Yeah that's what I was saying.
I mean it does offer some privacy (I think the problems in the papers above have been at least partially addressed) but Zcoin's anonymity set is just orders of magnitude larger.

Funny how the trolls come out of their caves when they smell a competitor that actually offers better privacy

They always come back... but wow, 2 months is bad. The artificial limit of 1 spend per block, which was put in place because confirming spends put too much performance strain on pools, is probably what's to blame here.
As I understand it Znodes will be there exclusively for this purpose - to confirm zerocoin mints/spends - so at the latest when they launch is when you should get your confirmations.

I feel like people are completely missing the point of Zcoin when they say things like you just did, basically: "MTP is all that matters for Zcoin"
That's completely untrue. I get that it has been marketed heavily as 'revolutionizing mining' etc, and sure, if it can fulfill its promises of putting CPUs and GPUs on comparable if not equal footing and being scalable to 4 GiB or even 8 GiB of memory usage, then it will certainly be an important next-gen PoW algo. But it will still be just that: a PoW algo.

So here's what you all seem to be missing: Zcoin is a privacy coin based on original technology and working 100% anonymous payments.

And it's better than all its competitors in at least one aspect each:
It's better than Zcash in the sense that it has more reliable, auditable supply (and no Zooko tweeting about/alluding to backdoors).
It's better than Monero and Dash in the sense that it has much larger anonymity sets, meaning that once you've minted your zerocoin, there's mathematically no way of tracing anything (which is still theoretically possible in Monero, albeit very hard).

And it has a roadmap that shows all the promising things they're still working on, including eventually trustlessness.

That alone – the privacy tech – should put it at a market cap comparable to Monero and Dash, at least once enough people have heard about it (especially in the West, since Zcoin is much more popular in southeast Asia).

Not MTP.

Lmao MTP isn't Zcoin's "right of existence". That's the zerocoin anonymity feature. MTP is just a nice POW algo that's supposed to bring better mining decentralization, but as long as Zcoin can be mined at all it'll be fine.
So in terms of raison d'être, it's better to watch out for Znodes which are an important step for zerocoin transaction scalability.

I mean I don't know for sure what's going on either, but as long as the github page shows no merging of MTP code into the actual live wallet, I'm going to assume that the following will happen at block 47,500:

• nothing.

So it's kind of foolish to come up with all these nightmare scenarios of an MTP switch with no public GPU miners etc ("bloodbath", "windfall"... "armageddon"?), when in reality it seems that the auditing process has turned out more extensive than assumed and they're taking more time to make sure that there won't be any MTP exploits in the finished product... but are somehow still completely silent on it. (Aside from the one-sentence comment on extended deadlines)

But on this note:


Thanks for continuing the good work!

mjosephs, you seem hell-bent on being the great detective that finds all the shady doings of these evil, evil developers... except, quote zcoinofficial: "Because of these changes we will extend the bounty competitions."
And extended bounty deadlines, along with all the talk about brand-new research etc, probably means MTP won't really be launching that soon (also because when you look at github, the only changes that have been recently been pushed to master are sync improvements)
So... hold your horses.

@Bannedseller: It's not a friggin Zcash fork.

As far as I know, it's not actually possible for Zcoin/zerocoin to 'vaporize' like you describe it. I tested the minting and spending extensively a while ago and yes, it has some quirks like that "has to have at least two mint coins" error message and the fact that there's currently an artificial limit of 1 spend transaction per block in place (to deal with performance impact on pools because Znodes aren't implemented yet), meaning that it can take a while for a spend to get confirmed and that transactions can be 'floating' in mempool for an unreasonable amount of time... But aside from that, whatever you own, you own. (As long as you don't mess with your wallet.dat...)

So I don't know what exactly happened in your case, but if I were you I'd just take the help zcoinofficial offered you instead of writing rant after rant, which accomplishes nothing.

Well it's not a Zcash fork but an independent development – it actually launched before Zcash.

Zcash (& all its forks) has the problem of lacking supply auditability, meaning if any malicious person ever finds a bug that allows for double spends or anything like that, they could create an infinite amount of currency without it being detectable. Zcoin doesn't have that problem because it shows transaction amounts, even in zerocoin spends (Zcoin's equivalent to shielded transactions, roughly speaking).

Also this year or next year the trusted setup, which is still at the core of every zerocoin/zerocash-based cryptocurrency, will be ditched in favor of the trustless Sigma protocol in Zcoin.

It wasn't botnets as far as I know, a bunch of people just found out how to get AWS credits for free and unleashed insane numbers of Amazon instances on Zcoin.



It's been Lyra2Z since February... MTP is running on testnet and open source miners are being developed, and at the moment it's scheduled to launch at block 47500 (which should be around August 13), barring any further delays due to weaknesses found or anything like that.

You can buy vast quantities of SHIT on Novaexchange: https://www.novaexchange.com/market/BTC_SHIT/

Definitely $FUCK

Edit: Oh that's a token, not a coin. Then I'll have to go with $SHIT.

Zcoin.rocks is a fan-made page. It was created some time last year and I think it's no longer maintained (hence the dead links)
You can still use it as Zcoin's keys are still the same (and all a paper wallet generator does is generate a pair of private/public keys), but a newer generator can be found at http://paper.zcoin.ga/ (also not official, and currently without HTTPS, so use at your own risk)

Are you both using older wallet versions? Starting a new wallet with the current version (0.8.7.8) took a day for me to synchronize fully (that's without the znode.io download), and has been starting instantly ever since.

@ho3in If nothing else works (if you've already downloaded the newest wallet), try starting with the -reindex flag – if you're using Windows you can do that by making a shortcut to zcoin-qt.exe and then adding " -reindex" to the target path. (Just make sure to remove it again once you've successfully reindexed.)




The Marc Bevand? Pretty cool :)
Also, seems like a good idea to go for an open approach and introduce that "scrutiny bounty".

Well I'm not a Khovratovich or Dinur or Nadler, but if Khovratovich has been in contact with the two and he says the current fix removes the attack vector, then it's reasonable to believe that.

I was replying to playingpoodles, and I was referring to this mythical 'fundamental' memory-hardness (as I think I've highlighted enough), rather than the term 'memory-hard' itself – I'm not confused about that (as you would've realized if you had read 3 more lines, where I gave that exact definition in layman's terms).
The point I was making is that whether or not something, especially a more complex algo like MTP, is memory-hard in practice can obviously depend on all sorts of details of the algorithm. And once such details have been spotted and fixed, I can't see how it would not be 'fundamentally' memory-hard. Can you?

You misunderstood something then. The goal was never to make a single CPU and a single (similarly priced) GPU exactly equal. In fact, if I recall correctly from the Zcoin Slack, they actually aimed for a 1:3 ratio. The reason for this is that there are ways to achieve vast amounts of CPU hashpower (AWS, botnets, etc.) that don't exist for GPUs, so GPUs should always have an advantage. Just not an orders-of-magnitude advantage.


I think you misunderstood something there, too. mjosephs was frustrated about the existence of the time-memory-tradeoff attack vector in the first place, and about the code change that was implemented in response, and uttered a suspicion that this fix is only a 'band-aid'. That's speculation though. There is no published research that indicates this. Reuben responded very fairly and admitted that, since MTP is still an extremely new development, it's possible that new weaknesses will be found that allow for new TMT attacks, but the Zcoin devs haven't remotely exhausted their options in this regard, so basically there's no need to worry.

Also, perhaps I should point out to you that literally nothing you do in computing is 'fundamentally memory hard'. You can always exchange memory usage for CPU time (because whatever you save in memory, you could also just re-calculate whenever you need it again). That's one of the basics of computer science.
So the question isn't whether an algorithm is 'fundamentally' memory-hard (a concept that doesn't exist), but whether it is memory-hard in practice, i.e. whether there is a practical method to use much less memory while using not much more CPU time. That's why it can be sufficient to remove such a practical method with a minor fix. And that's why, once such a method is fixed, we are back to square one and there is no way of reducing the memory consumption of the MTP algorithm without blowing up computation time by an unreasonable factor – too large to make ASICs feasible.

According to this, yes, that's the plan: https://zcoin.io/zcoin-moving-beyond-trusted-setup-in-zerocoin/
Arbitrary inflation, if you mean invisible arbitrary inflation, is impossible in Zcoin. That's one of the major advantages compared to Zcash.

And in addition to what zcoinofficial said, I think the multiple POW algo switches had a noticeable impact on the coin emission graph, as each time the difficulty had to be adjusted from zero.

And yeah, Zcash is basically missing another half a month worth of coins because they started out like this:

Poodle, yeah I've read it. After all, you've posted that link 3 times now on the current 2 pages. (Almost as if you have some sort of agenda and any phrase like "decide for yourself" is a thin veil over the fact that you very much want to decide what other people think about this project...)

Your logic still sucks. If the coin hasn't taken off (i.e. there's insufficient buy support) and someone urgently needs money, then devs would not be able to dump 370.000 coins at all. Especially not without completely tanking the coin's value. Supply and demand is a thing. (In fact, when buying is so limited because the coin hasn't taken off yet, it can be assumed that they would barely be able to get rid of their founders' reward on the market, so any additional 370.000 coins would be completely worthless at that point.)

And if they don't need it urgently, it just makes a lot more sense to keep your reputation intact, keep developing the tech, and wait until the word spreads and Zcoin adopts a more appropriate market cap for a working zero-knowledge coin with its own development from the ground up and its own amazing dev team.
The only people who still don't want that to happen are those like you, who apparently missed the boat at lower prices and now want to FUD like crazy to try and get another low entry point.

Yes, the Zcoin devs would totally engineer a weakness that results in coins being created out of thin air, with all the great PR this entails, when it's open and official that 20% of mined coins from the first 4 years go to a dev fund anyways. Flawless logic there, mate.

And you're still ignoring literally everything that has been clarified about MTP in order to push your "it's broken!!!11111" narrative. Which is false. (Just like you ignore all links to the wallet and continue claiming that "there's no working wallet" lol)

Why don't you just give up and go back to your Zencash, which you seem to like a lot better (according to your post history)?