Bitcoin Users Reveal More Private Information Than They Realize • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin Users Reveal More Private Information Than They Realize

#91

Post by zooko-zcash » Wed, Apr 06, 2016, 2:31 PM UTC

ultramancool wrote: post #88

zooko-zcash wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pump-and-dump is a major threat. Almost every cryptocurrency or related asset, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, has been vulnerable to pump-and-dump, and it is impossible to prevent. One way to try to deter pump-and-dump is to make it so that the founders don't have any sort of privileged position, but then how could you afford to do all of the work to create a solid, usable protocol? The Zcash team ( https://z.cash/t…

Delaying a scam doesn't make it not a scam. Don't get me wrong - You're doing great work and I hope it pays off, but I won't be using it unless it's forked and the founders reward is removed. I just can't trust it with 10% of the coin in control of a small group who didn't have to "pay" to get it. I understand the desire to pay the founders, but couldn't something closer to the Bitcoin Foundation work?

"Scam" means dishonesty. It means attempting to deceive and defraud people. There is no sense in which that word is appropriate to apply to my business, and I won't participate in a conversation predicated on that falsehood.

Re: Bitcoin Users Reveal More Private Information Than They Realize

#92

Post by bduerst » Thu, Apr 07, 2016, 2:03 AM UTC

MichaelGG wrote: post #84

bduerst wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've gone on record saying they're not liable for any criminal activity used by their coins, which lends me to believe that they'll unmask and turn anyone over if subpoenaed.

My question is: How can they unmask? I thought that was the entire point of the system.

Genesis block keys.

Re: Bitcoin Users Reveal More Private Information Than They Realize

#93

Post by daira » Fri, Apr 08, 2016, 9:06 PM UTC

ultramancool wrote: post #89

jackgavigan wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To quote Zooko himself[1]: "I don't agree that what we're doing with the Zcash Founders Reward is a premine. It's not pre! (Also it isn't mining.) But the part about it not being pre seems really important to me, because it means that anybody who can run a Zcash miner (which, I hope, will be almost anybody on the Internet) can have access to Zcash currency no later than the founders do. "As I described on my blog pos…

He clearly doesn't understand the point - the point is that those founders have 10% of the coin, great control over the market and they've not had to pay (in the sense of PoW or cash) to get that control. Nothing about what he said prevents this at all. It's still a pump and dump scheme, just longer term. Basically they solved the most minor part of the pre-mine problem and claim they solved the whole issue.

Of course they've had to pay. In the case of the investors, they've had to pay cash up-front to fund the development of Zcash. In the case of other shareholders of Zerocoin Electric Coin Company, they've had to pay for, or otherwise legitimately obtained their shareholding -- for example by their labour, in the case of developers who are also shareholders.

"Pump and dump" means fraudulently manipulating the price of a stock by making deliberately misleading or inaccurate statements in order to sell it at a premium. That's illegal under securities law. If you invest in something that then increases in value over a long period because people generally think it is valuable, and at some point you sell it, that is not "pump and dump".

Declaration of interest: I'm a Zcash developer and I hold some shares in Least Authority, which owns part of Zerocoin Electric Coin Company.

Re: Bitcoin Users Reveal More Private Information Than They Realize

#94

Post by daira » Fri, Apr 08, 2016, 9:18 PM UTC

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #73

knughit wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does z.cash prevent deanonymization via IP traffic analysis? Does it resist clusterization?

No, that's Tor's job.

It's a bit more complicated than that. The main responsibility for implementing connection layer unlinkability lies with Tor (if you use Zcash over Tor, which we will aim to provide good support for), but how effective that is in resisting deanonymization attacks at that layer depends a great deal on the higher level protocol and its implementation. That's why it's recommended to use TorBrowser to browse the web anonymously; if you were to use a stock browser, then there would be numerous attacks that reduce the size of your anonymity set. We've tried to pay attention to minimizing leakage of information in the Zerocash protocol; you can read the numerous tickets on that here: https://github.com/zcash/zcash/issues?page=2&q=is%3Aissue+la...

Also, note that even against an adversary that can observe all connection metadata, Zcash maintains strong unlinkability of which notes are involved in a private transaction.