#dusk $DUSK @Dusk Found something in Dusk's old repositories that reframed the whole project for me.
Before Succinct Attestation, Dusk's consensus was called Segregated Byzantine Agreement, and the mechanism at its heart was Proof of Blind Bid. There's still a repository named dusk-blindbidproof, described as an implementation of a privacy-oriented proof-of-stake protocol.
Read that again. A consensus design where the amount you bid — your stake — was hidden.
That is an extraordinarily consistent idea for a chain whose entire thesis is that financial information shouldn't be public by default. If you believe balances deserve confidentiality, why would a validator's balance be the exception?
Today, that's exactly what it is. Provisioner stakes are public. Committee selection is stake-weighted sortition, and the docs describe penalties in terms of reducing "effective stake used in sortition." All of it visible.
Here's my reading of why, and I want to be clear it's my reasoning rather than a Dusk statement: hidden stake fights with almost everything else you need. Slashing requires attributable misbehaviour. Verifying that a committee was selected correctly requires knowing the weights. Institutional counterparties want to know who is securing settlement. Blind bidding is elegant and it makes every one of those problems harder.
So the pragmatic choice was probably the right one. But it's still a trade: the confidentiality thesis stops at the consensus layer, and I've never seen Dusk explain that boundary publicly.
Should a privacy chain's validators be private too — or is transparent security the price of being trusted with regulated assets?
Before Succinct Attestation, Dusk's consensus was called Segregated Byzantine Agreement, and the mechanism at its heart was Proof of Blind Bid. There's still a repository named dusk-blindbidproof, described as an implementation of a privacy-oriented proof-of-stake protocol.
Read that again. A consensus design where the amount you bid — your stake — was hidden.
That is an extraordinarily consistent idea for a chain whose entire thesis is that financial information shouldn't be public by default. If you believe balances deserve confidentiality, why would a validator's balance be the exception?
Today, that's exactly what it is. Provisioner stakes are public. Committee selection is stake-weighted sortition, and the docs describe penalties in terms of reducing "effective stake used in sortition." All of it visible.
Here's my reading of why, and I want to be clear it's my reasoning rather than a Dusk statement: hidden stake fights with almost everything else you need. Slashing requires attributable misbehaviour. Verifying that a committee was selected correctly requires knowing the weights. Institutional counterparties want to know who is securing settlement. Blind bidding is elegant and it makes every one of those problems harder.
So the pragmatic choice was probably the right one. But it's still a trade: the confidentiality thesis stops at the consensus layer, and I've never seen Dusk explain that boundary publicly.
Should a privacy chain's validators be private too — or is transparent security the price of being trusted with regulated assets?
