Permissionless Knowledge Creation | Conjecture Institute

Conjecture Institute Fellow Maxime Desalle does not dabble in ideas. When he discovers a subject that he’s interested in, whether economics, physics, or computer science, he studies it until he becomes so familiar with the material that he could confidently teach it to the next generation of curious novices.

The proof is in the writing, literally. Maxime has written longform explainers about both Many-Worlds quantum theory and Zcash that beginners and experts alike would learn from. Maxime’s combination of conversational tone, awareness of when the layreader may find a particular passage more technical than they think they can handle, and insistence on never skipping over any detail that true mastery requires all come together to make Maxime’s miniature books invaluable for anyone interested in Zcash and Many-Worlds quantum theory.

Zcash: Humanity’s First Private and Sound Money

“I was always passionate about economics,” Maxime recalls. “My high school teacher mentioned Bitcoin once in the context of investing. I’d never heard of it.”

Maxime would read more about Bitcoin, the world’s first successful decentralized cryptocurrency. Coming to grips with Bitcoin’s monetary properties and the problems it solves, such as the tendency of fiat currencies to lose purchasing power over time due to inflation, led Maxime to learn more economic theory outside of the classroom.

“I was around fourteen when our teacher introduced us to cryptocurrency and then Bitcoin more specifically,” Maxime says. “But our economics lessons were pretty basic, and so I started reading books like Economics in One Lesson and got into Austrian economics. I realized that the government shouldn’t be in control of the money, and that Bitcoin offered a way out.”

Only about nine years later did Maxime become passionate about Zcash, another cryptocurrency with important properties that Bitcoin lacks (see “Mastering Zcash” below).

“Bitcoin is boring, which is good,” Maxime says. “You want your store of value to be unchanging, consistent, without surprises. That’s part of why Bitcoin is unstoppable. But this also means that I lost interest in it after a while, since there was nothing on the frontier. But then I learned about Zcash and realized that there was a glaring problem that Bitcoin couldn’t solve. I still think it will become the world’s next global reserve currency, but it can never be used privately—all Bitcoin transactions are publicly recorded forever. Zcash can fix this, and it’s an incredibly exciting space to work in.”

One reason that Maxime was able to grok all of the technical aspects of Zcash’s architecture and explain every upgrade to its protocol was that he spent years studying computer science and math after high school.

“I went to a voluntary programming school called 42, where you work on projects at your own pace,” he says. “I studied a couple of computer languages, since at the time I figured that programming would be one of the few areas that artificial intelligence wouldn’t replace. I was wrong about that, but my time at 42 gave me loads of important knowledge and skills that I’d use in my eventual career in crypto.”

Mastering Zcash

The Problem That Zcash Solves

Unless you’re using cash, the information about every purchase that you make is tracked and stored indefinitely. It doesn’t matter what it is, or how sensitive it is. The infrastructure that powers commerce, both offline and online, has effectively become an inescapable surveillance apparatus.

When it was first released, there were hopes that Bitcoin could fix this, but unfortunately, it hasn’t. In fact, contrary to many people’s understanding, Bitcoin is incredibly transparent, as every transaction ever made is permanently stored and visible to everyone. Sure, wallets are pseudonymous, but in order to receive Bitcoin, you need to provide your address, thus providing your entire transaction history and balance to the sender. On top of that, services like Arkham have made it trivial, for even the general public, to track and identify wallets.

Bitcoin isn’t private. The blockchain is entirely public by design: every transaction, every address, and every balance are visible to anyone who’s interested. Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, acknowledged this problem in Bitcoin’s foundational paper, suggesting that users could preserve some of their privacy by using new addresses for each transaction. This, however, was weak mitigation, as addresses can be clustered, transaction graphs can be analyzed and real-world identities can be linked through exchanges, merchants, and metadata.

The privacy problem remained overlooked for years. Early Bitcoin users assumed pseudonymity was close enough to anonymity, but they were wrong. By the early 2010s, researchers demonstrated that blockchain analysis could de-anonymize users with high accuracy. Companies like Chainalysis, founded in 2014, turned this into a business by selling blockchain forensics to law enforcement agencies, exchanges, and even governments.

Bitcoin had solved the double-spend problem, but it had made the privacy problem worse.

Zcash takes a different approach: offering default privacy, rather than default transparency. This means that when you make a shielded Zcash transaction, the sender, the recipient, and the transaction amount are all encrypted. The network verifies that the transaction is valid, confirming that you have the funds and aren’t spending more Zcash than you own all without being privy to any information about the transaction itself.

In 2014, a new paper was published. The author list had expanded to include Eli Ben-Sasson and Alessandro Chiesa, cryptographers who had been working on a new generation of zero-knowledge proofs (methods by which you can prove that you know a secret without revealing the secret itself), plus Eran Tromer and Madars Virza.

The paper was titled “Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin.” Despite what its title may lead you to think, it wasn’t simply a Bitcoin extension, it was a complete redesign.

The key innovation was the use of zk-SNARKs, which stands for Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge. These were zero-knowledge proofs that were small (a few hundred bytes), fast to verify (milliseconds), and expressive enough to prove complex statements about hidden data. With zk-SNARKs you can prove not just that you own a valid coin, but prove that an entire transaction is valid. This isn’t trivial, it means that the system verifies that the transaction amounts are correct, there is no double-spending, etc., all without revealing the sender, recipient, or amount.

Zooko Wilcox had been in the privacy and cryptography space for decades. He had worked at DigiCash in the 1990s and been involved with decentralized storage projects with strong privacy properties like Tahoe-LAFS. So, when the Zerocash paper was released, it was an immediate fit.

In 2016, Wilcox founded the Zcash Company, later renamed Electric Coin Company, and assembled a team to turn Zerocash into a production cryptocurrency. The academic authors mentioned above joined as advisors and collaborators on the project.

The trusted setup problem required a creative solution. The team designed an elaborate, multi-party computation ceremony: six participants, all in different locations around the world, would contribute randomness to generate the public parameters, and as long as at least one participant destroyed their secret input, the toxic waste would be unrecoverable. The ceremony took place in late 2016, with participants including Peter Todd, a Bitcoin Core developer, and journalists who documented the process. Extensive work went into making sure that the ceremony wasn’t compromised, as outlined here.

On October 28, 2016, the Zcash genesis block was mined. For the first time, a production cryptocurrency offered genuine, cryptographic privacy. Thirty-four years after David Chaum’s first paper on untraceable payments, the dream of untraceable digital money was running on a live network.

Zcash wants both trustless verification and privacy, but these seem to contradict each other. How can the network verify that a transaction is valid if it can’t see the transaction?

Think about what validation actually requires:

The inputs exist, as you can’t spend coins that don’t exist.
The inputs haven’t been spent before, so that there’s no double-spending.
The authorization to spend, since you control the private key.
The math works out, and outputs don’t exceed inputs.

In Bitcoin, nodes and miners check these four criteria by looking at the data. In Zcash, the sender, recipient, and amount are encrypted, and the data isn’t visible. How, then, can anyone check these criteria?

The answer is that Zcash doesn’t ask nodes and miners to check the data. Instead, the sender provides a zk-SNARK, a cryptographic proof, that demonstrates that the transaction is valid without revealing any of the underlying information. Miners and nodes don’t learn what the inputs are, who the recipient is, or how much is being transferred, they only learn one thing: the proof is valid, and therefore the transaction is valid.

Amazingly, we can verify that a financial transaction is valid without seeing it!

The Philosophy of Privacy

Privacy does not mean secrecy, for secrecy aims to hide something shameful. Privacy is the right to choose what you reveal and to whom. Privacy is autonomy over your own information, it’s the foundation of freedom itself.

This distinction matters because critics of privacy often conflate the two. The refrain of authoritarian systems proclaims that “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear,” and assumes that privacy is only valuable to those with something to conceal. However, privacy is valuable to everyone, precisely because it creates the conditions for everything else we value: free thought, free speech, free markets, and progress.

Philosopher Karl Popper thought that progress was dependent on criticism. Bold ideas must be proposed, tested, and corrected, so that errors can be identified and discarded. This process requires freedom from punishment for proposing bold ideas before they’re tested and which risk being wrong. The panopticon ensures that dissent is muted before it can be voiced. Innovation requires permissions and criticism gets punished—the mechanism of progress breaks down.

Physicist David Deutsch extended Popper’s insights, positing that humans are unique by virtue of being universal explainers. Our capacity to create knowledge, to understand the cosmos, and even to transform it, makes us special. Yet, knowledge creation requires experimentation, and experimentation requires the freedom to fail privately before succeeding publicly. Surveillance inhibits the freedom to experiment, for when every action is observed and recorded, it suffocates creative thinking.

These are not abstract concerns. They’re the reality of anyone who has self-censored knowing their words were being surveilled. Anyone who chose not to donate to a controversial or novel cause knowing the transaction would be visible or traceable. Anyone who avoided researching a sensitive topic knowing the query would be logged. Surveillance changes behavior, that’s one of its primary functions. Sometimes, changing behaviors amounts to constraining ideas, and thus, to constraining progress.

Money is the most powerful coordination technology humans ever built. It’s how we signal value, allocate resources, and cooperate at scale, but it remains significantly restricted. Money is the most surveilled and the most controlled technology. Every transaction can be monitored. Governments can freeze accounts with a keystroke. Banks can cancel you overnight. Increasingly, capital controls can prevent you from withdrawing your own cash.

Arguably, your money is not yours if someone else can see every transaction you make, decide whether or not to approve it, and later even decide to reverse that decision and inhibit access.

It follows from the nature of how markets work that free markets require privacy:

Markets aggregate information through prices, meaning that as participants make decisions based on private knowledge, prices emerge from the sum of those decisions. The mechanism functions only if participants are able to make decisions based on their private information without also revealing it prematurely. A trader who must broadcast every position before taking it will be front-run. A business that must publish every supplier relationship will be undercut. A donor who must announce every contribution will be pressured.

Any leak, even just of small pieces of information, changes the market because it introduces bias and distorts decisions. The more surveillance there is in a system, the more distortion it faces. Perfect markets require participants who can act freely on private information, which is made impossible under conditions of absolute surveillance.

Your net worth should not be a public API. Your transaction history should not be a queryable database. Your financial life should not be subject to the approval of observers. These are not edge cases or paranoid concerns, they are the baseline requirements for markets to function and for individuals to be free.

The stability of modern Western societies may have led people to misjudge the permanence of stability. Throughout history and across the world, stability is the exception, not the rule. Regimes collapse. Currencies fail. Debt cycles reset. Capital controls appear overnight. These are not rare events or distant history, these are features of the modern world happening to someone, somewhere, right now.

In the past decade alone, Cyprus seized bank deposits during its financial crisis and Greece imposed capital controls preventing citizens from withdrawing their own money. Lebanon’s banking system collapsed, trapping savings behind withdrawal limits that have lasted years. Argentina cycled through currency crises with depressing regularity. Nigeria restricted access to foreign currency. China tightened capital flight controls.

Surveillance capabilities only move in one direction: expansion.

Governments accumulate data, build systems, hire analysts, and develop analysis techniques. Governments can share information across agencies and even across borders. The infrastructure of surveillance, once built, does not get dismantled, but upgraded.

AI is going to dramatically accelerate these advancements. Pattern matching that once required teams of analysts can now be automated. Metadata that once sat in silos can now be correlated at scale. Behavioral analysis that once took months can now happen in real time. The cost of surveillance per person drops toward zero. The only limit is what data exists to be analyzed.

We’re at a branching point. The infrastructure of money is being rebuilt. The choices made now will determine what is possible later, and the branches diverge sharply.

One path leads to total financial visibility, where every transaction is logged, every donation is analyzed, and every purchase builds a profile. This outcome is the trajectory of our current system.

Central bank digital currencies are being piloted across the globe. For example, China’s digital yuan is already deployed at scale, the European Central Bank is developing the digital euro, and the Federal Reserve has studied a digital dollar. Importantly, these systems are surveillance-enabling, not privacy-preserving, by design. The objective is increased visibility: who spent what, where, when, and with whom.

Programmable money further extends the logic of fiscal control, introducing expiration dates on currency that force spending, restrictions on what categories of goods can be purchased, social credit systems where financial access depends on behavior scores, and stimulus payments that can only be used at approved vendors. None of this requires conspiracy, it only requires the infrastructure to have been built and the incentives to use it to arise.

The other leads to money that cannot be surveilled, censored, or controlled. Transactions are private by default, and account balances are visible only to their owners, making economic activity legible to participants and opaque to observers.

It’s important to note that this path does not result in chaotic lawlessness. The result of this path is rules, but rules that are enforced by mathematics rather than institutions. It’s not possible to double-spend because cryptography prevents it. It’s not possible to inflate the supply because the protocol forbids it. It’s not possible to forge transactions because you do not have access to the required keys. The rules are embedded in the system itself, enforced by nodes instead of government, and importantly, immune to discretionary override.

In this future, markets function without the distortive effect of observation. Group coordination remains possible without the influence of surveillance. Dissenting organizations remain possible because financial support cannot be traced. Innovation remains possible because experimentation cannot be monitored. Thus, the conditions for progress described above are preserved.

These paths are mutually exclusive, you cannot have both surveillance money and freedom money. You cannot have both financial privacy and universal transaction monitoring. The infrastructure currently being built will determine which world we inhabit.

Finding Realists in a World of Instrumentalists

“After I finished the program at 42 but before starting university, I invested as much free time as I could into learning math and fundamental physics,” Maxime says. “I figured I’d never have another opportunity to study for hours on end without other responsibilities, so I made the most out of these years.”

Maxime had been following the work of Conjecture Institute Founding Donor Naval Ravikant ever since he was a teenager, and he took to heart Naval’s argument that so many problems come down to knowing math and physics.

While working at a cryptocurrency token distribution company called Sablier, Maxime’s then-boss Paul Razvan Berg suggested that he read The Beginning of Infinity by physicist David Deutsch. He was particularly intrigued by the passages about the quantum multiverse, and, after numerous rereads, he’d become persuaded.

By the time Maxime got to the University of Montreal, he was eager to hear what his physics professors would say about the quantum multiverse.

“I was very disappointed,” he says. “They were all instrumentalists who viewed quantum mechanics as just a tool to do calculations, make predictions. They didn’t care what it said about what the world was actually like. I’d waited two whole years after reading Deutsch’s book to talk to professional physicists about this, and they told me that my questions were too philosophical. It was a bit of a shock.”

Fortunately, Maxime would befriend Conjecture Institute Fellows Sam Kuypers, Charles Bédard, and Paul Raymond-Robichaud during his time at university, and the three experienced physicists (technically, Paul is a mathematician whose work applies to physics) welcomed Maxime into the fold.

“They were Everettians, like me,” Maxime recalls. “And they brought me into their particular world of physicists, virtually all of whom were realists. Unlike many of the professors around me, Sam, Charles, and Paul actually did care about what our theories actually said about the world.”

Maxime’s eventual primer on Many-Worlds quantum theory is far more a testament to his many conversations with Sam, Charles, and Paul than it is to the content of his official university courses.

Understanding Many-Worlds

Quantum physics is famously bizarre. You may have heard of Schrödinger’s cat: both alive and dead, until you see it. The thought experiment posits that an outcome cannot exist until it is observed. That’s the accepted story told in universities and textbooks.

But the problem is: it’s wrong.

This mainstream interpretation of quantum mechanics is often called the Copenhagen interpretation.

However, this name is misleading: it wasn’t a single unified theory, nor solely the creation of Bohr and the Copenhagen school after which it’s named. Pieces of it came from different people, like Bohr’s idea of ‘complementarity’ (wave-particle duality), von Neumann’s collapse postulate as a stopgap measure, and later generations who mixed them into an official-sounding package.

We will thus use collapse interpretation to refer to this mix of ideas instead of Copenhagen interpretation as it’s commonly called.

It’s also sometimes called the “Shut up and calculate!” interpretation due to its denial of the implications of quantum theory and emphasis on the calculatory aspect of quantum theory.

The collapse interpretation adds unnecessary and ad hoc assumptions to avoid the implications of many worlds existing.

The good news is there’s a better explanation—a better framework—to understand quantum mechanics. Importantly, this framework doesn’t add any additional assumptions beyond quantum theory proper.

This explanation has various names. Some call it Many-Worlds, others call it Everettian Quantum Mechanics, after Hugh Everett, the physicist who proposed it in 1957. In mainstream media it’s often called the Multiverse. Henceforth, we will refer to it as Many-Worlds.

Many-Worlds is often grouped with other “interpretations” of quantum mechanics. But unlike collapse-based views, it doesn’t add extra assumptions. It simply takes the Schrödinger equation literally and universally.

For now, we’ll call it Many-Worlds. Later, we’ll argue why it’s better understood not as just one interpretation among others, but as quantum theory itself.

The Schrödinger Equation

In 1926, Erwin Schrödinger introduced what would become the core equation of quantum mechanics: the Schrödinger equation.

But more importantly, he introduced a completely new object into physics, the wave function, usually denoted by the Greek letter ‘Ψ’.

The wave function is a mathematical object that encodes the entire physical state of a quantum system.

Given the wave function, you can calculate everything you might want to know: how likely it is to find a particle in a given location, how it will evolve over time, or what outcomes an experiment might yield.

The Schrödinger equation is linear, deterministic, and universal:

1. Deterministic: If you know the state of the wave function at initial time t₀, or Ψ(t₀), then you can compute the wave function for any future time t, or Ψ(t).

2. Linear: If Ψ₁ and Ψ₂ are solutions to the Schrödinger equation, then any combination aΨ₁ + bΨ₂ is also a solution, where a and b are any real numbers.

3. Universal: It applies to all particles or systems that can exist.

One of the most famous results in quantum mechanics is the Born rule, introduced by Max Born in 1926. It tells us how to extract probability density from the wave function: p(x) = |Ψ(x)|², where x corresponds to one of the quantum system’s observables like position, momentum, or energy.

The difference between probability and probability density is as follows: the probability of something is the likelihood of it happening, but the probability density describes the concentration of that likelihood among different values, sort of like a map showing where outcomes are more or less likely.

This means the probability density of finding a particle near position x is the square of the absolute value of the wave function at that position.

In classical physics, a system is always in one definite state. A coin is either heads or tails. A particle has a specific position and velocity. Reality is singular.

Quantum mechanics, as described by the wave function Ψ, is different. A system can exist in a superposition, a single physical state that encodes multiple and simultaneous realities.

This isn’t a statement about our ignorance or uncertainty. It’s a statement about what is, superpositions are entirely real, evolve deterministically, and follow the Schrödinger equation at all times.

What Is a Superposition?

A quantum system can be described as (again, don’t worry about the weird notation): Ψ = a|A> + b|B>.

The above equation is an example of a superposition. |A> is one outcome, |B> is another outcome, and both outcomes are equally real.

Imagine having a coin where neither face is just heads or just tails, but instead, both at once, not because the state of the coin’s face is unknown, but because the outcomes exist in a blended state.

Let’s say that |A> is heads and |B> is tails. The numbers a and b, called amplitudes, tell us how much of |A> and |B> are in the mix relative to each other. The amplitudes are like proportions of ingredients in a recipe, and indicate how much of each outcome (ingredient) the system has.

However, we don’t see both outcomes when we look. We’ll come to that later.

Why the Collapse Interpretation Is Wrong

The collapse interpretation asserts that the wave function Ψ, while useful for predicting probabilities, is not real. According to this view, Ψ is a tool for calculating the probability density of various outcomes (using the Born rule), but not a description of the system itself.

The defining feature of the collapse interpretation is of course the collapse postulate: the wave function evolves smoothly and deterministically only until a measurement is made. Then, it randomly collapses into one of its outcomes, and all other outcomes are destroyed.

This collapse is instantaneous and non-deterministic. Before collapse, a system might be in a superposition, like the example from earlier.

After a measurement, one of the outcomes, say, heads, remains.

The other possibility, tails, is considered to have “disappeared.” The wave function no longer describes both outcomes, only one is real. This abrupt change is not derived from the Schrödinger equation, it’s an addition. To be clear, this is not a minor technical point, it requires introducing a separate rule for quantum systems once observed:

Deterministic Schrödinger equation when unobserved.
Random collapse when observed.

In other words, according to the collapse interpretation view, the Schrödinger equation applies everywhere and at any point in time, except when an observation is made.

But what qualifies as an observation, and who, or what, counts as an observer?

It’s here that things get suspicious. The collapse interpretation never provides a clear, physical definition of a measurement or an observer. The theory assumes this boundary but refuses to say where it lies. Is it the eye? The brain? A camera? A Geiger counter? A thermometer? Consciousness?

It gets even worse: observers themselves are made of quantum particles!

The collapse interpretation avoids resolving these issues by simply declaring that somehow collapse happens when it needs to, and that the details don’t matter.

Hence why it’s called by many the “Shut up and calculate!” interpretation. But the cost of shutting up is blocking decades of scientific progress.

It’s important to emphasize that collapse contradicts the core equation of quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger equation.

To reiterate, the Schrödinger equation is:

1. Linear: superpositions evolve linearly. Their parts may interfere or cancel, but they never collapse on their own.

2. Deterministic: there is no randomness in the equation.

3. Universal: the Schrödinger equation applies to all physical systems. Planets, labs, and observers are built from atoms, and atoms are quantum systems, so the whole remains quantum.

Collapse violates these features, as it’s:

1. Non-linear: it destroys all but one term.

2. Non-deterministic: it introduces randomness with respect to measurement outcomes.

3. Non-universal: it happens only when “observed,” but never explains what that means physically.

Importantly, the collapse mechanism isn’t derived from anything. It’s injected by arbitrary fiat.

And as shown through the violation of linearity, determinism and universality, it’s not just an unneeded philosophical add-on. It’s physically incoherent and mathematically ill-defined—an extra rule with no place in the framework of the Schrödinger equation.

The Theory of the Universal Wave Function

In 1957, a 26-year-old Princeton graduate student named Hugh Everett III published what would become one of the most important papers in the history of physics.

Everett’s radical proposal was stunning in its simplicity: Take the Schrödinger equation seriously. Apply it to everything. Never collapse the wave function.

Everett asked: What if we stop treating measurement as a special exception to the rules of physics? What if we treat observers, whether humans or instruments, as quantum systems unto themselves, obeying the same deterministic laws as everything else?

After all, nothing in quantum theory indicates that the Schrödinger equation shouldn’t apply everywhere.

The implications of his simple insight were extraordinary.

So, what actually happens when you perform a measurement, if it’s not collapse? Everett’s answer was simple: nothing out of the ordinary. Measurement is just another physical interaction, one quantum system interacting with another, governed entirely by the Schrödinger equation.

Suppose you have a particle |Ψ> in a superposition of two outcomes |A> and |B>: |Ψ> = a|A> + b|B>.

Now, let’s suppose that you bring in a measurement device, such as a detector, or even just your own eyes. That measurement device is itself a quantum system, and so is also described by its own wave equation. Let’s assume the device (or your eyes) to initially be in the state |D₀>.

When the particle interacts with the device, the universal Schrödinger equation doesn’t collapse anything. Instead, it entangles the two: |Ψ> = a|A>|D_A> + b|B>|D_B>.

Here’s what this so-called entanglement signifies:

If the particle is in state |A>, the device registers “A”, which is why we write it as |D_A>. It’s tied to the state—it’s entangled with it.
If it’s in state |B>, the device registers “B”, which explains why we write it as |D_B>.

There is no collapse here. Instead, there is just entanglement, and two equally real outcomes.

Further, if an observer was in the room, say initially in the state |O₀>, they would become entangled as well: |Ψ> = a|A>|D_A>|O_A> + b|B>|D_B>|O_B>.

What the above equation says is: there is a branch where the device measured outcome |A>, and the observer subsequently became entangled with that branch. There is another branch where the device measured outcome |B>, and the observer subsequently became entangled with that one as well.

Taking things literally, without fear of the implications, this means that there are now two observers: one who observed and became entangled with state |A>, and another who observed and became entangled with state |B>.

Both are equally real, but they can’t interact with each other. Importantly, until the exact moment that the entanglement occurred, the observer was one person, however, once the entanglement happened, two versions of the same observer emerged.

This might seem crazy, but all we’re doing here is taking quantum mechanics seriously and figuring out its implications. There are no additional, ad hoc assumptions here.

This is why calling Many-Worlds an ‘interpretation’ is misleading. It is quantum theory taken literally. Collapse interpretations, by contrast, are extra rules pasted on top.

Standing at the Frontiers of Physics and Money

These days, Maxime applies his passion for finance and crypto at his new job as investment analyst with Winklevoss Capital, a New York-based family office and early-stage venture capital firm founded in 2012 by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. Like Maxime himself, Winklevoss Capital builds on the frontiers of humanity, with a special focus on cryptocurrency ecosystems and other cutting-edge sectors.

At night, he continues to work on quantum theory. For example, he is currently developing a course for Conjecture Institute called Taking Schrödinger Seriously, which explains quantum mechanics from the ground up and without any confusing and arbitrary declarations about wave function collapse that most other pedagogical materials insist on.

“I was inspired by Paul,” he says. “He just left the university system to do his own thing. You don’t actually have to be part of the university system to contribute original research.”

Nor is Maxime finished with Zcash. While there are now countless books about the history, technical details, economics, and societal implications of Bitcoin, there is not yet a single primer about Zcash. Maxime is currently expanding his already wide-ranging Zcash explainer into the first book that explains Zcash from all angles.

Maxime’s expertise in physics, mathematics, and Zcash did not come from years of mandated curricula. On the contrary, they come from a relentless pursuit of his interests and a fearlessness in the face of technical details or counterintuitive concepts. He does not have a degree in Zcash, yet he will be the first person on Earth to have written a book about it. He does not have a PhD in physics, yet he may soon publish peer-reviewed articles. Like Zcash and research themselves, Maxime’s labors of love are permissionless.

Zcash: Humanity’s First Private and Sound Money

Finding Realists in a World of Instrumentalists

Standing at the Frontiers of Physics and Money

References