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ZCash Will Be a Truly Anonymous Blockchain-Based Currency

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141–150 of 285 posts

Re: ZCash Will Be a Truly Anonymous Blockchain-Based Currency

#141
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As it says in the title, it's more anonymous. So ZCash and Monero are competing for the darknet payment market.

But it can't really be truly anonymous, not if you want people to actually use it. At the end of the day you need at least some assurance that you're sending the money to the right person in exchange for their good or service. They also need to be able to verify that they have been paid for their work and by whom.

Imagine that you went to a restaurant and the restaurant told you where to send a payment. Then they could confirm that you had done so.

Now imagine that the restaurant didn't possess any information that it could use to identify you as a result of the payment, and that no payment intermediary possessed information that could be used to identify the parties to the transaction, and that when the restaurant later spent the money, the source of the funds couldn't be associated with your payment transaction (perhaps even by you as the customer).

Those are some properties that we could wish for in an anonymous payment system. It doesn't mean that the payee can't tell that a payment was made in response to a particular request, though it might not know "by whom" in any other sense.

Re: ZCash Will Be a Truly Anonymous Blockchain-Based Currency

#142

ZCash requires a trusted setup, takes a 20% fee from miners, and active mixing requires 8GB of RAM. https://blog.okturtles.com/2016/03/the-zcash-catch/ http://weuse.cash/2016/06/09/btc-xmr-zcash/ If you are interested in anonymous blockchains, I highly encourage you to look into Monero. It meets or exceeds that of ZCash. And Monero's RingCT is currently implemented and in use on TestNet with a target "go-live" this J…

8GB of RAM is only required when you want to transact; if you're not making transactions but are simply another node in the network (perhaps mining, or something), then I don't think the work required is any different from Bitcoin.

Re: ZCash Will Be a Truly Anonymous Blockchain-Based Currency

#143
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we have fully anonymous, working cryptocurrencies now (monero is the best example). You cannot link transactions nor determine the balance of a public key. without the private key and transaction key no court can seize. we have anonymous darknet markets, where you can buy many controlled substances, in visibility of law enforcement. My point is that you can't uninvent these things. They have already changed society,…

I'm not moralizing about inventing these things, I'm moralizing about using them. Inventing a nuclear weapon is not the same as using one. BTW, I didn't know about Monero. Is there any substantive difference between it and ZCash?

By the same token, sending the message to launch is not the same as sending a confidential message.

Re: ZCash Will Be a Truly Anonymous Blockchain-Based Currency

#144
post #112

I'm kind of confused by the tenor of the comments in here. I'll admit I haven't been following cryptocurrencies closely, but there seem to be a large number of comments suggesting that ZCash is a scam and that Monero is better (without any concrete arguments). Could someone enlighten me as to why that's the case? I know of ZCash via the academic papers on it, and because the people involved – Zooko Wilcox, Matthew Gr…

I have been reading through and also noticing this. I was looking for a better explanation too - from what I understand basically: Monero uses ringCT algorithm on transfer to mix the payments and obfuscate the sender Monero has a private view key and separate spend key. View key can decrypt transactions made by you to confirm your total balance (Monero balance is unknown to daemon, is calculated as (xmrRecieved - xmr…

SNARKs are not proofs-of-work, but are instead used to prove that you can spend a coin, without revealing which coin you're spending.

Re: ZCash Will Be a Truly Anonymous Blockchain-Based Currency

#145
post #101

I am long Zcash: * The founder is Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn, creator of Zooko's triangle, the BLAKE2 hash function, Tahoe-LAFS, and former employee at MojoNation (an early attempt at cryptocurrency/P2P filesharing where another employee, Beam Cohen, went on to create Bittorrent). He knows a thing or two about decentralization/P2P. * This project is NOT a trivial Bitcoin clone with only a new proof-of-work swapped in. The…

What do you think about Cryptonote projects? Such as Monero, Boolberry, a variety of other similar networks Some advantages Cryptonote has that come to mind: - They are private by default. Zcash requires two states, a state analogous to bitcoin, and the anonymous zcash state which has to be explicitely opted into. Shadowcash also has this, but opted for ring signatures for the anonymous state (like cryptonote coins u…

> Zcash requires two states, a state analogous to bitcoin, and the anonymous zcash state which has to be explicitely opted into.

It does not require two states, this is a misconception that originates from the paper which refers to "basecoins" and other obsolete terminology. The protocol was anticipated to be a sidechain of some kind, but due to technical limitations that never panned out. Our system does use two states, but I personally advocate for removing the "transparent" system in the future when we have things like private multi-sig.

> Cryptonote are also auditable if a user wants to reveal information about a transaction. But even then the information is limited, it will show that payments came in and out of specific amounts, but it won't show the sending/receiving address along with those transaction IDs.

You can do all of this with our system as well, it was one of our design goals!

Re: ZCash Will Be a Truly Anonymous Blockchain-Based Currency

#146
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given how complicated the technology is that they will be working with (as someone who has attempted to read the zcash whitepaper), I find this extremely unlikely. Sure there will be clones, but no altcoin "developer" will be able to properly maintain this, so bugs won't get fixed, or it'll always be lagging behind Zcash, or worse, they introduce unintentional bugs and completely wreck their blockchain and lose the m…

I wouldn't be so sure of that, there already exist some alternatives which seem better in some ways like Monero. I have very low trust for scam developers like the ZCash ones, I'm sure someone quite capable could take it up.

The people behind ZCash are definitely not "scammers"; they're respected computer scientists and applied cryptography engineers.

Re: ZCash Will Be a Truly Anonymous Blockchain-Based Currency

#147
post #49
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike Bitcoin, where Satoshi probably mined 5% of all BTC before other people noticed? Or unlike Bitcoin, where developers get paid by layering centralized startups on top?

Until proven otherwise, Satoshi still didn't touch his original mined coins…

IIRC they are supposedly locked in a 'trust' until ~2020

(See: Tulip Trust)

Re: ZCash Will Be a Truly Anonymous Blockchain-Based Currency

#148
post #75
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth reading the Zcash perspective: > At first, 50 ZEC will be created every ten minutes. 80% of the newly created ZEC will go to the miners, and 20% ZEC to the founders. > Every four years, the rate of ZEC being created will halve (again, just like in Bitcoin). After the first four years the ZEC created per ten minutes will drop to 25ⓩ, but after the first four years, 100% of it goes to the miners. > The end r…

> the founders are incentivized to support Zcash for the long haul (at least for four years) Four years is not the long haul when talking about a new currency.

Four years is an extremely long time when talking about a new currency.

Re: ZCash Will Be a Truly Anonymous Blockchain-Based Currency

#149
post #131
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can setup a hardware wallet with plausible deniability[1] [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/TREZOR/comments/2e8a9i/can_someone_...

And then they beat me with the wrench anyway for wasting their time. But I suppose the money's ok, which I'll need for hospital bills.

If they were going to beat you anyway, another layer of encryption was not going to help.

Re: ZCash Will Be a Truly Anonymous Blockchain-Based Currency

#150
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it can't really be truly anonymous, not if you want people to actually use it. At the end of the day you need at least some assurance that you're sending the money to the right person in exchange for their good or service. They also need to be able to verify that they have been paid for their work and by whom.

Imagine that you went to a restaurant and the restaurant told you where to send a payment. Then they could confirm that you had done so. Now imagine that the restaurant didn't possess any information that it could use to identify you as a result of the payment, and that no payment intermediary possessed information that could be used to identify the parties to the transaction, and that when the restaurant later spent…

So there is no way for the restaurant to know who paid if multiple concurrent payments happen? What if 5 different tables are done and ready to pay, but the restaurant sees only four payments? Who do they go after?
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