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Keybase chooses Zcash

keybase.io

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Re: Keybase chooses Zcash

#151

Post by gtlondon »

ewillbefull wrote: post #119
gtlondon wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good spot, though not surprising to me. Worth adding here that it also appears Zcash stakeholders have been internally buying/selling their own ZEC at inflated prices on Poloniex to artificially increase both volume and the market price. Whilst perfectly legal, it doesn't enhance a "trustworthy" reputation to me.

> Worth adding here that it also appears Zcash stakeholders have been internally buying/selling their own ZEC at inflated prices on Poloniex to artificially increase both volume and the market price. I don't understand this. None of the stakeholders have even received their money yet; this is publicly verifiable.

Hypothetically, anyone could "prop-up" the crypto market for a newly launched coin by buying the first Asks from Poloniex at a deliberately inflated price and then sell back-and-forth to themselves at the same inflated price to create false volume / pricing.

You wouldn't need any ZEC to begin with.

Just to be clear, I am not specifically claiming the devs are doing this, but somebody with an interest in ZEC performing well (and money to burn to prop up the price) has been.

It's eased off now in any case, but it hasn't gained trust from a trading point of view.

Re: Keybase chooses Zcash

#152

Post by yungchin »

pero wrote: post #126
yungchin wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks very much for this. Based on the one or two private individuals featuring on both lists, I'm inclined to think your original post was exceedingly strongly worded.

Did you read the blogpost? It's basically a Zcash presskit - note the surely calculated title, and the omission of any actual "anonymous" competitor coins in the first paragraph as well as the entire article, all at a time when ZEC price is in free-fall. It might even be worse if it wasn't as such - a security-oriented business that, motivated by Bitcoin's shortcomings, does due diligence on anonymous crypto and genu…

I did, but I (perhaps naively) took it as someone cheerfully geeking out about something cool their friends built, and which they're now interfacing with.

I do appreciate you're pointing out this alternative take. I guess what clouded our discussion is that we mixed questioning their motivations (the investors thing) and their judgement (ie is zcash a good choice?). I missed the latter, focusing on the former only.

Re: Keybase chooses Zcash

#153

Post by plasticmachine »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #149
plasticmachine wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linking to that GitHub issue is pretty embarrassing for you. Not only can it not be practically exploited, per the author of that issue, but it looks like it's just using Keccak as a stream cipher of sorts (but seeding it from /dev/urandom). That's pretty ok, and if we don't trust stream ciphers to produce pseudorandom numbers we have much bigger issues. But more importantly, the contributors acknowledged the issue,…

> it looks like it's just using Keccak as a stream cipher of sorts (but seeding it from /dev/urandom). That's pretty ok, and if we don't trust stream ciphers to produce pseudorandom numbers we have much bigger issues. I very strongly disagree with userspace RNGs being used instead of the kernel's CSPRNG being "pretty ok". Don't "seed a userspace RNG from urandom". Just use urandom.

Sure, and I agree with you in principle. Doesn't change the fact that what you've highlighted as some indication of Monero's inferiority lives in start contrast with the ZCash amateurs.

Re: Keybase chooses Zcash

#154

Post by plasticmachine »

daira wrote: post #139
EvilMonkeyMat wrote: post #121

I have read almost all comments, and it seems like nobody has pointed out that the supposedly anonymous transactions (using z addresses) are still not working. All mining pools are warning about it. For example: http://zcash.flypool.org If anonymity is so important for people, there are already excellent solutions, Monero being one of the best, if not the best, with a strong and serious dev team. Disclaimer: I am not…

Fixed in Zcash 1.0.3. (They were always "working", despite the bugs that were recently fixed. You can see plenty of successful z-address transactions on the blockchain.)

You had a single thing with ZCash that you had to get right, and you couldn't get it working in your initial release? What an utter embarrassment.

Re: Keybase chooses Zcash

#155

Post by aminorex »

malgorithms wrote: post #32

Author here. Seeing some of the discussion go down on Twitter, I feel maybe I should explain further the "white supremacist" example in the post. (one tweet at me: "So now you can hide the fact that white supremacists are sending you money? F!@#ing weird example.") When I shared a draft post with some friends, a lot of them had an ah-ha moment, so I was hoping for the same from others. I was trying to illustrate 2 pr…

choosing zcrash has to be pretty punitive for your users, given the rate of price inflation. For that matter, it must be pretty punitive for you as well.

Re: Keybase chooses Zcash

#156

Post by elif »

valarauca1 wrote: post #120
elif wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but proof that (Beyond the 10% pre-mine) more ZEC are not being secretly generated for the creators relies upon trust in a cabal of six individuals based upon a "public" exhibition of genesis involving theatrical destruction of computers (whose video was supposed to be published but I can't find?) Even if they are 100% legitimate actors, the lack of absolute proof undermines the provenance. From my perspective,…

>I'm sticking to bitcoin and ethereum You don't trust ZCash but you trust Ethereum? The coin that's had it's network hard forked and invalidated... what 4 times now?

Actually the fork is when I diversified from only bitcoin. It gives me more confidence than the perpetual ideological wanking behind the btc size bump. I don't usually take a fundamentalist perspective, especially when it requires siding with thieves who stole enough to become an existential threat to the currency.

Re: Keybase chooses Zcash

#158

Post by EthanHeilman »

plasticmachine wrote: post #133
EthanHeilman wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like both Monero and zCash. As technologies they both have different advantages and they are both pushing the state of the art in privacy cryptocurrencies. As a researcher it makes me optimistic that we are pursuing multiple paths to the goal of "digital cash". >Using zCash requires 8gb+ of RAM, and takes over a minute on a Xeon processor. Cryptography in this area is rapidly advancing, we have seen dramatic speed…

Sorry but I can't agree with you here. When Monero still allowed mixin 0 transactions almost nobody used the privacy-enhancing transaction type. The same goes for Dash and it's DarkSend, or Shadow's ring-signature side-currency - all virtually unused. Thus X grows at a rate that is useless for its intended purpose: getting lost in the dust of millions of others. But to make matters worse, ZCash is grossly irresponsib…

>Claiming that it's "just an experiment" is not acceptable when people's money is on the line, at best, and where their lives might hang in the balance, at worst.

Claiming it is just an experiment means that people should NOT use it when serious money or human lives are on the line. I think we can both agree that people should wait for a technology to mature before betting their life on it.

Re: Keybase chooses Zcash

#159

Post by plasticmachine »

EthanHeilman wrote: post #158
plasticmachine wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but I can't agree with you here. When Monero still allowed mixin 0 transactions almost nobody used the privacy-enhancing transaction type. The same goes for Dash and it's DarkSend, or Shadow's ring-signature side-currency - all virtually unused. Thus X grows at a rate that is useless for its intended purpose: getting lost in the dust of millions of others. But to make matters worse, ZCash is grossly irresponsib…

>Claiming that it's "just an experiment" is not acceptable when people's money is on the line, at best, and where their lives might hang in the balance, at worst. Claiming it is just an experiment means that people should NOT use it when serious money or human lives are on the line. I think we can both agree that people should wait for a technology to mature before betting their life on it.

If the aim was for it to be experimental, why create a "live" monetary system? Why not keep it testnet-only, untradeable?

Re: Keybase chooses Zcash

#160

Post by plasticmachine »

plasticmachine wrote: post #153
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it looks like it's just using Keccak as a stream cipher of sorts (but seeding it from /dev/urandom). That's pretty ok, and if we don't trust stream ciphers to produce pseudorandom numbers we have much bigger issues. I very strongly disagree with userspace RNGs being used instead of the kernel's CSPRNG being "pretty ok". Don't "seed a userspace RNG from urandom". Just use urandom.

Sure, and I agree with you in principle. Doesn't change the fact that what you've highlighted as some indication of Monero's inferiority lives in start contrast with the ZCash amateurs.

*stark
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