201–210 of 285 posts
I think the people behind a project mean a heck of a lot to the validity an integrity of the project. So if Zooko Wilcox et al are indeed respected in the P2P and security community, then I am interested in this.
I do not trust Israeli SIGINT people with my secrets.
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I'm working a coin minted for proof of carbon sequestration. It'd be implemented as a ledger on Ethereum (which is currently PoW but moving to proof of stake). Pay ether to a smart contract, it forwards the ether to approved organizations doing sequestration, and you get new minted coins. A couple weeks ago I presented the idea at MIT's Solve conference, and I've got a writeup at MIT's ClimateColab that made finalist…
Neat. Aside from the fact that it's built on a bug-prone foundation (Ethereum), the idea at least gives me some hope that cryptocurrencies don't have to have a negative impact.
As for Ethereum, so far the bugs in the underlying platform have been minor; right now they're dealing with DoS attacks resulting from mispriced opcodes but that's getting fixed. Most issues have been due to poorly-written smart contracts rather than the platform. That's not entirely the fault of the contract authors; it's taking some time to figure out the attacks and best practices.
I'm not planning to launch in the near future anyway, because Ethereum is going through some major changes next year for scalability, and contracts will need to be coded differently to take advantage of that. In the meantime I've gotten a job doing Ethereum app work, so I should be reasonably well-prepared to get the technical side of things right.
I think the bigger challenge is making sure the climate action is actually effective. Something I learned from people at the MIT conference is that while carbon offsets are readily available in the voluntary market, even the certified offsets are often very poor quality, or even outright scams.
Also I'd like to figure out a governance system that doesn't rely on central administration, but that may not be workable; a more democratic system could end up funding charismatic projects that don't actually do much good. I've got some ideas though.
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.
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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.
a) the mechanics of the proof generation, including outlining the time for proof generation.
b) How the trusted setup works; for extra credit describe in detail how zcash plans to do it.
c) an ELI5 explanation of zkSNARKS
d) a comparison of the Ben-sasson and Parno implementations.
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…
I can't stand the proliferation of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies in a world where people don't have to pay for the externalities of the energy they use. Let me know when there's a cryptocurrency based on proof-of-carbon-sequestration or something.
Do you actually understand the utility of proof-of-work? Whenever someone proposes something silly like "proof of recycling" or "proof of solar power" I can't imagine they do.
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> 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.
ZCash looks like a promising tool to prevent civil forfeiture and legalized theft. It is interesting how the same (or similar) technologies that have made cash rare, and allowed tracking of transactions and spending, may subsequently enable radical anonymity. P.S. I hope to see an investment market based on anonymous cryptocurrency one day; it would allow many people who currently lack access to investment markets or…
In respect of protection against civil forfeiture, how is it different from a regular bank account?
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I don't want to see a specific keyword; all I'm saying is that there is nothing on that website indicating any great knowledge of theoretical cryptography. For instance: no proofs, formal definitions, nothing. Not even links to other websites hosting such things.
I really feel frustrated by your lack of search/manual-crawling/link-clicking/understanding capabilities. He was the official security reviewer of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Then some extra references so you can continue your own search: - "MPF (Mental Poker Framework): A new family of practical and secure Mental Poker protocols" http://www.dc.uba.ar/inv/tesis/licenciatura/2010/lerner - MAVEPAY: a new lightweight payment…
The last link is more formal, and talks about models of computation, but once again does not provide any reductions.
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…
An "attitude" pump, really? :) I was one of the first and most dismissive when bitcoin was released. I'm on record saying "yet another p2p currency piece of crap" one ~day after its January 2009 announcement and release. There are so many endless p2p currencies out there-- this was even the case when bitcoin was first launched-- so many that, frankly, any dismissive attitude is completely justified. You can't go arou…