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ZCash (formerly Zerocash/Zerocoin) technology preview

z.cash

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Re: ZCash (formerly Zerocash/Zerocoin) technology preview

#71
post #67

With it use BTC or have a new money supply, or both? Will it be launched as a Bitcoin sidechain, or are there any plans to make it one after launch?

Zcash runs it's own blockchain.

The original zerocash team approached the bitcoin developers over a year ago asking to integrate some of their ideas into the bitcoin blockchain and were turned down entirely. So they went underground and developed zcash.

Zcash still seems to share quite a bit in common with bitcoin, however. For example, they are sticking with the 21,000,000 coin market cap.

Re: ZCash (formerly Zerocash/Zerocoin) technology preview

#72

For those of you concerned about pump and dump, they've specifically addressed it in a blog post [1]. And they are open sourcing a ton of stuff. But that's addressed in their blog. So to me, the lay man, it seems like they won't be doing a pump and dump. I say lay man because I'm really not qualified to assert that my statements are indeed correct. [1] https://z.cash/blog/funding.html

So, what is to stop someone from forking the code and removing the percentages that go to the Zcash company and devs? Similar to how Monero was forked from Bytecoin due to some odd shadiness (not that I think Zcash and co. are shady!) [0].

[0]https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=740112.0

Re: ZCash (formerly Zerocash/Zerocoin) technology preview

#74
post #2

Nothing new here. Add it to the pile of hundreds of other altcoins. Why is this here? Feels like the pump-and-dump world of altcoins is being done here to pump up this post.

> Nothing new here. Add it to the pile of hundreds of other altcoins. It sounds to me like you don't understand the technology involved. To be fair, it's probably Greek to most people outside of crypto. How many of the other altcoins were based on zero-knowledge proofs or allowed for private transfers (with respect to the blockchain)? I'm not aware of any. I think that's something new and worth talking about. (EDIT:…

>allowed for private transfers

Monero?

https://getmonero.org/knowledge-base/moneropedia/ringsignatu...

https://getmonero.org/knowledge-base/moneropedia/stealthaddr...

Re: ZCash (formerly Zerocash/Zerocoin) technology preview

#75
Here's some stuff on zerocash:

Zerocash: Decentralized anonymous payments from Bitcoin: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bitcoin/Zerocash:%20Decentra...

Zerocoin: anonymous, distributed e-cash from bitcoin: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bitcoin/Zerocoin:%20anonymou...

How to explain zero knowledge protocols to other people's children: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bitcoin/snarks/How%20to%20ex...

GGPR paper, NIZKs without PCPs: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bitcoin/snarks/Quadratic%20s...

Snarks for C: Verifying program execution succinctly and in zero knowledge: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bitcoin/snarks/SNARKs%20for%...

Secure sampling of public parameters for succinct zero knowledge proofs: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bitcoin/snarks/Secure%20samp...

https://github.com/scipr-lab/libsnark

FWIW I think that confidential transactions and even SNARKs will eventually make their way into Bitcoin.

Re: ZCash (formerly Zerocash/Zerocoin) technology preview

#76
post #27

I hope I'm wrong, but if ZCash delivers on the technical promise the blowback from legislators and law enforcement is sure to result in a net loss of privacy for everyone. Enabling illegal profiteering from the very real pain and suffering of others almost always results in government actio (appropriately so); but also legislative over-reaching (eg. mandated sentencing legislations, zero tolerance policies, warrantle…

The same could be said of strong encryption: if people use it, the government might crack down.

On the other hand, the more people use encryption, the less useful mass surveillance will be to the government. When the government no longer gets much worthwhile information from eavesdropping, it may be easier to get politicians to put a halt to eavesdropping.

So it could be that the best way to protect privacy is to use both technical and political approaches.

Re: ZCash (formerly Zerocash/Zerocoin) technology preview

#77
post #18

I wish someone would come up with a bitcoin alternative that isn't based upon speculation to get people interested in it.

I don't see another way to bootstrap value in an unbacked unofficial currency. It's possible to back digital currencies by gold or something, but then we have counterparty risk and potential for shutdown by governments.

Re: ZCash (formerly Zerocash/Zerocoin) technology preview

#78
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, two of the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse rear their ugly heads: 8.3.4. "How will privacy and anonymity be attacked?" [...] like so many other "computer hacker" items, as a tool for the "Four Horsemen": drug-dealers, money-launderers, terrorists, and pedophiles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...

> drug-dealers People profiting off the illegality of drugs who are drawn to high-risk/high-reward work. > money-launderers People who want to keep ANY of their income sources private. Also see: Anyone who uses cash. > terrorists "There is neither an academic nor an accurate legal consensus regarding the definition of terrorism." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_terrorism This makes it a "weasel word" (or…

Is there an actual reason this is getting downvoted? I have stated absolutely nothing untrue.

Re: ZCash (formerly Zerocash/Zerocoin) technology preview

#79

There seems to be plenty of privacy-oriented altcoins around. How does the privacy model of zcash compare to others, like monero or dash?

Zerocash offers far stronger and more complete privacy than anything I'm aware of.

Reusing an old comment about Cryptonote (which is what monero uses IIRC). Similar analysis applies to Dash, which I believe uses some (no doubt "improved") version of CoinJoin. :

All anonymity is not created equal: you're better off if we can only figure out that one out of 6 billion people bought a Nickelback album, then if we know it was either you or one guy in Tristan da Cunha. The size of your anonymity set matters and Cryptonote provides a rather small one in comparison to Zerocash. This is not to say Cryptonote is worthless, there are tradeoffs between the two, but Zerocash has a distinct advantage in terms of anonymity and I think it matters.

Cryptonote's ring signatures scale linearly in the number of people your transactions are mixed with. As a result, you can't mix an individual transaction with that many people without it getting too big and too computationally costly(chaining transactions doesn't solve this). In contrast, Zerocash mixes every transaction with every other transaction ever[1].

If you are worried about maintaining privacy given repeated interactions with merchants or others who already have some partial information about you, the size of the anonymity set matters considerably. Longterm intersectional attacks are a major problem with anonymity systems. The smaller the set you mix with on any given transaction, the easier it is for some third party to use outside information to eliminate everyone else in the mixing set (e.g because she knows no one else in the set was online at the time of the transaction or was in your approximate geographic area), and determine the true spender. One of the few effective defenses we have for this is to simply include as many people as possible in the anonymity set. If you want to avoid companies building financial profiles of users from the blockchain, this is precisely the type of attack you need to thwart.

[1] Technically, up to 2^64 transactions and the networks ability to handle the spent serial number list. So there is a limit, but it's rather large.

Re: ZCash (formerly Zerocash/Zerocoin) technology preview

#80
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Laptop stolen, unlocked, you never encrypted anything: yep, you're hosed as far as I know. How else would your wallet be able to tell you a balance? 2) The creation of the genesis block involves a trust 'game' of sorts, in which many participants are asked to pick a number. The statement from zcash, which a better cryptographer than me could verify, is that only one of the participants need be trustworthy in order…

Ah, two of the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse rear their ugly heads: 8.3.4. "How will privacy and anonymity be attacked?" [...] like so many other "computer hacker" items, as a tool for the "Four Horsemen": drug-dealers, money-launderers, terrorists, and pedophiles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...

It's pleasant to be snarky or even in denial about the existence of those four archetypes. The sad truth is not only that they exist, but that they benefit from cryptocurrencies in general.

I spent 2012 and 2013 vigorously parrying journalists who only wanted to write about Bitcoin and the four horsemen. I was wrong to do that. Most Bitcoin transactions of substance in 2012 were related to one of the four.

While I'm pissed off that I spent time taking shots in the public limelight on behalf of asshole drug dealers, that was not actually the point I was raising above. I presume that the zcash folks are aware their inventions will be used for bad things, and have weighed the moral calculus, and are fine with the outcome. And, I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that calculus.

What I was saying is that a clear-headed individual needs to go into launching a cryptocurrency like this with the certain knowledge that their tool will be used, very rapidly, and perhaps very aggressively, to forward the agendas of the four horsemen. In fact, those will likely be the earliest adopters, or the earliest adopters with real money.

That has some implications for how you design your own responsibility / rights / powers in a cryptocurrency. To think otherwise is terribly avoidant behavior.

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