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There's a general attitude to some of the comments here. "Another altcoin." "I wouldn't weigh the odds that this specific system really lasting more than

There's a general attitude to some of the comments here. "Another altcoin." "I wouldn't weigh the odds that this specific system really lasting more than 4 years out especially high." 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. Matthew Green Daira Hopwood Taylor Hornby Ian Meiers Zooko Wilcox-O'hearn Every one of the names in the preceding list is or was involved in the ZCash project to some capacity. Every one of those names stands alone on their own merits. Ask your cryptography expert friends what they think about ZCash. Yes, the one who are always yakking about side-channel cryptanalysis and which character device to use for generating random numbers. If you don't have any such friends, go to ##crypto on Freenode and say "Hi". It's all uphill form there. Saying the equivalent of "Monero is better" is little better than trolling. Let Monero stand on its own merits; being negative and hostile accomplishes nothing. Saying the equivalent of "Sigh! Another doomed altcoin" is needlessly pessimistic. ZCash represents what every other altcoin should have been doing all along: - It uses a real proof-of-work function. - It offers actual anonymity (an improvement over BitCoin). - It uses an entropy source that won't fail open (like so many BitCoin apps did). - It was designed and implemented by a team of academic cryptographers and industry experts on secure cryptography implementations. - The team took their time bringing a solid implementation to market. - Every design decision was documented and discussed openly. If you have technical concerns about the protocol design or implementation, please don't feel discouraged in sharing them. It's the dismissive attitude that's bothering me.

tromp 10y ago
Some slight corrections: It's Ian Miers, not Meiers. The Equihash proof of work, its name notwithstanding, is a real puzzle, not a Hashcash hash function. Each instance can yield 0, 1, 2 or more solutions (though rarely more than 7).
Ar-Curunir 10y ago
This dismissive attitude infests HN; whenever some-one does something, the top comments are from people nit-picking and finding flaws with the work.
- aaron695 10y ago
  Are you being meta on purpose?
throwaway2016a 10y ago
> 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 them, that's not novel in and of itself.
- tlrobinson 10y ago
  Out of curiosity, which alt coins would you put in the latter category ("have had great minds behind them")?
  - throwaway2016a 10y ago
    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.
kanzure 10y ago
An "attitude" pump, really? :) I was one of the first and most dismissive when bitcoin was released. I'm on record saying "yet another p2p currency piece of crap" one ~day after its January 2009 announcement and release. There are so many endless p2p currencies out there-- this was even the case when bitcoin was first launched-- so many that, frankly, any dismissive attitude is completely justified. You can't go around saying "you're too dismissive" because by doing so you commit the same crime you're accusing others of committing. Keep in mind that for some of us there's a lot of background in reviewing cryptocurrency proposals; it came as surprise to me to later learn that there was actual working source code associated with bitcoin rather than merely manifesto emails. Also, "I wouldn't weigh the odds that this specific system really lasting more than 4 years out especially high" is clearly a reference to the author's experience analyzing (or reviewing) zk-SNARKs and related cryptocurrency proposals. I suspect even Zooko would readily admit that there are alternative SNARKs constructions that they might move towards over time. Heck, it was nullc who pointed out to me that Bryan Parno had published on a libsnark security hole: https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/437 https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/437 -- and besides, it's not yet time to say that the trusted setup and the host of new cryptographic assumptions are rock solid... otherwise let's merge this into bitcoin. "Attitude", ha. Also... it's not clear whether a high-privacy cryptocurrency, built by a specific nameable centralized company, is able to both operate as a legal business entity while still ensuring they are not operating under secret court orders from secret courts or other adversarial government interests, such as to inject silent inflation or otherwise compromise your integrity. It's too early to dismiss the concerns (of adversarial intervention) regarding the financial link between the Zcash developers and the Zcash cryptocurrency. (It may not be clear to casual readers that, unlike in Zcash, in bitcoinland there's no protocol rules about paying developers from the mining subsidy reward amounts. There are very strong reasons for why this is still the case.) (If you are going to have adversarial intervention like that, then you might as well use a much more directly centralized currency. It's not enough to handwave about the wonders of crypto and theoretical computer science while subjecting your work to extreme adversarial intervention. High-privacy designs in a centralized system can somewhat work, even if you were to want to explicitly make a backdoor for whatever law enforcement interests you pledge loyalty to.)
- SubiculumCode 10y ago
cloudjacker 10y ago
Hey there, I asked about some comparisons to cryptonote technologies, of which Monero is one, and I haven't gotten any real answers, would you like me to repost it under your thread? Or can you just find it in the comments My understanding of the execution of Zcash is pretty clear, and it seems like a worse execution that existing technologies, especially cryptonote of which Monero is one. Am I trolling, or looking for a counterpoint? Do you understand how cryptonote technology works? The criticisms have been the exact same since 2014 Blockchain technologies are intended to be able to stand on their own without high profile names attached to them. ZCash is doing the opposite of that, and not even offering anything to make up for it. This invites criticism, let alone the product itself.
- Ar-Curunir 10y ago
  Monero has a weaker security/performance tradeoff; it seems that if you want a large anonymity set then you have to pay for it with a large tx size. Zcash, on the other hand, has the entire blockchain as the anonymity set with no increase in tx size.

tromp 10y ago

Some slight corrections: It's Ian Miers, not Meiers. The Equihash proof of work, its name notwithstanding, is a real puzzle, not a Hashcash hash function. Each instance can yield 0, 1, 2 or more solutions (though rarely more than 7).

Ar-Curunir 10y ago

This dismissive attitude infests HN; whenever some-one does something, the top comments are from people nit-picking and finding flaws with the work.

aaron695 10y ago
Are you being meta on purpose?

throwaway2016a 10y ago

> 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 them, that's not novel in and of itself.

tlrobinson 10y ago
Out of curiosity, which alt coins would you put in the latter category ("have had great minds behind them")?
- throwaway2016a 10y ago
  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.

kanzure 10y ago

An "attitude" pump, really? :) I was one of the first and most dismissive when bitcoin was released. I'm on record saying "yet another p2p currency piece of crap" one ~day after its January 2009 announcement and release. There are so many endless p2p currencies out there-- this was even the case when bitcoin was first launched-- so many that, frankly, any dismissive attitude is completely justified. You can't go around saying "you're too dismissive" because by doing so you commit the same crime you're accusing others of committing. Keep in mind that for some of us there's a lot of background in reviewing cryptocurrency proposals; it came as surprise to me to later learn that there was actual working source code associated with bitcoin rather than merely manifesto emails. Also, "I wouldn't weigh the odds that this specific system really lasting more than 4 years out especially high" is clearly a reference to the author's experience analyzing (or reviewing) zk-SNARKs and related cryptocurrency proposals. I suspect even Zooko would readily admit that there are alternative SNARKs constructions that they might move towards over time. Heck, it was nullc who pointed out to me that Bryan Parno had published on a libsnark security hole: https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/437 https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/437 -- and besides, it's not yet time to say that the trusted setup and the host of new cryptographic assumptions are rock solid... otherwise let's merge this into bitcoin. "Attitude", ha. Also... it's not clear whether a high-privacy cryptocurrency, built by a specific nameable centralized company, is able to both operate as a legal business entity while still ensuring they are not operating under secret court orders from secret courts or other adversarial government interests, such as to inject silent inflation or otherwise compromise your integrity. It's too early to dismiss the concerns (of adversarial intervention) regarding the financial link between the Zcash developers and the Zcash cryptocurrency. (It may not be clear to casual readers that, unlike in Zcash, in bitcoinland there's no protocol rules about paying developers from the mining subsidy reward amounts. There are very strong reasons for why this is still the case.) (If you are going to have adversarial intervention like that, then you might as well use a much more directly centralized currency. It's not enough to handwave about the wonders of crypto and theoretical computer science while subjecting your work to extreme adversarial intervention. High-privacy designs in a centralized system can somewhat work, even if you were to want to explicitly make a backdoor for whatever law enforcement interests you pledge loyalty to.)

SubiculumCode 10y ago

cloudjacker 10y ago

Hey there, I asked about some comparisons to cryptonote technologies, of which Monero is one, and I haven't gotten any real answers, would you like me to repost it under your thread? Or can you just find it in the comments My understanding of the execution of Zcash is pretty clear, and it seems like a worse execution that existing technologies, especially cryptonote of which Monero is one. Am I trolling, or looking for a counterpoint? Do you understand how cryptonote technology works? The criticisms have been the exact same since 2014 Blockchain technologies are intended to be able to stand on their own without high profile names attached to them. ZCash is doing the opposite of that, and not even offering anything to make up for it. This invites criticism, let alone the product itself.

Ar-Curunir 10y ago
Monero has a weaker security/performance tradeoff; it seems that if you want a large anonymity set then you have to pay for it with a large tx size. Zcash, on the other hand, has the entire blockchain as the anonymity set with no increase in tx size.