7 ms·
The Security Behind the Birth of Zcash
- based2 9y agoalt https://github.com/z-classic/zclassic https://github.com/z-classic/zclassic http://zclassic.org/ http://zclassic.org/
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- evanb 9y agoRelated recent radiolab episode: http://www.radiolab.org/story/ceremony/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/ceremony/
- soneca 9y agoActually I heard about it at Radiolab first, but thought it was better to share here one of the linked written article.
- eternauta3k 9y agoThe article is better in that it has no Robert Krulwich.
- johns 9y agoNeither does this episode.
- criddell 9y agoVery well told story, but it was a little frustrating to not hear why the reporter's iPhone was feeding back into the hangout.
- justusthane 9y agoAndroid, but yes, I agree.
- nawre 9y agohttps://twitter.com/zooko/status/863202798883577856 https://twitter.com/zooko/status/863202798883577856
- jameskegel 9y agoThat about seals the deal for me.
- formula1 9y agoSeals what? People talking about big ideas that are hard to solve?
- mrb 9y agoZooko was talking about doing KYC/AML at the exchange level. He did not suggest to weaken the Zcash protocol: https://mobile.twitter.com/zooko/status/863506504518914050 https://mobile.twitter.com/zooko/status/863506504518914050
- erpellan 9y agoJust like _actual_ cash! The bank doesn't scan the serial numbers on the money I deposit and yet they somehow correctly credit my account.
- Mcphja 9y agoCash counting machines in banks scan and record numbers to find bills that have already been flagged (such as those stolen from banks/ATMs), but that process is unrelated to the crediting of money to your account. General cash tracking is hypothetically possible, but it would not be trivial to implement.
- valarauca1 9y agoThey actually do. Well not _you_ but bills do get flagged if they're involved in crimes (like kidnapping or robbery). So when they're deposited in a bank the FBI can track the _relative_ location of criminals.
- goldenkey 9y agoThe math behind Zcoin is shoddy at best. Homomorphic encryption isn't proven impenetrable. I wouldn't use this for anything more than storing cat litter dingleberry coins.
- asymmetric 9y agoFYI, this is from December 2016.
- RichardHeart 9y agoI do not like 20% founders tax. I do not like "trusted" setup. I do like Zooko trying to make fungibility stronger. I do like zero knowledge proofs making their way into the wild.
- GhotiFish 9y agoisn't it 10%? Main site says 10%, but I hear people complaining about 20%. I'm not sure what's going on here.
- saurik 9y agoI don't know what website you are reading, but the Zcash website says it is 20% now but after 4 years drops to nothing, and when you account for the dropping rewards given to minors, after ten years (when mining will end) the result will be 10% went to the founders: so people saying "a 20% tax" are correct today even if the tax rate will amortize a long time from now to only be 10%. > At first, 50 ZEC will be created every ten minutes. 80% of the newly created ZEC will go to the miners, and 20% ZEC to the founders. https://z.cash/blog/funding.html https://z.cash/blog/funding.html > Every four years, the rate of ZEC being created will halve (again, just like in Bitcoin). After the first four years the ZEC created per ten minutes will drop to 25ⓩ, but after the first four years, 100% of it goes to the miners. > The end result (as shown in the diagram) is that there will ultimately be 21 million ⓩ, and 10% of it, or 2.1 million ⓩ, will have been initially distributed to the founders.
- gojomo 9y agoIt's 10% of all ZEC over planned mining-distribution, but front-loaded: 20% of mining-rewards for the 1st four years, then 0% thereafter.
- anon4728 9y agoEverything but the actual private key/parameters should be open-source, vetted and approved before going forward on a cryptocurrency... no magic obscurity when it comes to money. Otherwise, scams and/or vulns lead to amateur-hour fail.
- arthurcolle 9y agoIt sounds like zookoo is kookoo
- fiatjaf 9y agoWait, but what about block sizes, mining costs and all that? Zcash will suffer as much as Bitcoin and everything will be lost forever.
- Casseres 9y agoIt's interesting and definitely worth the read, but if anyone is interested in a cryptocurrency with privacy, Monero is a better choice. (Monero doesn't require a trusted setup, doesn't have a founder's tax, isn't run by a US company, and address balances are private.)
- mmel 9y agoToo many of these alt-coins are premined cashgrabs.
- Casseres 9y agoOkay, that doesn't have anything to do with Monero though as it's fairly mined (no premine or dev tax). Monero has very good and active dev team that has fixed and disclosed bugs instead of exploiting them for free coins like other alt-coins.
- mmel 9y agoApologies, I should have clarified that Monero was a rare exception to the pre-mining get rich quick schemes.
- jameskegel 9y agoMonero is not premined.
- kbody 9y agoI appreciate the research of zcash, but trusted-setup is still just a very sophisticated security theater. The least they should have done is have constructed an open participation.
- justinjlynn 9y agoIndeed. Secure multiparty computation with large numbers assumed malicious participants to do the initial setup would've been enough. As it was, I just can't trust it - even if all the parties are honest and completely trustworthy. I may be paranoid but, in my opinion, if you have to do the same rigmarole that the CA system does then you're still fundamentally broken.
- ewillbefull 9y agoAt the time, the multi-party computation protocol could not scale to a large number of participants.
- justinjlynn 9y agoDefine large. In any case, I would rather have a protocol in which only one of the participants need successfully discard their local state for total security than n participants.
- kbody 9y agoYou still would need just 1 participant, it's the computation part that would be open to any number participants in order to reduce the possibility of collusion.
- ianmiers 9y agoThat was the case. If one of the 6 people completed the computation and discarded the results, the paramaters are secure. Ideally it would have been more than 6 people, but that protocol really didn't scale to more than a handful of people.
- ianmiers 9y ago
- pmarreck 9y agook why does the URL change after it's loaded in such a way that I can't reload, it seems like it cuts off the last part of the path
- anon4728 9y agoIf you put almost any HP RPN calculator right up to your ear, you can hear computation via capacitors.
- j_s 9y agoBitCoin developer Peter Todd's part in this story: https://petertodd.org/2016/cypherpunk-desert-bus-zcash-trusted-setup-ceremony https://petertodd.org/2016/cypherpunk-desert-bus-zcash-trust...
- buttershakes 9y agoRegardless of the secure computation done during the ceremony at the end of the day there is a degree of trust in the founding participants of Zcash. I think given the people involved, and that they are all essentially security zealots with provable records. messing this up doesn't seem likely. There is no monetary incentive to make a mistake in the trusted setup, and there is significant personal reputation damage to the participants if it was provably hijacked. Further, the founder's reward despite having a slight smell is really not an unfair way to structure something like this. Significant resources were put into Zcash well before it was deployed, are the founder's supposed to just eat that cost? Why shouldn't their success be tied to the success of the coin they created over a period of time? Would a Satoshi style pre-mine be more fair? These questions are complicated, but without an ICO driving the development, this doesn't seem like the worse case scenario for a commercial entity.
- abecedarius 9y agoAgreed. As a programmer who's worked with Zooko and other Zcash developers (on unrelated projects before it) I'll add that I was impressed by their security-engineering skill and integrity. (I'm unqualified to judge their crypto.)
- Freak_NL 9y agoI wonder if there isn't a more ethically sound way of rewarding the founders of cryptocurrency initiatives. A percentage of the total value of the whole currency seems disproportionally large if you consider the value of the total coin offering possible if they ever attained a status akin to the Euro, Dollar, Yen, or Pound Sterling. While that may or may not ever happen, it certainly seems to be a goal for many of these initiatives. To me it makes all cryptocurrencies seem like Ponzi schemes designed to profit its founders first and foremost; regardless of any merits. > […] are the founder's supposed to just eat that cost? Ideally, some philanthropist driven by idealism would work with a bright bunch of crypto enthusiasts like them to fund development, precisely to prevent the ethical problem of a founder's reward. Alternatively, perhaps a capped value that is based on a fair estimate of the initial costs of development with a fair profit margin (to compensate for the risk) would encounter less resistance than the current trend of an open-ended percentage.
- n3x10e8 9y agoCurious to know the complete story of the phone after this article. Does someone know about it?