n was taken from the factoring challenge as detailed in the article linked above. No new creation needed. We don't know what is p and q that was used to derive n.


Thanks! Will announce it on all our channels


Thanks for helping out and sorry to hear about your experience. We will honor bounties a lot faster now. The dev fund from Tim's funding is more than enough to cover Poramins coding for a year and to fund additional devs to help him. This doesn't even include any of the founders reward or the bounty fund so we are in good hands.

The founder wallet address that was dumped and was removed was Gary's.
https://chainz.cryptoid.info/xzc/address.dws?aLrg41sXbXZc5MyEj7dts8upZKSAtJmRDR.htm

The other wallets in the Founder's Reward are more or less intact and that can be verified on your own. What is important is that the initial investors and dev are not dumping their entire stashes and are vested in the long term growth of the coin. We have already disclosed that these wallets belong to initial private investors and Poramin and a bounty fund.

The other wallet address that had quite a lot of deductions is the bounty fund which were used to pay various bounties which include (but not an exhaustive list) dev help (various people), community manager pay (Reuben), Glitch (website and logo design), ocminer (for pool code), blockchain explorer (chainz), coinpayments listing, our introductory video work and voice actress, various people for contributions on social media and maintaining other language communities, initial Zcoin giveaways for promotion and translation work.

Poramin's founder's wallet address which I am at liberty to disclose is: a1kCCGddf5pMXSipLVD9hBG2MGGVNaJ15U

With a bit of deduction, you can probably tell whose wallet is whose but we won't be making any official announcements on this at this time as we have not received clearance from the investors. What's important is that they are largely intact.

You can view the relevant history of Github here: https://github.com/zcoinofficial/zcoin/commit/6ad9bdf2ea1a01df2ce757eb842fb278f0f6582d?diff=split

The investors are Roger Ver, Tim Lee and one other investor who wishes to remain anonymous. Roger Ver and the anonymous investor were the initial investors together with some money from Startup Chile. Tim Lee is the new investor who is bringing in new investment (since the initial investment was largely taken by Gary) and also bringing the support of his team which we will see over the coming months.

As to why Founder's wallets are not 'anonymous' and how to prevent Founders from secretly 'minting' their own Zerocoins there's a lot of misunderstanding here and hope this clears it up. It is however ironic that when we do disclose further info on the founder's wallets we are then criticized for not being 'anonymous'.

How Zcoin and its Zerocoin implementation works for anonymity and how it affects Founders

Zcoin is anonymous by choice. This is a similar setup as Zcash and Dash. You can either choose to send coins like normal like Bitcoin or to anonymize your coins.
The anonymity in Zcoin works by burning up existing coins (minting Zerocoins) and then generating new coins (Zerocoin spend) with no transaction history. The zero knowledge proof ensures that you need not show people which coin you burnt but can prove that you burnt it that allows you to redeem. So you will get new coins on a new address with no transaction history.
Founder's wallets are built into the block reward and are directly given to them from the block reward. These are done in normal Coinbase transactions.
Founders can of course choose to mint their block rewards which will anonymize them and make it unclear which coins they still keep and which coins they have spent. But they have for the most part not done this (with the exception of Gary). If their founder's wallet is untouched, it is untouched. If it has deducted an amount, they have either been transferred out or minted Zerocoins. Once they have minted Zerocoins, they could be still kept by them or they could have spent it elsewhere but you can not tell which. This is where the anonymity comes in but I suspect if they do this, more FUD will come about.

Can Founders secretly mint Zerocoins?

No, they (and not including the dev) do not have access to the initial parameters and are subject to the same rules as everyone else.

Zcoin uses Zerocoin. Zerocoin's 'trusted setup' is purely two distinct large prime numbers which is normally referred to as p and q. Multiply them together and you get the parameter n which is used for the RSA accumulator setup. p and q needs to be destroyed. This is why we use parameters that were generated for a cryptographic challenge created in March 1991 which we believe is unlikely to be compromised. For further reading on how these parameters came about and the cryptographic challenge, you can view this article.

Zcash's setup on the other hand is much more complex and is >1 GB in length and their trusted setup and how they did it is a lot more complicated and there have been criticisms of it.

Of course having a trusted setup in general is not ideal and we are exploring ways to do away with this trusted setup entirely (as stated in our roadmap) but we believe our trusted setup is unlikely to have been compromised, and even if it was compromised, would be easily detected (see below). We note that there are some people who claim that they have done trustless setups for Zerocoin via RSA UFOs but this is impractical as it has huge performance hits. Another coin has claimed to find a way to modify this to make it usable but we believe this method is flawed as detailed here (https://twitter.com/secparam/status/449619152685522944) (Ian Miers is one of the original authors of Zerocoin and Zerocash).

Remember, neither the dev nor the founders have the trusted parameters as these were generated by a third party as elaborated in the article above so they aren't able to mint Zerocoins themselves. Even if they did, it will be detected as explained below.

How do we detect a breach in Zcoin's initial parameters or a vulnerability?

In the event of Zcoin's initial parameters being compromised or some other vulnerability is discovered, Zerocoins can be minted. However this is easily detected as total supply is still auditable.
Total supply of coins that should exist = (block number x block reward)
OP_ZEROCOINMINT function shows all mints + 0.1 mint fee
OP_ZEROCOINSPEND shows all spends of Zerocoin
So you know exactly how many Zerocoins have entered the Zerocoin pool and how many Zerocoins have exited the Zerocoin pool.
total supply >= all circular money - (#zerocoin_mint_tx + 0.1 for each tx) + #zerocoin_spend_tx

Remember an example of a bug that can cause things going haywire has been observed in Bitcoin (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident) but it was detected and fixed because the total supply was auditable.

This is not possible with Zcash as transaction amounts are obscured making it impossible to determine so if a flaw is found, this is a much bigger risk. This is the trade off for their added anonymity and we feel it's a risky one although they have attempted to mitigate this by multiple costly security audits.

Why the Fork away from Gary?

Without getting into the dramatic details, this mainly arose from a few key factors:

a) lack of transparency to Poramin on how the initial investor funds were utilised and how much was left to fund Poramin's dev (with Poramin doing all the coding work). The vast majority of the initial investors' funds (>90%) remain with Gary so if anyone thinks he was forced out unfairly should consider this.
b) lack of involvement from Gary on his duties with very little disclosure to the team as to how he was working to promote Zcoin despite numerous pushes to help out.
c) the dumping of Gary's wallet and the lack of spending on Zcoin marketing/dev and building the team. This lead to many good people who wanted to work or contribute help to the coin to lose interest when they were not remunerated fairly for their efforts.
d) questionable behavior in a number of specific instances that did not tally with Gary's assertions. I will refrain from going into details. You can dig them by yourself from Slack and BCT.

Happy New Year everyone and stay safe!!!!
 

@jeremy grol:

It is FUD and is evidenced by the blocks progressing to the new block past 13999 already when the fix had nothing to do with those lines.

He's not asking, he's spreading misinformation that is purely untrue. You can look at the nature of his other posts.

I am Reuben, the official community manager of Zcoin as listed in zcoin.finance (http://zcoin.finance/language/en/about/) and elaborated many times in this thread. All the technical replies I have vetted with Poramin.

As for the bounties, the only founder wallet that was significantly dumped was Gary's which was emptied. One of the big reasons that lead to the split. Remember the founder's reward does not consist of only the bounty wallet but also the initial private investors and dev's wallets.

Poramin's wallet remains almost entirely intact except for some small amounts. Roger's wallet remains untouched and the other investor's wallet liquidated only a bit during initial launch. The bounty wallet was not dumped and was indeed used to pay bounties (including my pay). This can all be seen on the block explorer.

The blog post on the bounty wallet was done by Gary and not me. I am protecting investors by preventing the spread of inaccurate information all which is publicly verifiable and in the code and Github.

As for the Slack? The old one is moderated by Gary and he's the one that is absent. We were previously removed from the old Slack by Gary.

The new one Poramin is replying in and is pretty active:
http://invite.zcoin.finance:3000 to get an invite.

More attempt at FUD. Those are in relation to the founder's wallet addresses which have been changed due to the new investor and removing Gary.

You already totally miscalculated the founder's reward before to say 2 million coins in 1 year which is actually 2.1 million coins in 4 years. Basic stuff.

For the fast wallet, we're still working on it. Maybe working on a compromise to allow the wallet to load first and allow regular transactions while waiting for all the Zerocoins to verify. This will allow people to use the wallet as per usual but will wait longer before Zerocoin transactions are enabled.

Android wallet will be looked at once the core has been updated which is already in progress.

30 December 2016

Due to the short time given for the update for the fork, many nodes and clients have not updated to the new version resulting in the network being stuck at block 13999.

This new update forces the old wallet clients off the network so that only the newer clients are recognized to avoid any conflicts.

Please update to the latest version v0.1.6 here:

https://github.com/zcoinofficial/zcoin/releases

It's 2.1 million coins spread over 4 years. 10% of total eventual supply of 21 million coins. This goes to initial private investors and to dev which are currently funding development.

As for the fork, we are working on a fix. We think we found the problem but are testing it right now. Stay tuned. Github has a push already but we're making sure it works.

ELI5:

Fast verification of the proof of work. This means clients don't have to spend a lot of resources to verify the validity of the proof.
ASIC resistant.
Difference between GPU and CPU mining shouldn't be too great.
Same creators as Equihash. Created to address some shortcomings of Equihash.
Zcoin will be the first cryptocurrency to implement it.


For your info, Gary did not contribute to the coding at all so it's not really '2 devs'. More like 1 dev Poramin, and one guy who takes care of everything else.
Now there's a team of people to help with everything else along with recruiting more devs

Update on Development:

MTP development is now at approximately 65% completion.
Setup envs are being prepared for update of Bitcoin core base to 0.13.
Wallet startup time is being looked at and prioritized.

Good news!

Bittrex has now updated to Poramin's version of the wallet and also the two main mining pools Suprnova and Pool.mn have rallied behind Poramin's version.

As for the slow startup issues, we are aware of them and are working to improve the wallet startup times.

Actually the split between Poramin and Gary hasn't affected price much at all. In fact looks like price is stable. The price crash happened way before this fiasco and is typical of a launch of any new coin.

Practically, the only version of XZC that matters right now is Poramin's as all the pools and major exchanges are rallying behind Poramin's as well as the community.

Gary's version doesn't have any updated binaries nor any pools or exchanges openly supporting him, nor does he seem active in his own Slack community.

I've spoken to Bill from Bittrex and he will make an announcement once the wallet is updated on his end which should be quite soon.

This is true. But the way I see it is a painful but necessary step. The old Zcoin was far from being a team with Gary handling the management and marketing of the coin and Poramin focusing on development which was less than ideal especially since Gary wasn't always present.

With the new team which will be announced in the coming weeks, we have clear roles and segregation of duties and a unified goal to make Zcoin a success. Development still is continuing and at a faster pace with additional help being given. It is no longer a two man show.

What I can say is that Tim Lee is a very successful Chinese businessman and is savvy with cryptocurrencies.

He brings with him not just new investment money to fund development but also a marketing team and valuable contacts. He's an active investor willing to put in the time and resources to improve Zcoin and not passively sitting on the sidelines. The investment he has brought in is more than sufficient to fund Zcoin's development for more than a year and allows Poramin to hire additional help as well. On top of the investment, he has been meeting important people in the industry and also has assembled a team to help promote Zcoin.

In this way both the development and marketing side is covered and provides a good momentum for Zcoin to move to the next level. Unlike what I experienced previously, I can say that since Tim has stepped in, we have daily discussions on how to improve Zcoin and we're very much better coordinated than before. I'm confident we will see positive results in the coming months.

Use this version. https://github.com/zcoinofficial/zcoin/releases

Bittrex version we will see once they have made a decision but we are positive.

This is a message from our new investor Tim Lee:

Still using the same Github here:
https://github.com/zcoinofficial/zcoin/releases

Thanks for the support!


Nope, the miner applications should be unaffected. Only pool software needs to be updated.


We will make an announcement on this once the fork has taken place. One of the reasons why we have been silent is that there's a lot of things going on behind the scenes that we need to wrap up before making any conclusive statements. I know this is frustrating as it seems that we are keeping everyone in the dark but it will become clear later why this is necessary.

However, in short Poramin will continue development of Zcoin regardless, as a new investor has been brought in to fund Poramin's development while all existing investors are retained and are agreeable to the new founder's reward distribution in Poramin's version.

Gary will no longer be a part of the project but it appears he may continue his own Zcoin fork while pulling code from Poramin's Github. He is however in control of the Twitter and Reddit accounts.

Poramin from the funding of the new investor has enough funding to continue Zcoin development and hire additional help.

MTP development is still ongoing but development is currently focused on reducing the wallet load times.

Technically speaking, if you keep your wallet.dat, all your coins before block height 14000 will be recognised in both Gary and Poramins version but practically, the one that retain its value is the one the community supports.

Feel free to join us on Slack! http://invite.zcoin.finance:3000

New investor. Existing investors are aware of it. Poramins share remains the same.

Thanks appreciate the support merry Xmas!