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Why does anyone care what Snowden thinks about crypto currency? He was a SharePoint administrator. I don't understand why his opinion is relevant. Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for his sacrifice, and I think he deserves to be pardoned.
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Yes, as interesting a development as zcash is, you need more trust in the 9 people at that one-off ceremony than you do in a central bank. Monero's ring signatures have their drawbacks, but they don't require trust. It is hard to see his rationale for referring to it as an "amateur effort".
There is a tradeoff here that keeps being missed. Ring signatures with small anonymity sets have very serious privacy drawbacks, but they have more sensible assumptions for protecting the monetary base integrity. zk-SNARKs are the opposite: they don't compromise on privacy at all, but require stronger assumptions to protect the monetary base.
zk-SNARKS have no privacy issues, but to trust ZCash you require absolute trust in the zcash ceremony. This is an issue for many, including me. This ceremony has happened, there is no way for me to prove to myself that the private keys were not stored somewhere. Although I can prove to myself it is decentralised and private, I can't see how I could ever prove to myself that noone can cheat and generate coins with minimal effort, thus devaluing mine. I just have to trust the founders.
Monero's Ring signatures require no trust, but they have privacy problems in the case of small rings. This is solveable by restricting to large rings (as a hard fork will enforce this September[1]), and at that point, I can see how to convince myself that the system is decentralised, private, and noone can generate coins without appropriate mining effort.
[1] https://getmonero.org/2017/09/13/september-15-2017-protocol-...
Its curious to see, I travel around a bit and I'm always astounded how many countries still use cash and have backwards banking infrastructure. You'd think transferring money from one account to another should be near instantaneous and require no third party. If bitcoins can shake the rest of the world into the modern age I'm all for it.
You're describing the United States, right?
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Yet ignores the founders of zCash saying they can make a backdoor for police and make it too traceable for criminals. >Green says that he and his fellow researchers are not interested in facilitating criminal activity with Zerocoin. "Zerocoin would give you this incredible privacy guarantee, then we could add on some features which let the police, for instance, to be able to track money laundering. A back door." http…
That's a very weird statement, and I wish there were some more context behind it in the article - is this a cryptographic or protocol-level back door, or is this just the idea that you can start with an anonymous system and add tracing (but you can't start with a visible system and add anonymity)? It could be either, and I'm not sure how to read it.
Why does anyone care what Snowden thinks about crypto currency? He was a SharePoint administrator. I don't understand why his opinion is relevant. Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for his sacrifice, and I think he deserves to be pardoned.
He was a SharePoint administrator. This is just silly. His skills are clearly way broader and deeper than that.
It is clear to me that he is brave, principled and committed to privacy. It is not clear to me that his skills extend beyond that of the average sysadmin.
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Before he was known for the NSA leaks he was still a privacy activist who helped teach people about cryptography. It's not totally unrelated, especially since Zcash's selling point is that it offers more privacy than Bitcoin. https://www.forbes.com/sites/runasandvik/2014/05/27/that-one...
ZCash is only as secure as you trust 9 people and their ceremony. There's gotta be a way to do consensus about zero-knowledge proofs that's a little more... you know ... decentralized. https://petertodd.org/2016/cypherpunk-desert-bus-zcash-trust... https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/6a26rh/peter_todd_h... Before you guys start saying, banks don't trust Bitcoin either because transactions are controlled by like…
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He was a SharePoint administrator. This is just silly. His skills are clearly way broader and deeper than that.
How is that clear? It is clear to me that he is brave, principled and committed to privacy. It is not clear to me that his skills extend beyond that of the average sysadmin.
For example.
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That's a very weird statement, and I wish there were some more context behind it in the article - is this a cryptographic or protocol-level back door, or is this just the idea that you can start with an anonymous system and add tracing (but you can't start with a visible system and add anonymity)? It could be either, and I'm not sure how to read it.
Zooko explained afterward: https://twitter.com/zooko/status/864341289374023680
Especially when Green has his own quote saying they're OK building backdoors for police.
Or maybe that is their entire plan. Say something slightly sketchy, knowing any real criminal will be too paranoid to trust it. Worked for me.