Alan Szepieniec
PhD in post-quantum cryptography. Into Austrian economics and libertarian legal theory. Architect of Neptune, the scalable post-quantum anonymous peer-to-peer digital currency (1), and Triton VM, the recursive zk-STARK engine for Triton VM (2).
Sessions
A mutator set is a cryptographic data structure for efficiently authenticating operations on large sets, similar to a Merkle tree but with important features for privacy:
- you can add items to the set;
- you can remove items from the set;
- you cannot link additions to removals.
Depending on your perspective, it is a) a succinct decoy-and-nullifier set such as used in ZCash and Monero (but without an every-expanding nullifier set); b) a cryptographic accumulator scheme with privacy-preserving set updates; or c) a mixnet without operators. In the context of cryptocurrencies, mutator sets are capable of achieving scalable privacy.