101–110 of 117 posts
Ie how can we build roads and schools in a Zcash economy?
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
How can the state trace transactions as to collect tax on transactions made with Zcash? If the state cannot trace the transactions and this becomes black economy 2.0 then will it not face banning and seizure from the authorities? Ie how can we build roads and schools in a Zcash economy?
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Zcash gets %10 of the mined coins for the first 4 years and %1 goes to a foundation. This is their business model. It seems reasonable to me... using the currency you're creating to fund the development of the currency. If Zcash ends up worthless, then they won't have captured any value. Since it's not a pre-mine it's not subject to the pump-and-dump dynamics of a pre-mine... it will take 4 years and the coins will h…
Thanks, MCRed. Yeah, I worked long and hard on this, and this ( https://z.cash/blog/funding.html ) is the best idea I could come up with. And yeah — if anyone else reading this has any better ideas, I would love to see you try it! If it helps, you could start with a copy of our source code ( https://github.com/Electric-Coin-Company/zcash/ ).
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Zcash gets %10 of the mined coins for the first 4 years and %1 goes to a foundation. This is their business model. It seems reasonable to me... using the currency you're creating to fund the development of the currency. If Zcash ends up worthless, then they won't have captured any value. Since it's not a pre-mine it's not subject to the pump-and-dump dynamics of a pre-mine... it will take 4 years and the coins will h…
Thanks, MCRed. Yeah, I worked long and hard on this, and this ( https://z.cash/blog/funding.html ) is the best idea I could come up with. And yeah — if anyone else reading this has any better ideas, I would love to see you try it! If it helps, you could start with a copy of our source code ( https://github.com/Electric-Coin-Company/zcash/ ).
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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...
In reality we sorted a lot of the problems out as we went along. We have muddled through somehow. The process I think was hardly linear or deterministic. And I think it never will be. Look at InfoSec where it is a constant game of catching up. Yet somehow our ancient technology stacks (DNS, SMTP, HTTP, ...) still seem to work and our world has not yet imploded. Society not yet collapsed. Our children who grew up with the Internet have turned out pretty well (people today seem a lot smarter than most of the guys I grew up with in the 70ies/80ies mainly because of the Internet)
Seems that every time we're on the verge to discovering something totally radical (crypto currencies, big-data, IoT, ...) fear is strong. The only place (people) I have seen where the mainstream approaches technologies with an open mind is Japan. There even old people think robots are cute and innovation is ultimately good. In the rest of the world technology is something potentially evil that must be regulated at all cost before it is even invented.
What if we succeed in creating a decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO)[0] or an economy that doesn't answer to the state. We are pretty close to having the tools for it, and I'm sure this is scary as hell for a lot of nation states. See also the latest news about UK government creating their own version of a blockchain by removing the best feature (decentralization [1]). I doubt though that any of this will lead to anarchy (unless our system/society is already so broken that it was due to be replaced with a healthier model anyway).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organ...
[1] http://www.newsbtc.com/2016/01/19/uk-government-to-develop-a...
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Thanks Ian, I really appreciate your comprehensive answer :) - laptop being stolen: cutting out potential ifs and buts, would it be drastically unfair of me to take that as: if you laptop's compromised, all bets are off ? - deanonymize every transaction: genuinely interesting, thanks for taking the time to educate me :)
Laptop being stolen: Certainly for normal users, yes. Don't let that happen. But you can protect yourself by moving funds to new addresses and deleting the old address keys. Poor man's forward secrecy. Since no one will probably do that, yeah .... all bets are off.
I think it's important to distinguish between "deleting" and "securely erasing" here. The former often provides only a layer of obscurity, while the latter takes expertise to perform reliably.
Ideally the wallet's key deletion functionality would include ensuring the private data doesn't remain on disk (and warn if the media makes this impossible), but I think this is more or less impossible; a secure erase facility really needs to be implemented at the OS level, since it requires knowledge of the workings of the filesystems in use as well as its interactions with the physical media. And it gets worse; in the case of any solid state devices that perform their own write balancing, even the operating system can't know what data has actually been lost.
Of course, if someone has your (unencrypted) hard drive digging around for old ZCash key data is probably low on the list of privacy-compromising information available to them anyway.
Correct me if I'm wrong but this is a for profit company telling me to use the currency, no commodity, they created and control in order to have privacy? How about I just stick to actual money?
I don't think they will actually control anything, once it takes off; just like no single entity really controls Bitcoin.
That's just not true. The core developers do control it. Look at the problems its having with the blockchain limit. Yes in theory anyone can fork it and people can run the fork, but that theory has now been tested and it failed.
Similarly, if ZeroCash took off, the "official" devs would be the ones to control it. And they're a for profit company on top of it. I can't think of a worse idea than that. A commodity "currency" that is controlled entirely by a for profit company.
Actually, zerocash is significantly different than other altcoins, in that it replaces digital signatures with zero knowledge proofs. It's technically very interesting, and seems like a believable next direction for Bitcoiners. The other direction would be some variant of ethereum. If you don't believe that a general purpose one-size-fits-all blockchain technology can be easily and safely created, but you would prefe…
> it replaces digital signatures with zero knowledge proofs digital signatures are somehow non-interactive zero knowledge proofs. So what's the novelty here?
Bitcoin requires each user to verify the entire blockchain, whereas the SNARK-technique means a single user can verify the blockchain, and produce a piece of data which essentially proves that 1. the verification has taken place and that 2. the claimed result of the verification (valid/non-valid) is the actual result of running the verification.
If it sounds too good to be true, that's because it is fairly revolutionary (if it works). Here's the paper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/507.pdf
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I think this moral panic (for lack of a better term) is omnipresent because it's actually true to some degree. You can't seriously claim these groups wouldn't benefit from anonymous, secure payment systems. However: - They already have anonymous, secure payment systems (cash, drugs, jewels, shell companies, etc) - The cat is out of the bag, so they're going to have it anyway - These proverbial Horsement do more than…
I agree that we shouldn't be dismissive. However, I still think you are being somewhat dismissive when you say "The cat is out of the bag, so they're going to have it anyway." This is binary thinking but crime isn't binary. There are varying levels of crime. New technologies can make criminal behavior easier or more difficult. Just giving up on money laundering isn't something most people are willing to think about,…
But nobody is actually advocating this, least of all me. The argument is that tracking every financial transaction is no longer viable, whether we like it or not.
Moreover, digging your heels into the sand and saying "but it's not right to give up on money-laundering" doesn't change the reality: there exists technology that makes arbitrary, anonymous payments trivial to perform. What do you propose we do?