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ZCash Will Be a Truly Anonymous Blockchain-Based Currency

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

#171

Post by ac29 »

livingparadox wrote: post #41
fleitz wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so you're in court, and the courts just gonna be like, 'ok, we'll just ignore our orders to make you pay because it's crypto currency'? I don't think you understand what happens when you defy court orders... Also, mostly this will be used for tax issues, where guess what, the burden is on you to prove that your income was only X, so the more crypto shit you have the easier it is for the prosecution to say you hav…

Your question was how do you defeat the 5$ wrench, not how do you tell them tax-man to f himself. If state actors use the 5$ wrench, that's illegal and consequently you have the defense of the courts to counter that behavior. Civil forfeiture is dependent on being able to "prosecute" your stuff, rather than you. So if they can't seize it, they have to go after you directly, which puts the burden of proof on the prose…

> Civil forfeiture is dependent on being able to "prosecute" your stuff, rather than you. So if they can't seize it, they have to go after you directly.

The US certainly has had cases prosecuting "stuff" where said stuff is cryptocurrency. See "United States v. 178.95842915 Bitcoins" [0], which appears to be a civil forfeiture case [1][2].

[0] https://www.usmarshals.gov/assets/2016/bitcoinauction/index....

[1] https://www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/10752506/United_Sta...

[2] https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/washin...

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

#172

Post by Ar-Curunir »

problems wrote: post #170
Ar-Curunir wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They may have some flashy names, but there's no truely provable reason to believe they're better than the fly-by-night guys who pop up on bitcoinforums with a new altcoin and dump it as soon as it's up and running. Since there's no cryptographically provable way to know they won't do this, well, we have to assume it's what they'll do. Distrust is the basis for cryptocurrencies afterall.

Unlike those fly-by-night guys, these people have their reputations at stake; they've have not only their names associated with this project, but also their academic careers.

Moreover, having worked with some of them, I can assure they're not shady no-gooders...

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

#173

Post by cloudjacker »

ewillbefull wrote: post #145
cloudjacker wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sta…

I get that the protocol in theory doesn't need two states, Zcash the product will have two states. The harder second state likely won't be used that much. There are several cryptocurrencies that had multiple states to promote privacy. Darkcoin's darksend was an option in an otherwise bitcoin clone. Shadowcash has two states where the default state is an otherwise bitcoin clone. Zcash doesn't differentiate there.

As regard to your second point, I know, thats why I said "also".

Aside from the marketing budget and evangelists, Zcash isn't really standing out to me. What do you see? Your idea and possibility of removing the transparent system? From my understanding this means every transaction will have the high system requirements, it still seems like a worse execution of this technology than other existing cryptocurrencies who will be even further ahead by the time these growing pains are even considered on the Zcash network.

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

#174

Post by cloudjacker »

CoryG89 wrote: post #158
cloudjacker wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tolerable growing pains all of those things improve the resilience of the implementations exactly as the original white paper suggested

I'm not sure how the centralization improves the resilience of the implementations. Mining pool centralization is definitely a big downside for security on the blockchain. A lot of research is being done in cryptocurrencies looking for ways to discourage this type of centralization.

centralization doesn't, that wasn't a claim I was making or considering

mining pool centralization has ebbs and flows. I'm not concerned about bitcoin's TODAY for example, but maybe tomorrow and at times in the past. There are a lot of blockchains people don't put under much scrutiny, where it turns out there is massive centralization. But this isn't an inherent problem, Satoshi was 100% of Bitcoin's network for a long time.

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

#175

Post by lisper »

stale2002 wrote: post #160
lisper wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Confidential != anonymous. Anonymous invites bad behavior more than confidential does.

How are those different? They have equivalent meaning.

"Confidential" means the content of a communication is (intended to be) secret. "Anonymous" means the identity of the author is secret. Big difference.

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

#176

Post by tromp »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #161

There's a general attitude to some of the comments here. "Another altcoin." "I wouldn't weigh the odds that this specific system really lasting more than 4 years out especially high." ZCash isn't just another fly-by-night cryptocurrency scam. It's a serious engineering effort that was carefully undertaken by some very well-known cryptography and security experts. Matthew Green Daira Hopwood Taylor Hornby Ian Meiers Z…

Some slight corrections:

It's Ian Miers, not Meiers.

The Equihash proof of work, its name notwithstanding, is a real puzzle, not a Hashcash hash function. Each instance can yield 0, 1, 2 or more solutions (though rarely more than 7).

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

#177

Post by wslh »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #165
wslh wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a cofounder of a company in this space and three people in my company are in a position to understand it very well. For example Sergio who also blogs here: https://bitslog.wordpress.com

I don't see anything there about zkSNARKs?

Sorry to get it personal but it seems you are very shortsighted and need to see a specific keyword to understand the capabilities of the people.

Please let me know what specific topic of zkSNARK you find challenging to explain and we can write a blog post about it.

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

#178

Post by walrus01 »

Animats wrote: post #39

Another altcoin. This one has a 10% pre-mining cut for the founders: "Zcash's monetary base will be the same as Bitcoin's — 21 million Zcash currency units (ZEC, or ⓩ) will be mined over time. 10% of that reward will be distributed to the stakeholders in the Zcash Company — founders, investors, employees, and advisors. We call this the “Founders Reward”." Here's a list of the other 709 altcoins.[1] 373 of them are st…

Never fear, I liquidated my entire 401k and put it into dogecoin, 5.56 ammunition and canned lard.

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

#179

Post by throwaway2016a »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #161

There's a general attitude to some of the comments here. "Another altcoin." "I wouldn't weigh the odds that this specific system really lasting more than 4 years out especially high." ZCash isn't just another fly-by-night cryptocurrency scam. It's a serious engineering effort that was carefully undertaken by some very well-known cryptography and security experts. Matthew Green Daira Hopwood Taylor Hornby Ian Meiers Z…

> ZCash isn't just another fly-by-night cryptocurrency scam. It's a serious engineering effort that was carefully undertaken by some very well-known cryptography and security experts.

The implication that most of the alt coins are like this is unfortunate. Sure, a very many of the alt coins are just bitcoin clones with a different genesis block trying to get rich but many of the alt coins have had great minds behind them, that's not novel in and of itself.

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

#180

Post by driverdan »

Animats wrote: post #39

Another altcoin. This one has a 10% pre-mining cut for the founders: "Zcash's monetary base will be the same as Bitcoin's — 21 million Zcash currency units (ZEC, or ⓩ) will be mined over time. 10% of that reward will be distributed to the stakeholders in the Zcash Company — founders, investors, employees, and advisors. We call this the “Founders Reward”." Here's a list of the other 709 altcoins.[1] 373 of them are st…

I don't disagree with your general point but PayCoin was a straight up scam, created by scammers. Not a fair comparison.
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