Thoughts on Zcash?

[smooth]

Smooth seems to imply that all of civilization needs to be vertically integrated for maximum efficiency, and it doesn't matter if all the oceans are empty, food is entirely synthetic in a complex chain of labor custody, and every inch of land is covered with concrete.

I never implied it does't matter. If you want to be able to go back to the land, then it certainly does matter. Very few people will ever want to do that, but very few is not none. I just said that you can't argue starvation and population reduction at the same time that you argue for widely-available synthetic food. Being more tightly integrated into society is another matter, and technology does tend to do that, with some exceptions.

Anyway, I'd suggest that technology makes it less likely (similar to TPTB's comments about less farm land being used). Synthetic fish will reduce demand for real fish, because it will be cheaper to grow fish meat in a vat using genetically engineered yeast or whatever (I have no idea how synthetic fish works). Real fish will become a luxury good that are sold in smaller quantities and higher prices (the latter including people who choose to devote large quantities of their scarce labor to catching it in a self-sufficient manner, via the "opt out" luxury good channel).

[1715180771]

1715180771

[TPTB_need_war]

Why are you on a technology forum? I think you want the Cave Man Hasn't Discovered Fire discussion and doesn't have a suitable weapon to fend off lions.

Bitcoin is a supposed solution to a monopolization problem.  Even if Bitcoin worked flawlessly, what I just talked about above is the real monopolization gorilla in the room that dwarfs it.  Like I said, even with a perfectly functioning Bitcoin that scales to infinity, it would be worthless if you're unable to opt out of a monolithic civilization at all.

You have conceptualized the problem incorrectly. Refer to the Economic Devastation thread in the Economics forum. This thread it the wrong place to discuss it.

In short (and please reply on the other thread), maximum division-of-labor (specialization) is a problem when Coase's Theory of the Firm is in control. But we solve this by lowering transactional costs between specialists, so the capitalists can't parasite via the Corporation.

It is a more complex discussion than we should have in this thread.

I am sad to see you are so pessimistic. I'd like to help you see the light (if I had more free time). I need to busy coding instead.

[TPTB_need_war]

You said something like you'd prefer for our advisors and engineers to get the founders reward, and they do! This is a common misunderstanding that almost everyone seems to have: everyone seems to think that the investors are getting most or all of the founders reward. I'm yet not ready to divulge more details about how the Zcash Co is split between the investors and the other founders, but generally speaking, no way do the investors have anywhere near a majority of the Zcash Co. The vast majority of the founders reward is going to the other founders rather than to the investors.

An ICO sold into the free market would be preferrable, so that you founders take your cash and the coins are widely distributed, so that no one has to fear that the insiders will dump their coins.

Problem is that is impossible to prove whether you purchased the ICO from yourselves jacking up the price (even you can take out a loan to do this). Similarly it is impossible to know if you've taken cash or coins from an ICO.

So it seems this problem has no good solution. You've opted instead to take the coins over a longer period of time via mining, perhaps to convince investors/speculators that you can't dump the coins early. Also this enables you to get coins at (hopefully) higher prices in the future. Problem is that afaics (IANAL) this will force all miners to register as Money Services Businesses with FinCEN to avoid being an illegal money transmitter since the miners are transfering value to a third party. Also this puts your company in danger of being classified a controlling entity w.r.t. to Howey test which requires you to register all the investment securities (i.e. the coins) with the SEC. We have asked you (in your AMA and also on this forum) to respond to this legal issue and have received no response yet.

I have suggested that instead you focus on receiving investment in your company as experts on this technology. And target working with Open Ledger and others who are attempting to make block chains for the corporate market. Because the big win for Zcash is not for the masses, but for enabling privacy for corporations using public block chains (because firewalled block chains are not secure and they ameloriate the reason to use a block chain). The use of anonymity by the masses is fraught with meta-data issues that are basically insoluble. Anonymity is mostly a technological dead-end for the masses. The coin that will be marketed to the masses (I am working on that) will be focused on microtransactions and instant transactoins, scaling, and mass adoption markets in social networking. That is not, can not, and should not be the focus of your work. You could still release a Zcash for everyone, and make it a fair distribution where everyone can mine, same as Monero did. However, it is sort of silly to waste all that investment on electricity (one of the distribution, technological, and marketing issues I am attempting to solve with my work). And still the coin will be distributed to those with the most mining chops who invest the most in electricity and leasing hardware. So again I suggest perhaps you just do a public ICO if you can manage the legal issues.

Another factor to bear in mind is that the sober reality that crypto currency just doesn't work may eventually come to pass. It is much better to take some of your return on investment asap just to hedge your speculative bets. Do not delude yourself into thinking this is a sure bet, even though you have great technological progress.

Seriously you need some better marketing advice. You have the technological capabilities, the business chops, but who on your team has been a VP in marketing at a major software company? Try consulting for example Steve Guttman or someone who can help you not make a huge blunder in your marketing strategy (which impacts the decisions about R&D and the funding model).

his different path of the future of this new and exciting idea

So you mean the Socialism vision for the future where we all collect unemployment insurance payments while we code open source. 

Fact is that serious R&D open source is driven by corporate sponsorship. Non-serious open source (a.k.a. copycoins) are driven by mining the speculators.

Zcash's team has the technical skills being the inventors of the math and technology. They will be able to make tweaks and insights that hobbiest coders won't be able to make. Those expert cryptographers and mathematicians who might be at the same level of comprehension and knowledge, will also not work for free.

Besides as I explained in my other posts on this forum, "fair" mining by debasement just hands the invested money to the electric and hardware companies, who have no vested interest whatsoever to improve the Zcash technology.

[TPTB_need_war]

One final post to Zcash and this really needs to be my last one:

But you and Matthew Greene in my opinion has brought to the project more...

Maybe I'm wrong. And I don't want to offend Zooko!!! Just as I and my friends don't understand what's going on with the project. We waited for about 2 years. Every day reading tape Matthew Greene and you and... I think that you just had to ask for community money to develop. As an example, in the CIS about you know a lot of people and collect money for you(Even 1 000 000$) was not a problem.

And most uzhastnoe what piucture fear that community will not accept a good idea from those 20% will go to investors. If these 20% went to the team of developers.

zooko & ian, I hope as astute marketers you will understand for every person who makes the effort to complain there may be 100 others who agree with vlad and Trashman but don't make the effort to give you feedback. And I hope you understand that (despite ostensibly English not being vlad's native language) he is communicating to you that the ideology in the market of Bitcoin is that it is a community investment in bettering our world and that there shall not exist centralized parasites, not the Federal Reserve central bank nor investors. Again Zooko, I advise you give your investors a % of the corporation and you can raise funding for the corporation and service corporate needs for your technology. Simultaneously you could launch a general use Zcash that is targeted to the Bitcoin market and that community's ideological sentiments, which can be orthogonal to your efforts to apply your technologies to corporate markets (or even somewhat integrated but not integrated from the funding perspective), and such could also serve to demonstrate that your company is the expert on this technology which can drive the funding of the corporation by venture capital investment (probably coming from the corporations that want you to invest in applying your technology to OpenLedger or other projects applicable to corporate needs).

I think Ethereum has shown that the Bitcoin community stands ready to buy into an ICO to the tune of $millions if you can demonstrate a superstar team of developers and clearly communicate your strategy for the Zcash ecosystem, so that speculators are enthused about the potential ROI. And then these speculators become cheerleaders for Zcash doing your PR for you at a viral scale that you can't do otherwise.

For as long as the speculators can see the lion's share of the ICO money is going to fund the develpoers, then the community that supported Ethereum will not likely complain (even though there will be some others who will complain if the launch isn't a "fair" launch of debasement, but I've explained that it is silly to give that $ away to the electric and hardware companies who have no vested interested in Zcash's development).

Also it seems to me that if you can show ICO funds have been stored in specific BTC addresses which are then maintained for the duration that the funds have not yet been spent on development, then you can effectively show that the funds were not used to purchase Zcash coins and thus the community will know your group is not controlling a large share of the coins.

An ICO presents some legal issues w.r.t. to the SEC regulations if you allow US investors to purchase. For this, you really need to consult an attorney. IANAL.

Edit: and if you are going to do an ICO, I urge you to do asap, because one theory is we are going into another liquidity contagion downturn worse than 2008 which may start as soon as May or maybe as late as 2017. It is quite possible that the altcoin market will go comatose. You would thus be advised to get funding now asap and not take coins from mining over an extended period of time. To be stable developers, you should not also be speculators. Remember that! I learned that the hard way in the past.

[TPTB_need_war]

Zcash does not understand this thread about funding and distribution models and I also point out how the recent Ethereum shrilling has thus made Ethereum illegal:

The most important fact is that an "Initial Coin Offering" could potentially be treated as selling a security by SEC or other securities regulators. See the new report “Is Bitcoin A Security?” by the excellent Coin Center crew to understand what that means and when it might apply:
 https://coincenter.org/2016/01/is-bitcoin-a-security/

So this is the number one fact that determined my decision: doing an ICO would risk legal consequences that could prevent the technology from ever being built.

     (The Coin Center report actually cites us as an example of how to avoid this legal issue.)

I had studied that Coin Center report in the past and their conceptualization of the Howey test (pg. 41 of the report) is incorrect! The test is not some explicit set of 4 attributes as the Coin Center claims but rather the Supreme Court explicitly stated it will overlook all obfuscations and distill to the economic reality of who is creating the expectations of investors (implied by any means, not just those 4 attributes so enumerated)! For example, the points on pg. 30 (32 of the PDF) and pp. 38 - 40 are linking profit by developers to the Howey test, but rather I argue the Howey test looks not primarily at profits by developers (although that is also a necessary ingredient) but rather whether the developers promoted expectations for gains amongst the investors. The term 'security' means another entity is securing (i.e. responsible for in the eye of the investor for) the outcome. Note IANAL though.

Pleeeeaaaaaassssseeee don't insinuate to us that your company is basing its decision on a report from the Coin Center and has not consulted its own legal counsel. You need your own legal counsel to indemnify you from this risk.

That Coin Center report has technical errors as well, such as they claim on pg. 15 (17 of the PDF) that a 51% attack can't create coins out of the thin air nor otherwise alter the consensus protocol, but what they fail to realize is that the minority mining can't fork away from the 51% attack because the 51% attack can always create the longest chain on any new fork as well. So the minority mining is powerless and thus the users of the coin have no choice but to the use the 51% attacked protocol, so their cois are not locked up (jammed). Also that Coin Center report claims it is very expensive to sustain a 51% attack, but this fails to mention the case where the cost is charged to the collective by the corrupt State, such as may be the case in China (which controls 65% of Bitcoin's hashrate) where perhaps a wink and a handshake gets you free electricity from the Three Gorges Dam.

The Coin Center repeats that technical error on pg. 19 (21 of the PDF) wherein they formulate a thus erroneous distinction between proof-of-work (PoW) and permissioned block chains. On pg. 20 (22 of the PDF), the report makes an erroneous claim about proof-of-stake (PoS) coins being more expensive to acquire as the coin's price rises, because as we explained, PoS has lack of Nash equilibrium failure modes of which includes the fact that externalities can be employed to pay for attacking the coin, most especially because the attack cost is paid only once and not ongoing as for PoW. On pg. 53 (55 of the PDF), the statement that investors in ETH (Ethereum's tokens) do so primarily for use-value is entirely disproven by the recent domination of the Altcoin Discussion thread at Bitcointalk.org with numerous of Ethereum threads shrilling[1] for the recent price rise from $2 to $15 despite my numerous attempts to explain that Ethereum has no use-case because they never solved the centralization of verification issue.

On pg. 23 (25 of the PDF) the point is made that proof-of-burn is probably the most unarguably fair.

[1]	https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1356957.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1361609.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1360037.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1361613.msg13856423#msg13856423

> There's actually a good reason for securities regulators to look critically at such deals —
> because they are an opportunity for the seller to take advantage of the buyers, and to find
> buyers who are naive or vulnerable. An ICO is an acute opportunity for a "pump-and-dump"
> scam. I didn't want even the appearance of the possibility of such a thing to be associated
> with Zcash. I also didn't feel comfortable taking money from people who may be ill-informed
> and who may be unable to afford the loss if the project were to fail.
>
> It's ironic: there is a certain segment of the cryptocurrency world who considers an open ICO
> to be good because it exposes a bunch of self-selected people to the upside, but this is the exact
> same reason that securities regulators such as SEC regard such things as potentially bad: because
> they expose a bunch of self-selected people to the downside! (And insidiously, the cost to the
> buyers is potentially to the benefit of the seller.)

But you have steadfastly ignored the numerous times I (shelby3 on the Zcash forum and Zooko's AMA) have asked you to comment on the FinCEN regulations which seem to require that all Zcash miners will have to apply as Money Service Businesses (and note even the Coin Center report mentions FinCEN at the top of page 3), if you require miners to transfer 11% of the coinbase block rewards to your corporation. Even if you build in the protocol the requirement that 11% of the coinbase is to be transfered to your foundation, the miner still is the one who creates the block and decides on his own free will whether to honor the protocol or fork the protocol. This is very dubious and I don't think miners will risk it! You may think that FinCEN regulations do not apply globally, but the G20 has announced plans to cooperate against money laundering (and the recent false flag operation in France is being used as another excuse just as that false flag 9/11 got the BigT Lie rolling with the resultant "Patriot" Act). You think you are clever, but you are digging your grave by monkeying around trying to skirt USA regulations, which you've now admitted in public above. Not good. You are starting to demonstrate that you are not competent to run this operation. Please stop being obstinate and wake up to the realities.

That will kill your coin because it means that FinCEN controls your coin.

[TPTB_need_war]

I didn't call Zcash, Monero, or Aeon scams for example.

I have argued that Zcash may be superior to Cryptonote/RingCT, but this is still an open question. Even right now I am invited to private discussion with Zooko to find out what their legal interpretations are hopefully, but I may be restricted from sharing it (I don't know yet). I have also questioned whether anonymity can gain significant adoption in the mass market. Hey but also remember we are likely headed into capital controls by 2017, so there it is all open to question at this point. I had been thinking maybe it is wiser to target anonymity for corporations on public block chains (since permissioned block chains seems to remove any point of block chains), but also realizing that programmable scripting on block chains doesn't work, causes me to pause to think about the implications.

And thanks for posting from a newbie sock puppet account.

[39tears]

now zerocash is in the test mode, right?

[smooth]

now zerocash is in the test mode, right?

https://github.com/Electric-Coin-Company/zcash/wiki/Public-Alpha-Guide

[AngusCanine]

When  and where will the public be able to buy Zcash

[smooth]

When  and where will the public be able to buy Zcash

Nothing like that has been announced. It won't be launched for several months. After that I would guess it will trade on some exchange(s).

[TPTB_need_war]

I want to add that I realize the legal issues make any PUBLIC pre-sale/pre-mine choice dubious. If you do public ICO then the tokens must be registered as securities. If you do PRIVATE pre-sale and then PUBLIC royalties from mining as Zcash proposes, then the miners apparently have to register as Money Service Businesses under FinCEN regulations and the coming G20 plan to harmonize these regulations starting in 2017.

Appears the only options for legal distribution are PRIVATE ICOs (that can include any qualified investors as so defined by the SEC but you can't advertise this to the public-at-large and has to be viral within the qualified investor social network).

Or via PUBIC proof-of-work mining.

IANAL yet I think Ethereum violated the securities law.

Some have also claimed that PUBLIC airdrops might be legal, when these are not marketed as investments but rather for-use tokens.

[fartbags]

Anyone know the basic info such as:

- mining algo
- pools
- link to miner
- coin totals
- premines
- block reward structure
- block time
- PoW or PoS

[smooth]

Anyone know the basic info such as:

- mining algo
- pools
- link to miner

The info on the live coin is not released yet afaik. There is only a testnet now.

- coin totals
- premines
- block reward structure
- block time
- PoW or PoS

I think it is stated that all of these are planned to mirror Bitcoin's structure (PoW, 10 min blocks, 21 million coins, halving days, etc.) except that 10% of the total supply is paid to the company launching it (structured as 20% of the block rewards for the first four years) and 1% is supposed to go to some kind of foundation.

[wachtwoord]

Anyone know the basic info such as:

- mining algo
- pools
- link to miner

The info on the live coin is not released yet afaik. There is only a testnet now.

- coin totals
- premines
- block reward structure
- block time
- PoW or PoS

I think it is stated that all of these are planned to mirror Bitcoin's structure (PoW, 10 min blocks, 21 million coins, halving days, etc.) except that 10% of the total supply is paid to the company launching it (structured as 20% of the block rewards for the first four years) and 1% is supposed to go to some kind of foundation.

So dead on arrival

[GTO911]

10% of total supply 

Greedy fucks!

[Rotator]

After i saw SDC- fall i have beginning to doubt in all those stories about anonymity.
Just a matter of time when will some good programer find some bug in every other coin with anon transactions.

[fartbags]

10% of total supply 

Greedy fucks!

Brought to you by the new greedy fucks on the block Pantera Capital
https://z.cash/team.html#investors

I wonder what the marketcap will be. Since it's a mined PoW coin it might be really cheap at some point, unless these investors are planning on mining and buying up all the coins for a pump n dump.

[fartbags]

Is this more anonymous than XMR monereo and ring signatures?

[smooth]

Is this more anonymous than XMR monereo and ring signatures?

Certainly yes, since it is (in theory assuming everything works properly) perfectly anonymous while Monero (or any mixing-like technique) has some degree of leakage. The practical effect of the difference is debatable, especially considering other issues such as computational overhead, complexity of the implementation, trusted setup, and immaturity of the underlying crypto.

[fartbags]

This project looks pretty good except the PoW. If someone could get rid of the initial private investor coins and switch this to PoS then I would be really interested.