3 ms·

Can someone ELI5 how Zcash works?

• vessenes 11y ago
  Zero Knowledge proofs take the place of a digital signature proving ownership of an address in Bitcoin. Well, that's explain like you're a crypto undergrad. But, it's a start. There's quite a lot of interesting cryptography and engineering involved in making this work; the last zerocash presentation I saw in 2014 mentioned they had been working on shrinking ZK proofs from 25k down to a manageable size for a blockchain.
• fryguy 11y ago
  I haven't read the Zcash paper, but my understanding of its predecessor could be simplified to: * To "create" zcash, you put a random number into a box that can't be opened and a proof that you spent bitcoin to a special kind of bitcoin address. * To "spend" zcash, you reveal the random number that you put in the box (to prevent double spending), and you prove that one of the boxes contains that number (without revealing which box it is). Then you can take the same amount of bitcoin from any of the special addresses above.
• Atheros 11y ago
  I commend fryguy for trying. People with PhD's in computer science have trouble figuring out how Zcash works. It seems to require a very strong mathematics background and it's an order of magnitude more complicated than Bitcoin. I don't think that you're going to get a good ELI5 for it for a while. Zcash is based on Zerocash. In case you ever want to feel like a simpleton: http://zerocash-project.org/media/pdf/zerocash-extended-20140518.pdf http://zerocash-project.org/media/pdf/zerocash-extended-2014...