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> "It was a strange incident, but apparently not a new experience for Stallman, whose emails urge any NSA or FBI agents reading to “follow Snowden’s example” an

> "It was a strange incident, but apparently not a new experience for Stallman, whose emails urge any NSA or FBI agents reading to “follow Snowden’s example” and blow the whistle." I find it extremely hard to believe that the US intelligence agencies haven't mastered the art of tapping phones without alerting targets over the decades. > "Asked what he thought about so-called privacy coins, Stallman said he’d gotten an expert to assess their potential, and “for each one he would point out some serious problems, perhaps in its security or its scalability.” It would've been nice for the interviewer to ask followup questions in response to this. > "Taler never rejects a legitimate customer due to a fraud-detection false positive." This would be nice. PayPal has caused no shortage of headaches for both me and people who wish to send me money. I wouldn't mind something better catching on.

booleandilemma 8y ago
I find it extremely hard to believe that the US intelligence agencies haven't mastered the art of tapping phones without alerting targets over the decades. Unless they want him to know. Maybe they’re playing mind games.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- quadrangle 8y ago
  Yup. We know with certainty that this sort of thing is done, we just don't know about this case.
paulsutter 8y ago
Zcash’s privacy is cryptographic whereas Monero seems more like a chain with a builtin mixer. Monero has a history of fixing privacy issues as they are published (for example the paper by the National University of Singapore). Fixing issues is good, having so many is less good. Zcash has scalability limitations because it’s hard to add an L2 solution like Lightning because that would pretty much wreck privacy. But zcash is running at nowhere near capacity so that’s hypothetical. They’re both great experiments and Stallman would be more impressive proposing better solutions than just sniping at the projects.
- glitch003 8y ago
  Agreed. Mimblewimble / Grin / BEAM are also interesting ideas here that can provide scalability with privacy. Additionally, I wish Stallman would research for himself instead of asking an expert, but oh well.
- daira 8y ago
  There's a pretty detailed proposal of a privacy-preserving L2 solution for Zcash, called BOLT (https://z.cash/blog/bolt-private-payment-channels/ https://z.cash/blog/bolt-private-payment-channels/). The original paper is at https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/701 https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/701 , and there's a prototype implementation by J. Ayo Akinyele at https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/libbolt https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/libbolt . Further development of that implementation is being funded by the Zcash Foundation (https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/GrantProposals-2018Q2/issues/29 https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/GrantProposals-2018Q2/iss...). The Blossom upgrade scheduled for October 2019 is intended to include consensus changes needed for BOLT (https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/announcing-zcash-blossom-and-proposed-feature-goals/31891 https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/announcing-zcash-blossom-... and https://github.com/zcash/zcash/issues/3676 https://github.com/zcash/zcash/issues/3676). There are also realistic longer-term possibilities for L1 scaling of Zcash, including the possibility of doing a Coda-like succinct blockchain (https://codaprotocol.com/ https://codaprotocol.com/). I've been working on optimizing recursive validation (https://github.com/zcash/zcash/issues/3425 https://github.com/zcash/zcash/issues/3425) and researching how to find more efficient pairing-friendly curves in order to make this practical. Networking optimizations and other consensus layer upgrades along the lines of SPECTRE/PHANTOM (https://medium.com/@drstone/an-overview-of-spectre-a-blockdag-consensus-protocol-part-2-36d3d2bd33fc https://medium.com/@drstone/an-overview-of-spectre-a-blockda... and https://medium.com/@drstone/an-overview-of-phantom-a-blockdag-consensus-protocol-part-3-f28fa5d76ef7 https://medium.com/@drstone/an-overview-of-phantom-a-blockda...), etc. are also quite feasible. It's correct that we're not running anywhere near capacity at the moment, and that gives us time to develop these solutions. -- Daira Hopwood (Zcash developer)
  - paulsutter 8y ago
    Thanks for the links, nice to see the work on Bolt. And Coda looks incredible if that can be done

booleandilemma 8y ago

I find it extremely hard to believe that the US intelligence agencies haven't mastered the art of tapping phones without alerting targets over the decades. Unless they want him to know. Maybe they’re playing mind games.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
quadrangle 8y ago
Yup. We know with certainty that this sort of thing is done, we just don't know about this case.

paulsutter 8y ago

Zcash’s privacy is cryptographic whereas Monero seems more like a chain with a builtin mixer. Monero has a history of fixing privacy issues as they are published (for example the paper by the National University of Singapore). Fixing issues is good, having so many is less good. Zcash has scalability limitations because it’s hard to add an L2 solution like Lightning because that would pretty much wreck privacy. But zcash is running at nowhere near capacity so that’s hypothetical. They’re both great experiments and Stallman would be more impressive proposing better solutions than just sniping at the projects.

glitch003 8y ago
Agreed. Mimblewimble / Grin / BEAM are also interesting ideas here that can provide scalability with privacy. Additionally, I wish Stallman would research for himself instead of asking an expert, but oh well.
daira 8y ago
There's a pretty detailed proposal of a privacy-preserving L2 solution for Zcash, called BOLT (https://z.cash/blog/bolt-private-payment-channels/ https://z.cash/blog/bolt-private-payment-channels/). The original paper is at https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/701 https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/701 , and there's a prototype implementation by J. Ayo Akinyele at https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/libbolt https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/libbolt . Further development of that implementation is being funded by the Zcash Foundation (https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/GrantProposals-2018Q2/issues/29 https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/GrantProposals-2018Q2/iss...). The Blossom upgrade scheduled for October 2019 is intended to include consensus changes needed for BOLT (https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/announcing-zcash-blossom-and-proposed-feature-goals/31891 https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/announcing-zcash-blossom-... and https://github.com/zcash/zcash/issues/3676 https://github.com/zcash/zcash/issues/3676). There are also realistic longer-term possibilities for L1 scaling of Zcash, including the possibility of doing a Coda-like succinct blockchain (https://codaprotocol.com/ https://codaprotocol.com/). I've been working on optimizing recursive validation (https://github.com/zcash/zcash/issues/3425 https://github.com/zcash/zcash/issues/3425) and researching how to find more efficient pairing-friendly curves in order to make this practical. Networking optimizations and other consensus layer upgrades along the lines of SPECTRE/PHANTOM (https://medium.com/@drstone/an-overview-of-spectre-a-blockdag-consensus-protocol-part-2-36d3d2bd33fc https://medium.com/@drstone/an-overview-of-spectre-a-blockda... and https://medium.com/@drstone/an-overview-of-phantom-a-blockdag-consensus-protocol-part-3-f28fa5d76ef7 https://medium.com/@drstone/an-overview-of-phantom-a-blockda...), etc. are also quite feasible. It's correct that we're not running anywhere near capacity at the moment, and that gives us time to develop these solutions. -- Daira Hopwood (Zcash developer)
- paulsutter 8y ago
  Thanks for the links, nice to see the work on Bolt. And Coda looks incredible if that can be done