I catch myself doing this every time I read "privacy" in a blockchain context, mentally treating it as one dial, fully open on one end, fully closed and unverifiable on the other. Going through Dusk's own breakdown of what it actually provides made me stop doing that.
Privacy, transparency, and selective disclosure show up as three separate rows in how Dusk describes its capabilities, not one sliding scale. Privacy covers shielded transfers and zero-knowledge proofs. Transparency covers public accounts and public chain data. Selective disclosure is its own distinct thing, controlled visibility specifically for issuers, venues, auditors, or supervisors. Hiding something from the general public and losing the ability to verify it turn out to be two completely different properties, not one.
That reframed something for me. I'd been assuming an encrypted balance was, by definition, unverifiable to everyone. It's actually the opposite premise, encrypted from the public by default, verifiable to whoever's authorized, on a case by case basis rather than an all-or-nothing switch.
What I haven't pinned down yet is the actual mechanism deciding who counts as authorized in a given case, and whether that determination happens at the protocol level or gets left to whichever application is built on top. That's the piece I want to understand next.
#dusk $DUSK @Dusk $BTW $TUT
Privacy, transparency, and selective disclosure show up as three separate rows in how Dusk describes its capabilities, not one sliding scale. Privacy covers shielded transfers and zero-knowledge proofs. Transparency covers public accounts and public chain data. Selective disclosure is its own distinct thing, controlled visibility specifically for issuers, venues, auditors, or supervisors. Hiding something from the general public and losing the ability to verify it turn out to be two completely different properties, not one.
That reframed something for me. I'd been assuming an encrypted balance was, by definition, unverifiable to everyone. It's actually the opposite premise, encrypted from the public by default, verifiable to whoever's authorized, on a case by case basis rather than an all-or-nothing switch.
What I haven't pinned down yet is the actual mechanism deciding who counts as authorized in a given case, and whether that determination happens at the protocol level or gets left to whichever application is built on top. That's the piece I want to understand next.
#dusk $DUSK @Dusk $BTW $TUT