spent the afternoon digging through Dusk's docs on shielded transactions for the Binance Square task, and honestly the thing that made me stop scrolling wasn't the ZK part it was the phrase "viewing key."
Quick anchor: transactions on Dusk use PLONK-based zero-knowledge proofs to shield amounts and parties gas still gets priced in LUX regardless of which transaction type you're running. Pulled that off the docs this week.
But here's the thing "privacy that regulators can live with" sounds like it just solves the tradeoff on paper. Pull the string and the mechanism is selective disclosure auditor or compliance holder viewing keys that can decrypt specific shielded transactions under the right permissions. So it's not that nobody can see through the shield, it's that specific someones can by design.
Sat with that longer than planned. I'd assumed "privacy coin" meant nobody sees anything ever. That's not really what's being built here it's more like privacy from the public ledger not privacy from every possible party with a key.
Private from whom exactly kind of depends who's holding the viewing key. Anyone actually mapped out who ends up with auditor access in practice?