Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Keybase chooses Zcash

keybase.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–167 of 167 posts

Re: Keybase chooses Zcash

#161

Post by Taek »

wmf wrote: post #113
Taek wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not mean to suggest that a whole $2M was dropped, but someone did buy a fragment for $2M per coin. These people buying it hopefully would have been aware of the publicly known upcoming inflation, the fact that they bought at these prices I believe is a tragedy and a black mark against Zcash.

So if I buy 0.01 BTC for $750 [1] and cause the price to "fall 99%" that will leave a black mark against Bitcoin? Perhaps the blame really lies in the exchanges who were so eager to allow trading on such a scarce asset. [1] I realize this is not really possible because you'd have to buy the entire order book first, but in the case of ZCash the order book was empty.

The order book was not empty, as stated above there was over $350,000 in trade volume at prices greater than 100x what they were less than a week later.

Re: Keybase chooses Zcash

#162

Post by EthanHeilman »

plasticmachine wrote: post #159
EthanHeilman wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

All cryptocurrencies are experimental, but if no one uses them they will not mature. Is gmail still beta?

Re: Keybase chooses Zcash

#163

Post by AgentME »

kobeya wrote: post #125
AgentME wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zcash's anonymous transactions are much more expensive CPU-wise to verify and aren't pruneable, and the cryptography behind it has been much less reviewed (Bitcoin operates on a bunch of very boring standard already established and long-trusted algorithms in comparison!), so I'd be surprised if an established project like Bitcoin adopted them before they were proven in practice. There's a lot of money tied up in Bitc…

Stealth addresses don't use any new cryptography, aren't computationally expensive, and require no changes to bitcoin consensus or policy rules.

Oh, I guess I mixed up some posts with one lamenting that Zcash wasn't incorporated into Bitcoin.

Stealth addresses seem like they give much weaker anonymity guarantees than Zcash, unless you only ever send and receive funds through stealth addresses with others who follow the same precautions.

Re: Keybase chooses Zcash

#164

Post by plasticmachine »

EthanHeilman wrote: post #162
plasticmachine wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

All cryptocurrencies are experimental, but if no one uses them they will not mature. Is gmail still beta?

No, Google removed the beta label some time ago: https://gmail.googleblog.com/2009/07/gmail-leaves-beta-launc...

Also if Gmail lost all your email it would be bad, but you'd probably be ok. If ZCash causes you to lose a significant portion of your life saving, on the other hand...

Re: Keybase chooses Zcash

#165

Post by plasticmachine »

dagw wrote: post #142
kzrdude wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> prices were hovering around 2 Ferrari 458 What does this part mean?

Just like how some people like to report areas in terms of football fields or Belgiums and weight in terms of busses and whales instead of SI units. In cases they seem to be reporting a price in terms of random objects instead of currency. For reference the price converts into roughly 1.5 pints (US) of gold

Can you give me that price in buckets of tempura shrimp?

Re: Keybase chooses Zcash

#166

Post by EthanHeilman »

plasticmachine wrote: post #164
EthanHeilman wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All cryptocurrencies are experimental, but if no one uses them they will not mature. Is gmail still beta?

No, Google removed the beta label some time ago: https://gmail.googleblog.com/2009/07/gmail-leaves-beta-launc... Also if Gmail lost all your email it would be bad, but you'd probably be ok. If ZCash causes you to lose a significant portion of your life saving, on the other hand...

>No, Google removed the beta label some time ago

That was my point, gmail was in beta for five years, but it wasn't in beta forever. Technology takes a long time to mature and it is hard to get to that level of maturity without having people use it for real things.

Do not put a significant potion of your life savings in ZCash.

Re: Keybase chooses Zcash

#167

Post by atweiden »

detaro wrote: post #132
atweiden wrote: post #67

The "zaddress" is already implemented in Bitcoin in the form of a stealth address, pioneered by libbitcoin [1]. This news spurred me to delete my Keybase account. I regret ever giving a corporation that much control over my personal privacy. [1] https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-explorer/wiki/Steal...

Care to explain why for someone who doesn't know much about the bitcoin/cryptocurrency world? I don't get what the link is supposed to tell me.

A regular Bitcoin address of the form `1LoD3JXVckEKkZh8nkSrvmQaovnGYu8fNP` is non-private, everyone knows this. Posting such an address in your public profile allows blockchain data harvesting firms to learn when your address receives BTC and from where, and to whom your address sends money to.

But there is no reason to post such an address. If Alice wants to post a fully private Bitcoin address that can't be monitored by data harvesting firms, she should post a stealth address [1]. If Bob wants to send Alice BTC, he takes Alice's stealth address and derives from it a regular Bitcoin address. No one but Bob can know what Alice's derived Bitcoin address is, because the address is derived from Bob's private data.

The libbitcoin software suite supports these stealth addresses, but because libbitcoin isn't VC backed and doesn't have the hype of moneyed interests behind it, libbitcoin wasn't good enough for Keybase. They probably never even evaluated it.

A ZCash "zaddress" is basically just a Bitcoin stealth address.

That the CEO of a privacy-focused social networking service is not in tune with this information is a huge red flag to me. As each Keybase.io profile is an implicit endorsement of Keybase and by extension Keybase's investors, I was deeply saddened and frustrated to learn the news that Keybase has decided for its entire userbase to prop up ZCash based on their faulty assumptions.

[1] http://sx.dyne.org/stealth.html

Post reply on HN