to implement a snack verifier. And um yeah, there are many different ways like even opcat alone like just the op code opcat would give us a snack verifier basically. So the point I want to make is um we don't need like crazy consensus changes. Actually people thought to have strong privacy on Bitcoin we need like deep invasive consensus changes and like we need like lots many lines of code to change but that is not the case. Like actually just activating OKCAT would already give us um basically perfect privacy and way better scalability. So we are actually quite close um to to making that happen and it's uh no no invasive changes are necessary for that. >> No but I think the problem with with this is sort of uh one of of direction and like Bitcoin governance right we need to like decide what we want to do and then do it the right way. Uh we've tried hacking Bitcoin as much as possible, but I think that really we should be uh more ambitious in asking for what we really want and telling people why. And that's what we're trying to do. >> Yeah. It's actually like a cultural problem. Yeah. Bitcoin being able to serve billions of people as money is not really a technical problem. for the technical problems. We do have solutions. It's more a cultural problem of us like deciding that we want that and that we dream of that and that we go back to the original cypher punk ideas that uh actually made this community big. Uh originally like back in I don't know 2014 15ish people were just about like making Bitcoin money. It wasn't about Michael Sailor on the main stage. like he didn't exist back then and all these ideas didn't exist back then. It was about Bitcoin being usable as money and making the world a better place by having a better money that is healthy that is a healthy foundation for for for society instead of this fiat money that is cancer. And we need to refocus on that. We need to stop laughing. We need to refocus on making Bitcoin money. And it's a cultural problem. It's really us starting to think again about making Bitcoin more useful and then it basically becomes quite easy to do these consensus changes necessary to solve all the technical problems that we need to solve to get there. >> Yeah, I think you know it is a cultural problem and to go even further it is an existential problem. So privacy is not just a nice to have. Um without privacy, Bitcoin cannot be used as freedom money. Um Bitcoin loses fungeability. um oppressive jurisdictions um will always be able to distinguish the activities of people they are trying to censor uh people they are trying to exclude from the financial system. And so it is only when um the miners of Bitcoin are unable um to discriminate between transactions that Bitcoin truly becomes usable and free money. >> There's um yeah >> there's a class of also solutions that people um or many people think that Bitcoin can be used in in these kind of custodial ways. So uh in in fact many privacy kind of techniques end up degenerating into these custodial solutions where you let somebody else manage your money for you and uh you you can have nice properties on top of that. Um but I think that this is not like um sustainable. I mean there's just huge practical issues with this. like it's it's potentially illegal and uh it undermines the um distributed ownership of Bitcoin, which is where we derive our value from. When you have centralized parties that control all of the funds, it's easier to shut down the system. Those parties have more say in what happens. And uh we we need to like really have permissionless decentralized ownership of Bitcoin that's usable in a private and scalable way. Without that, I don't think that it will succeed long term. >> And a lot of people are saying that like if you like Jack Dorsey for example, he keeps on reiterating that the most likely way that Bitcoin is going to fail is that it's not going to that we don't use it. clearly says we have to use Bitcoin for it to be able to succeed. And I think Satoshi said that as well. He said something like uh in a couple decades um there's going to be either lots of transactions or none. And um I think we should refocus on yeah making Bitcoin as usable as possible to as many people as possible and start dreaming that dream again. And I think daring to dream that dream is actually extremely powerful. It is quite unlikely that we will succeed. Yeah, sure. Like I I'm not unrealistic. Like I I know that the probability that Bitcoin is going to become the dominant payment system in the world is quite low. But if you think about it, like maybe you've seen that legendary talk of um Andreas Antonopoulos where he he talked to like a room of like three people or something and now we have like things like this with like how many people are here like few 10,000 or something. The president of the United States sells his shitcoin here. So we came a long way and it was so unlikely that this is this succeed that that this would succeed. So it is we have already seen such a wonder happening. So it's not uh it's not impossible that it will happen again and the key thing is that we start believing in it again because that is what it was originally about. It was about peer-to-peer electronic cash being used by everyone in the world and that is possible. There is a way to do that and we should believe in that. We should talk about that. We should focus on that and we should have a culture that embraces this idea. >> We can't take our success as Bitcoin as an inevitability. It's it's not guaranteed. And we have to be very clear about what the value of Bitcoin derives from. It's it's not supposed to be a speculative asset that's held custodially by a few central parties. That's not going to succeed. Yeah. there won't be Bitcoin and uh it I think we we still have a chance but we have to recognize this and you know do it. >> Yeah. I think the growing influence of Bitcoin and the growing participation of institutional players can work in our advantage here precisely because we are able to bootstrap this privacy protocol as a matter protocol today without soft forks and precisely because we're able to achieve the huge anonymity set um best-in-class privacy on such an influential asset that so many important certain people care about and own and are invested in. Um the fact that we're able to bridge Bitcoin across into this system in a trust reduced way again without a soft fork. I think all of these are incredibly bullish. uh the fact that we can do all of this without a consensus change in L1 and make use of Bitcoin's adoption um and influence to bootstrap a truly private and free money payment system uh makes me really optimistic. >> So what should we do now? >> We need to take action to make this happen. I think the simplest thing for everybody to do is to just acknowledge the problem and like recognize that this this is a problem and that we have a solution that we have to pursue this vision that we're outlining and tell people about it. Like I I feel like often in Bitcoin conversations it's just sort of taken for granted that it it's you know digital gold and it doesn't matter if we can use it for payments and um all of this and I I don't think that's true. So if you believe in this then then you know tell people. Um >> I think championing um privacy and scalability as just principles that we cannot compromise on. Um supporting projects that work on this um supporting advocates that are promoting this message. Uh all of this is part of the culture shift back to the Bitcoin that we were promised. Um and it's very important >> and for for people who are more technically inclined, I mean, reach out, get in touch with us. We're we're we're working on this. We're trying to make it happen. We're still small, but I think we can do it. Um all the technical pieces we know how to do. Um and we welcome contributions or just general interest from the community. Um, and if you're a secret whale and want to fund us, fund us, we are cyber punk as it gets. We love this stuff. Like we are not lapas. We we are very serious about it. Um, and the other thing is yeah, we we need to like get rid of this this stagnation. We need to embrace softbox. We need to think about consensus changes and we we need to yeah um realign ourselves with that vision of making Bitcoin money. And for that we need to like improve Bitcoin also like on the consensus level and um yeah we need to demand that from our culture. >> Activate a snark verifier on L1. >> Yeah >> we need that. >> Okay that's it. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Weird time. Every year this community comes together to celebrate, to debate, to build what comes next. And every year the stage gets bigger. Sound money center stage. So, where do you go to celebrate the next chapter in Bitcoin history? You come home. Nashville, July 2027.