[jl2718]

At that time the ZeroCoin protocol was known, but an example was only shown for simple transactions, and anything else would have been a lot more complex, and nobody who claimed to understand the snark construction at that level was willing to do it. Gavin was just cranking it out as an op code state machine because he knew he could do that himself. Vitalik would engage with all the big crazy ideas in the room, bringing as much as possible into the idea that was ethereum, and Joe was kind of like the interface between selling the dream and delivery on what they knew they could do. I realized much later that ethereum needed all three personalities in separation to succeed with the crypto community, because they were three different types of promises, not all fully congruent, but the big unifying vision was in the eye of the beholder, a belief that it would all bend eventually toward their personal vision: a utopian egalitarianism for some, and vast plutocratic wealth for others, a gpu mining business for some and environmentally friendly staking for others, etc etc.