16 ms·
Zcash begins
- sbierwagen 10y agoPrevious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12790002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12790002
- mrb 10y agoHere is a sweet little block explorer tweeted by Zooko (although it gets the hash rate value completely wrong and unit wrong too--It's Sol/s not H/s and it's about 400 Sol/s right now): https://explorer.zcha.in/ https://explorer.zcha.in/ Edit: it gets this info from zcash itself (zcash-cli getmininginfo) which is probably buggy and doesn't compute the network's speed correctly. My Equihash PoW solver silentarmy gets 45 Sol/s on an R9 Nano, so there seems to be only about 10 GPUs mining worldwide, 65 minutes after the launch of Zcash :) Edit: oops scratch everything I said. I forgot difficulty 1 was redefined for the mainnet. In testnet difficulty 1 was defined as: genesis.nBits = 0x200f0f0f; So you needed the 32-byte SHA256 hash to be less than 0x0f0f0f00_00000000_00000000_... But with the mainnet it was redefined as: genesis.nBits = 0x1f07ffff; This value is 0x0007ffff_00000000_00000000_... so only 1 in 8192 random hashes is less than this. So the network's speed seems to be around 130,000 Sol/s. So that's already 3-4k GPUs mining. Ouch.
- mostly_harmless 10y ago> Zcash is a technology, and like any technology it has multiple uses. I suspect that many of the best applications of this technology haven't been conceived of yet. > 10% pre-mine to founders This smells super fishy. Altogether, I've yet to see anything to do with cryptocurrencies be useful. Nothing but scams, hiding illegal activities, and hopeless optimism so far.
- olegkikin 10y agoI love paying with bitcoin, even when other methods are available. It's just so easy, and just knowing no stupid bank can stop the payment or freeze your balance feels like freedom. If you see "nothing but scams", it only tells me you live in a strange bubble. There are tons of legitimate businesses that use bitcoin daily. There are some that use litecoin, and even dogecoin.
- dangerlibrary 10y agoAs a consumer spending money from a checking account or credit card, the only reasons a bank would stop a payment or freeze a balance are because they suspect fraud or illegal activity. In the first case, it's a service they are providing you - peace of mind as a result of extensive fraud protection measures. In the second case - then mostly_harmless is correct. If the only benefit of bitcoin is "no fraud protection and the freedom to use for illegal transactions" how is mostly_harmless wrong?
- aianus 10y ago> peace of mind as a result of extensive fraud protection measures I don't want "peace of mind". I (a Canadian) want to be able to buy something online from a US supplier and have it shipped to me in Thailand. This is just not possible with any kind of chargeback-enabling payment method. Just because you haven't been in a situation where the "fraud protection" is impacting your life (or your sales) doesn't mean those situations don't come up for others.
- 10y ago
- zby 10y agoIn other news TumbleBit[1] seems to bring good enough anonymity to bitcoin as well. 1. https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/575.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/575.pdf
- wcummings 10y agoAnd works w/ the Bitcoin protocol as it exists now.
- tmat 10y agoall premiNed coins are a scam..
- kilroy123 10y agoIt's not pre-minded, but 10% that are mined will go to the company.
- tromp 10y agoSo it's post-mined... Or should we say tax-mined ?!
- vortico 10y agoWow, that's even worse. The entire reason cryptocurrencies exist is to do away with a governing party. If what you say is true, Zcash has an administrating government, while developers of Bitcoin design the algorithm only for the benefit of the community.
- wyager 10y ago10% premine and run by a private company? No thank you! I don't care what cool ZKP crypto they use; one of the critical aspects of Bitcoin's success is that there was no premine (no unfair advantage for the creator) and no company to go after if someone starts feeling litigious. Bitcoin is a protocol, this is a product.
- sbierwagen 10y agoone of the critical aspects of Bitcoin's success is that there was no premine Satoshi has about a million bitcoin: https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/ https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-f...
- wyager 10y agoRegardless, he didn't premine unfairly; he released it to the public before mining began. Also, 1m is a very high-end estimate. Most estimates come in on the order of several hundred K.
- chabes 10y agoThose million bitcoin were all fairly mined, not premined. There is a difference
- nickpsecurity 10y agoBarely. He created them with about no effort at all while other peoples hard work and real dollars spent would turn it into a fortune later. That counters wyager's claim a bit where there's definitely an unfair advantage in terms of financial distributions. Quite like the U.S. system it intends to replace. :)
- wyager 10y agoThere were a number of people who were mining within the first few days. They had no idea if it would pay off or not; they put a fair amount of effort into an extremely high-risk investment. They deserve everything they got out of it.
- tuyguntn 10y agoDoes 1 ZEC worth >1000$[1] in reality? [1] - https://forum.z.cash/t/1-zec-1130-00-usd/4177 https://forum.z.cash/t/1-zec-1130-00-usd/4177
- teekert 10y agoI want to buy zcash for 10 euro, then wait until it explodes like bitcoin, how can I do this? It's not currently traded at Bittrex I see it's there but as "disabled". When can I buy?
- abrkn 10y agoBitcoin has exploded? That would be the 113th time it has died[1] [1] https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/ https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/
- Retr0spectrum 10y agoThe article/list you linked was being satirical.
- narrowrail 10y agoIt may be a language thing, but I believe teekert meant bitcoin exploded, as in, took off and was temporarily valued at ~$1,300. So, you mistook the meaning as the exact opposite of what the author intended (I believe). Also, the other reply to you mistook you for not understanding that your link is satire, which I believe you understood.
- curiousgal 10y agoKraken added Zcash support today.
- erikb 10y agoPlease use the title to explain what makes ZCash special. Nobody cares about just another Bitcoin clone, so "Zcash begins" is not enough as a title.
- ebbv 10y agoIt is controlled by a for profit company. That's what's different. If that sounds like a good idea to you...
- mrb 10y agoWith Bitcoin anyone can see for example that "1F38k5Q3ob4X4rJtmzAER2Y6j94cU8EKW9 sent 0.0115627 BTC to 1NzLNxxU8Vo2urbGdarJjHCpLyv61JuHwD" (see for yourself: https://blockchain.info/tx/bf151762857db770a5a714afd974e1f46545220cf8bbcf5b7172eba27841e5ab https://blockchain.info/tx/bf151762857db770a5a714afd974e1f46...). This is not really anonymous because first you see the amount being sent. Then you may be able to track who owns these addresses, eg. if someone posts his Bitcoin donation addresses to a website, or if a vendor sells something for a particular price like 17.958 BTC then you can scan the blockchain and look for all transactions of 17.958 BTC and you might be able to infer how many transactions that vendor made even if they used unique addresses for each sale. All of this is not great. This is why we say Bitcoin is not anonymous, but "pseudonymous". So Zcash fixes this by obfuscating all of this: sender, amount, recipient are just obfuscated blobs of data. You don't know how much was sent, from who, to whom, but you cryptographically know the transaction is valid (didn't try to send more coins than the recipient has, etc). This is verified through fancy so-called "zero-knowledge proofs". See https://blockchainhub.net/blog/infographics/zcash-explained/ https://blockchainhub.net/blog/infographics/zcash-explained/
- avar 10y agoHow is this functionally different from everyone using "mixers" with Bitcoin?
- CiPHPerCoder 10y agoMixers just make graph traversal more expensive. They don't actually hide amounts.
- vegabook 10y ago》power to uplift millions of people Haha. 10% premine to uplift the founders with millions, more like.
- marklawrutgers 10y agoIs this the one that forked off BitCoin due to differences centered around how it didn't make its investors/founders enough money? From the last thread they pointed out: "Zcash's monetary base will be the same as Bitcoin's — 21 million Zcash currency units (ZEC, or ⓩ) will be mined over time. 10% of that reward will be distributed to the stakeholders in the Zcash Company — founders, investors, employees, and advisors. We call this the “Founders Reward”." It's nice to have a currency with more security and privacy features in mind but I would be extremely wary of compromises like this for that achievement.
- wmf 10y agoYeah, I hate those compromises like capturing a fraction of the value you create and using it to pay your developers.
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- vegabook 10y agofraction?? The money supply of the world is about between 30 and 80 trillion dollars. Let's call it 50 trillion. Let's say crypto gets 10% share over time, and these guys get 10% of crypto. That's 1% of the money supply. So... 500 billion dollars. 10% for founders = 50 billion dollars. Isn't that just, a bit, ambitious in your opinion? This fork of bitcoin is worth 5 million dollars MAX for the founders efforts up to now (it's a fork, remember), namely 1/1000 of my already conservative scenario. Let's hyperbolically discount that for the huge risk, and therefore generously multiply my scenario by 10. We're talking 1% premine fair value, max. Let's get real here. These guys are fucking opportunists at best, ponzi median, outright thieves at worst.
- wmf 10y agoGood point. Perhaps startup founders should limit their stake to 1% just in case their company ends up being worth $100B instead of only $1B.
- jstandard 10y agoGenuine, blunt question here, why is this technology important and needed? I ask this as someone who is intrigued by cryptocurrency, but never felt a pressing need to be able to transact 100% anonymously.
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- 0xCMP 10y agoIn a world of bitcoin any address could be anyone, but as addresses are shared (or posted on someones public website) knowledge is revealed about who they are. You can, thanks to how bitcoin works, track all the transactions they do and who they send it to. You may know somehow who the other side of the transactions are (or find out in the future, since the blockchain is forever). This isn't how cash works, which is the real "money" in our system. At some point (even if on credit) cash is transferred for stuff. I don't want people to know which places I have a news subscription for. I don't want them to know who I donate to just from the blockchain. I have a choice to want them to know that. This is a practical problem because that means either I need to use shady services to hide these facts for normal purposes. That, or never use them except in a few cases where I don't care people know (but I also might regret that). I think from a practical perspective, this makes bitcoin really hard to use. How do you make transactions that aren't easily traced to you by literally anyone? Answer: it's hard and possibly won't work completely.
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- dimino 10y agoIt's only hard to use if you care about those things, and aren't willing to simply "cash out" when you want to spend on other things.
- 0xCMP 10y agoYou cash out because cash has this property. And, at least in the US, you never need to subject your self to daily currency fluctuations to go about your business. IF a crypocurrency is going to be used it needs to be able to be used as is on it's own just as easily as US Dollars are used now.
- grigio 10y agoWhy didn't I see the same buzz around Monero?
- OrpheanBeholder 10y agoMonero wasn't developed by a group of highly respected cryptographers and the privacy it offers is plausible deniability not zero knowledge.
- Animats 10y ago"This technology can do for cooperation what the Internet did for communication two decades ago." Huh? Why? How? It's an altcoin with more anonymity than Bitcoin. That's nice, but no big deal. I went to hear Tromer's talk on the theory behind Zcash at Stanford last Wednesday.[1] There were a lot of very strong claims and a lot of hand-waving. I'm not an expert in that area, but the claims were awfully strong and the presentation didn't back them up sufficiently. Here's his key paper.[2] He claims, at least, to have developed a new way to generate cryptographically strong hash functions. See section 1.1 of that paper. That's a hard problem. Of the existing crypto-grade hash functions, Snefru, MD2 (128-bit), MD4, MD5, RIPEMD, HAVAL-128, and SHA-0 have all been broken, and SHA-1 is looking weak. Solving that problem alone would be a noteworthy achievement. So where's Tromer's proposed hash function, evaluated by the crypto community? On the financial front, the insiders take a 20% rakeoff of new Zcash coins for the first four years. That's a huge cut for a financial product. The investors include Roger Ver, the convicted felon who publicly said Mt. Gox was sound. What could possibly go wrong? [1] http://web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/ http://web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/ [2] https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/580.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/580.pdf
- patcon 10y agoHaven't read it, but since that quote totally rings true to me, I'll step up to the plate: I think they're trying to channel the idea that blockchains are to "agreements" what the internet was to "communications", particularly in terms of democratization. The internet used to provide low-barrier super-human communication abilities, but only in very limited contexts -- possibly beside a giant mainframe, and only able to talk with other giant mainframes. Now that we have instant comms in our pockets and on our wrists all the time, the effects are pretty expansive. Blockchains are not yet ubiquitous, but when they are (in every device and underlying many services we use), every person will have the infrastructure to create and maintain complex agreements for near-zero costs. (Financial agreements and otherwise.) This will be pretty transformative. I assume ZCash is acknowledging that privacy is a critical piece of that transformation in organizational structure for society. Kinda like how ubiquitous communications are almost pointless without the possibility of E2E encryption. But this is a lot of speculation given that I haven't read the linked article ;)
- artursapek 10y agoYou can see the markets reacting here: https://cryptowat.ch/poloniex/zecbtc/5m https://cryptowat.ch/poloniex/zecbtc/5m Pretty crazy, it hit a high price of 3300 BTC! That's $2MM.
- swissoak 10y agoSeems like a matter of time before someone does the same thing, but without the bullshit "we keep 10% of everything".
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- pmarreck 10y agoAs I said here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12796310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12796310 I don't see how it's arguable for a currency to have a 10% cut for the founders. That's too high.
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- pikachu_is_cool 10y agoIs there a fork of this with no premine?
- vortico 10y agoI'm interested in this as well. The main fork is so bad, that if a fork existed, most Zcash users would flock to that.
- Uptrenda 10y agoIt looks like the Bitcoin fan boys are already rushing to poison the proverbial water hole and hijack this discussion. It's always disappointing to see just how much politics have managed to infect this space. I mean, everyone knows that with politics a person's preferences end up being based largely on whether or not they like a given candidate's character (hence the quote "politics is the mind-killer") ... But within the cryptocurrency space people are even less rational since after investing their money they now have a perverse incentive to try discredit any competition and the effects of their confirmation bias after investing are truly immense. Bitcoin in that sense, is one of the most toxic communities out there since its entire community seems to be against any kind of innovation taking place outside of Bitcoin and are quick to dismiss any such attempts as "crapcoins." I wish we could go back to 2011 when people were more opened minded ... It's honestly gotten to the point where no one can work on anything new in this space without some shill from Bitcoin trying to cast doubt on their project to steer people back to it ... So I guess pick your favorite investment and support your side. "Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you're on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it's like stabbing your soldiers in the back—providing aid and comfort to the enemy. People who would be level-headed about evenhandedly weighing all sides of an issue in their professional life as scientists, can suddenly turn into slogan-chanting zombies when there's a Blue or Green position on an issue." Cryptocurrencies are the new mind-killer.
- RRRA 10y agoSo now someone could / should... - fork this - remove the 10% economy imbalance - remove centralized alerts and anything centralized - integrate ethereum & namecoins - Get a governance body that would be very neutral and protect principles of the blockchain (EFF? ...) And then we could have a normalized, standardized, basis for the rest of blockchain based protocols...
- RRRA 10y agoNot sure how this affects parameters ceremony compromise or the alert system, but we can't have an economy with such imbalance from the start: https://twitter.com/HeyRhett/status/792332276453416960 https://twitter.com/HeyRhett/status/792332276453416960