As I said the last several dozen times ZCash hype articles got posted; what's worse than currency controlled by a government AND currency controlled by an unelected group of developers? Currency controlled by a for profit company.
ZCash Will Be a Truly Anonymous Blockchain-Based Currency
251–260 of 285 posts
Re: ZCash Will Be a Truly Anonymous Blockchain-Based Currency
#252Another 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 see how it's arguable for a currency to have a 10% cut for the founders. That's too high.
Re: ZCash Will Be a Truly Anonymous Blockchain-Based Currency
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Out of curiosity, which alt coins would you put in the latter category ("have had great minds behind them")?
If I answered that I would have to make personal endorsements of the team members of those coins which I am not prepared to do.
Same reason Gary Johnson didn't answer the "Name a foreign leader you respect"... once you name someone you open up to answering for all their mistakes.
Re: ZCash Will Be a Truly Anonymous Blockchain-Based Currency
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did anyone fork or clone Ethereum to cut out the developer's premine? I'd be interested in an Ethereum-like, but only without the politics of forking based on protecting assets of the original developers.
You might be interested in Tezos ( https://tezos.com , disclosure: I'm the lead dev), an upcoming distributed ledger and smart-contract platform with a decentralized governance model. It's not a clone of Ethereum, it's a fresh, from scratch implementation of a new protocol in pure OCaml (with the notable exception of a dependency on libsodium). It's two year in the making and we're hoping to launch in March. Governan…
I heard about your project via Doug Barnes at a lawyer party, of all places. Very interested in the meta protocol or governance model. A worthy experiment!
Re: ZCash Will Be a Truly Anonymous Blockchain-Based Currency
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
right, but we already covered that. there is no court order in the world that can compel to you to provide what you do not have. so why is the US a bad place for ZCash to incorporate?
Are you sure such argument would fly against (possibly and probably technically illiterate) judge? I'm not. Apple was a separate case, because it is publicly known and loved company, and there are very few companies that have luxury to say the same. How did that play out to Lavabit (that's a controversial example, but it's to illustrate that court doesn't hesitate to crush a company to achieve its goal)? Also, RSA sc…
The software is open source with reproducible builds. I'm not saying this is a magic wand, but it's a significant difference from the other cases.
Re: ZCash Will Be a Truly Anonymous Blockchain-Based Currency
#256Earlier 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…
CryptoNote doesn't look very scalable; if you want a large anonymity set, your transaction size grows linearly with the size of the set.
Scaling is a valid criticism of cryptonote
Have you talked with the monero team on how they plan to address it?
They might not have a good answer (cheaper storage, computers faster in the future), maybe they do have some solutions in mind
This seems to be an issue with zcash too? Can you explain why it isn't?
Given current information if seems like these problems won't become apparent till the year 2021
Re: ZCash Will Be a Truly Anonymous Blockchain-Based Currency
#257Earlier 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…
This is no different than Bitcoin.
Re: ZCash Will Be a Truly Anonymous Blockchain-Based Currency
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
The government can very easily take money out of your bank account. Happened to me one time when the Texas Comptroller made a paperwork error. Even after they fixed it and refunded my money, Wells Fargo charged me $150 for "legal fees". That was a lot of fun.
Your problem is that you used Wells Fargo instead of a credit union.
After that event I switched to a credit union. Good decision.
Re: ZCash Will Be a Truly Anonymous Blockchain-Based Currency
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good luck getting anything like that into a cryptosystem. 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.
I understand the negative utility of proof-of-work. It takes useful resources and turns them into nothing. I didn't claim it would be straightforward to make a cryptosystem whose mining process causes a benefit instead of a harm. I didn't claim I had such an idea. But let's rank some options in order of goodness: 1. Figure out a cryptocurrency with a real-world benefit 2. Don't use cryptocurrencies 3. Use cryptocurre…
> I didn't claim I had such an idea
Hint: it's impossible.
But regardless, I seriously doubt that Bitcoin mining actually has negative utility even after taking into account any negative externalities introduced by the relatively small electricity use from mining. My suspicion is it's more or less negligible compared to manufacturing or transportation.
Re: ZCash Will Be a Truly Anonymous Blockchain-Based Currency
#260I'm a big believer in privacy, but anonymity scares me. Anonymity invites bad behavior: look at how bitcoin -- which isn't even all that anonymous -- has enabled the ransomware industry. I agree that it is very important for people to be able to conduct financial transactions without having to disclose them to third parties. It's also important for people to be able to use a mutually-agreed-upon trusted third party t…
I would argue that anonymity and privacy are equally positive things and both necessary for a functional society. Anonymity facilitates the exposing of bad actors and systemic failures in the bureaucracies we've created to help and protect each other, i.e., whistle blowers. I would also argue think ransomware is a good thing. Although it's annoying, it's providing just enough of a shift in incentives for people to st…
> Anonymity facilitates the exposing of bad actors
No, it doesn't actually. What are called "anonymous sources" in the press are actually not anonymous in the sense that ZCash makes them anonymous: their identity is known to the journalist who publishes the story. The identity of the source is kept confidential by the journalist. This mechanism is an important check on the credibility of the source. True anonymity leads as much to vendetta-driven libel as it does to legitimate whistle-blowing. There's a reason that serious people get their information from the Register and the Washington Post instead of 4chan.
Also, anonymity in general and an anonymous currency are not the same thing.