Thoughts on Zcash?

[someone111]

even SIGAINT said it wouldn't use Zcash when it was released.

Source please?

[c789]

even SIGAINT said it wouldn't use Zcash when it was released.

Source please?

Sorry...I'll edit the post. Here's the link, but you'll need a TOR browser: http://monero7tukbkxn57.onion/

Here's the text:
    What about cryptocurrency X/Y/Z? I heard they can mix/join/ninja vanish.

    Bitcoin mixers (even coinjoin) are not enough to maintain transaction unlinkability. Not to mention the Bitcoin blockchain data is currently being mined and sold to law enforcement.

    Dash's supernodes could collude to reveal who you are.

    Zcash is operated by an LLC in the USA. Besides the obvious political problems, Zcash doesn't mix by default it is opt-in. Also, it may be possible for the maintainers to secretly inflate the currency by hiding inflation into zk-SNARK "pours".

EDIT: thanks, lethos3, for posting a pic of the site.

[TraderBill]

I still have to do my research on it.  But my first impression was skepticism when I read it will require several people with a "trusted setup"

Also 20% of each block going to the dev team by default seems a bit centralized.  I wonder why they didn't do the ethereum setup of ico for dev team then regular mining

[nioc]

The more I read about Zcash the more I think its totally overhyped.

what would make sense is a Zcash sidechain over Monero core.

If my memory serves maxwell mentioned Bytecoin, not Monero.  

Damm! Will probably get more trust spammed by the Monerologists. 

Memory would have to serve you well as GM said that a long time ago, hence why he suggested the original implementation of cryptonote.  No one is going to use bytecoin for anything now.

[Galiatram]

Zcash is pretty nice and the fact is that its upcoming after monero it can also come up but we have to see this first of course.

[25hashcoin]

Just another shitcoin.

[altseeker]

Zcash is pretty nice and the fact is that its upcoming after monero it can also come up but we have to see this first of course.

I can see it has some potential to be as good as monero.

[JITENDERPAR3]

Hi guys,

What are your thoughts on Zcash and its zero-knowledge proof construction? I've read that there are already a few big investors backing up this project.

Cheers!

i don't think it be go up successfully because of limited number of investors and very few known user of Zcash .

[dinofelis]

I can see it has some potential to be as good as monero.

I think that the cryptography in zcash is very interesting.  My trouble is with the way the ZCASH team is putting it up.  Maybe ZCASH will be some kind of bytecoin: brilliant crypto but badly put in music, with a too scammy or doubtful way of issuing the coin.  I'm NOT saying that the zcash team are scammers: they are open about their post-premine, and the risky thing of their small-club trusted setup ; they are not lying, they are openly saying it ; also, the "corporate connections" are not what you would expect from an anarchist tool.    But, like with bytecoin, the crypto is probably brilliant.  But badly put into work.
What kills ZCASH to me, is the fact that anonymous transactions are optional.  That's a no-go, a non-sense.
But I'm happy that zcash sees the daylight, as this will allow for real-world testing of ZKp crypto.  I see it as a proof of concept prototype.

[vigZ]

I will say this over and over again until people realize this important point. Coins controlled by corporations will not succeed. A few bucks will be made and the coin will quickly be forgotten. Only grassroot community coins with active development with a REAL purpose and usecase will succeed. Direct your attention to coins that are not owned by corporate interest / ponzi/premine and you will find projects that genuinely believe in this that movement we are apart of.

[glerant]

Hi guys,

What are your thoughts on Zcash and its zero-knowledge proof construction? I've read that there are already a few big investors backing up this project.

Cheers!

i don't think it be go up successfully because of limited number of investors and very few known user of Zcash .

Really? 

Zcash has been waited for and hyped more than Segway in the crypto world! 

[glerant]

I will say this over and over again until people realize this important point. Coins controlled by corporations will not succeed. A few bucks will be made and the coin will quickly be forgotten. Only grassroot community coins with active development with a REAL purpose and usecase will succeed.

I tend to agree with you there.

Direct your attention to coins that are not owned by corporate interest / ponzi/premine and you will find projects that genuinely believe in this that movement we are apart of.

Not so sure about this one!

People invest in the present. I know some projects are saddled with history and skeletons - but they can be taken over like Europecoin was or they can redeem themselves in the eyes of investors by what they do and how they behave recently. Like NXT etc.
The point is, if they are now great projects and are largely decentralised, I don't think the history makes much difference. If Eth fails. It will be because of the recent Hard Fork (Centralised) nothing to do with the historical instamine/ICO.

Projects are also judged differently across different crypto-epochs. Insta-mines/"ICOs"/Premines are judged very differently now from how they were back in the day (Spoetnik is the exception who proves the rule! Time will tell if he is right - and he often is ). The NXT ICO wouldn't even raise an eyebrow these days.

[ArticMine]

...

Monero is, as far as I understand, not a FORK of bytecoin, but a clone.  Bytecoin was the first implementation of a cryptonote coin ; but the cryptonote developers made a "kit" to invent your own cryptonote coin.  There have been several, of which bytecoin, and monero.

As far as I understand, bytecoin has been involved with some premine scandals, as a few other cryptonote clones are.  Essentially, the claim was that when bytecoin came to be known here, that it was "already used for 2 years on the dark markets", to justify that most of the bytecoin coins had already been mined.  There is serious doubt about these two years of unknown existence "on the dark markets", especially after that there was a bug in the original cryptonote software that allowed for very high initial mining rates.    Monero has been less or not involved in these issues.

That said, the true, original "bitcoin" of cryptonote technology (invented by a certain "Nicolas Van Saberhagen" - the Satoshi of cryptonote) is not monero, but bytecoin.  Monero is just a clone of it, but one that is simply perceived as being less of a premine scam than the original bytecoin one.

At this point, monero has its own history and development, and is not a pure cryptonote clone any more.

At least, that is how I understand the history of this.

Essentially, it is as if one had found out that Satoshi had been a premine scammer, and that he claimed that he invented bitcoin in 2007, that it had been used on the dark markets, and that he now brought it to the rest of the world, after having mined a good deal of all bitcoin, while he essentially had generated a falsely timestamped block chain in 2009.  Then probably litecoin would now be nr 1.

If one talks about "monero" one often means "cryptonote technology", as monero is now its most well known representative.  But historically, it was bytecoin that brought it out.

Monero is not a clone of Bytecoin.  It can best be considered as a fork of a Bytecoin and Dogecoin cross, that has been modified materially afterward.

Here are some material differences between Monero and Bytecoin, apart from the Bytecoin pre-mine / ninja mine of over 80% of the emission before launch.
1) The tail emission. This is the Dogecoin part of Monero's heritage. The tail emission actually makes the Cryptonote adaptive blocksize limit work, while keeping the mining incentives that are necessary to keep the POW secure in place. In Bytecoin with no tail emission the penalty for increasing the blocksize becomes toothless as the emission falls. As a consequence of this it is only a matter of time before Bytecoin becomes vulnerable to a 51% attack.
2) Minimum mixin for regular transactions is enforced in Monero, making fungibility / privacy and anonymity mandatory. This is not the case in Bytecoin.
3) The use of the LMDB database to store the blockchain on disk. In this respect Monero is more like Bitcoin or Dogecoin rather than Bytecoin. The original Cryptonote protocol used a flat memory model with the blockchain stored in RAM. Storing the blockchain in RAM is of course totally impractical. Try that with Bitcoin's over 100 GB blockchain.
4) RingCT. This is of course the adaptation of Greg Maxwell's confidential transactions for use with ring signatures. This article by Shen Noether et al. introduces this innovation in Monero. https://lab.getmonero.org/pubs/MRL-0005.pdf

When considering Z.cash we just as in the case of Cryptonote and Monero one must make a clear distinction between the technology, Zerocoin, and its implementation in Z.Cash.

The technology has several limitations:
1) The need to "prove" the destruction of the initial private key in order to prevent a centralize "authority from creating the zerocoin tokens at will. My take is that this could be addressed by creating a market of initial setups, possibly on different side chains and have the market pick which ones are trustworthy.
2) The high computing cost of creating the zerocoins. Time is of course on the side of this technology; however at this point it may simply be not practical at all especially on mobile devices.
3) Fungibility, privacy and anonymity are in fact optional, which when combined with 2 above could easily lead to a situation where the fungibility, privacy and anonymity are seldom used, effectively creating very small mix sets.

The Z.cash implementation has at least two very serious if not fatal shortcomings:
1) The base coin has the same kind fixed blocksize issues as Bitcoin with no long term solution to the blocksize issue.
2) The corporate post mine is likely to make the Electric Coin Company an MSB in the eyes of the regulators. This will create a very significant regulatory risk requiring AML/KNC compliance in the United States and many other jurisdictions.

[glerant]

3) The use of the LMDB database to store the blockchain on disk. In this respect Monero is more like Bitcoin or Dogecoin rather than Bytecoin. The original Cryptonote protocol used a flat memory model with the blockchain stored in RAM. Storing the blockchain in RAM is of course totally impractical. Try that with Bitcoin's over 100 GB blockchain.

As with Monero, the cryptonote/bytecoin project has not stood still all this time.

The blockchain storage has been moved to a database powered by RocksDB resulting in significant RAM consumption reduction. The newest Bytecoin daemon takes up modest 150-200MB RAM, a sixfold decrease comparing to the previous versions.

https://bytecoin.org/news/bytecoin-2.0.0-major-update-beta/

However, thanks for the interesting post! 

[TraderBill]

...

Monero is, as far as I understand, not a FORK of bytecoin, but a clone.  Bytecoin was the first implementation of a cryptonote coin ; but the cryptonote developers made a "kit" to invent your own cryptonote coin.  There have been several, of which bytecoin, and monero.

As far as I understand, bytecoin has been involved with some premine scandals, as a few other cryptonote clones are.  Essentially, the claim was that when bytecoin came to be known here, that it was "already used for 2 years on the dark markets", to justify that most of the bytecoin coins had already been mined.  There is serious doubt about these two years of unknown existence "on the dark markets", especially after that there was a bug in the original cryptonote software that allowed for very high initial mining rates.    Monero has been less or not involved in these issues.

That said, the true, original "bitcoin" of cryptonote technology (invented by a certain "Nicolas Van Saberhagen" - the Satoshi of cryptonote) is not monero, but bytecoin.  Monero is just a clone of it, but one that is simply perceived as being less of a premine scam than the original bytecoin one.

At this point, monero has its own history and development, and is not a pure cryptonote clone any more.

At least, that is how I understand the history of this.

Essentially, it is as if one had found out that Satoshi had been a premine scammer, and that he claimed that he invented bitcoin in 2007, that it had been used on the dark markets, and that he now brought it to the rest of the world, after having mined a good deal of all bitcoin, while he essentially had generated a falsely timestamped block chain in 2009.  Then probably litecoin would now be nr 1.

If one talks about "monero" one often means "cryptonote technology", as monero is now its most well known representative.  But historically, it was bytecoin that brought it out.

Monero is not a clone of Bytecoin.  It can best be considered as a fork of a Bytecoin and Dogecoin cross, that has been modified materially afterward.

Here are some material differences between Monero and Bytecoin, apart from the Bytecoin pre-mine / ninja mine of over 80% of the emission before launch.
1) The tail emission. This is the Dogecoin part of Monero's heritage. The tail emission actually makes the Cryptonote adaptive blocksize limit work, while keeping the mining incentives that are necessary to keep the POW secure in place. In Bytecoin with no tail emission the penalty for increasing the blocksize becomes toothless as the emission falls. As a consequence of this it is only a matter of time before Bytecoin becomes vulnerable to a 51% attack.
2) Minimum mixin for regular transactions is enforced in Monero, making fungibility / privacy and anonymity mandatory. This is not the case in Bytecoin.
3) The use of the LMDB database to store the blockchain on disk. In this respect Monero is more like Bitcoin or Dogecoin rather than Bytecoin. The original Cryptonote protocol used a flat memory model with the blockchain stored in RAM. Storing the blockchain in RAM is of course totally impractical. Try that with Bitcoin's over 100 GB blockchain.
4) RingCT. This is of course the adaptation of Greg Maxwell's confidential transactions for use with ring signatures. This article by Shen Noether et al. introduces this innovation in Monero. https://lab.getmonero.org/pubs/MRL-0005.pdf

When considering Z.cash we just as in the case of Cryptonote and Monero one must make a clear distinction between the technology, Zerocoin, and its implementation in Z.Cash.

The technology has several limitations:
1) The need to "prove" the destruction of the initial private key in order to prevent a centralize "authority from creating the zerocoin tokens at will. My take is that this could be addressed by creating a market of initial setups, possibly on different side chains and have the market pick which ones are trustworthy.
2) The high computing cost of creating the zerocoins. Time is of course on the side of this technology; however at this point it may simply be not practical at all especially on mobile devices.
3) Fungibility, privacy and anonymity are in fact optional, which when combined with 2 above could easily lead to a situation where the fungibility, privacy and anonymity are seldom used, effectively creating very small mix sets.

The Z.cash implementation has at least two very serious if not fatal shortcomings:
1) The base coin has the same kind fixed blocksize issues as Bitcoin with no long term solution to the blocksize issue.
2) The corporate post mine is likely to make the Electric Coin Company an MSB in the eyes of the regulators. This will create a very significant regulatory risk requiring AML/KNC compliance in the United States and many other jurisdictions.

Very interesting analysis

[CredaCash]

2) The high computing cost of creating the zerocoins. Time is of course on the side of this technology; however at this point it may simply be not practical at all especially on mobile devices.
3) Fungibility, privacy and anonymity are in fact optional, which when combined with 2 above could easily lead to a situation where the fungibility, privacy and anonymity are seldom used, effectively creating very small mix sets.

CredaCash is another new cryptocurrency that uses Zero Knowledge Proofs to achieve complete privacy. CredaCash was started as in independent project before Zcash was announced.  All transactions in CredaCash are private.  Most importantly though, CredaCash can create a completely private transaction in 5 seconds, while it takes Zcash and its clones around 2.5 minutes. This speed up was accomplished by optimizing the Zero Knowledge Proof algorithm.    CredaCash has a Windows binary with source code on GitHub. The website is credacash.com

[Matkurb]

CredaCash™ is a next generation cryptocurrency that features:

Speed: Transactions clear in just a few seconds.
Finality: Cleared transactions are final and cannot be reversed.
Privacy: Transactions are encrypted using Zero Knowledge Proofs to keep the source of funds, destination of funds, and the transaction amounts completely private.  CredaCash can create a private transaction in about 3 to 6 seconds, much faster than any other cryptocurrency that uses zero knowledge proofs.
Scalability: A single blockchain can scale to thousands of transactions per second.  In the future, multiple blockchains will be interconnected and payments routed seamlessly between them, similar to routing data on the internet.

[Ayers]

2) The high computing cost of creating the zerocoins. Time is of course on the side of this technology; however at this point it may simply be not practical at all especially on mobile devices.
3) Fungibility, privacy and anonymity are in fact optional, which when combined with 2 above could easily lead to a situation where the fungibility, privacy and anonymity are seldom used, effectively creating very small mix sets.

CredaCash is another new cryptocurrency that uses Zero Knowledge Proofs to achieve complete privacy. CredaCash was started as in independent project before Zcash was announced.  All transactions in CredaCash are private.  Most importantly though, CredaCash can create a completely private transaction in 5 seconds, while it takes Zcash and its clones around 2.5 minutes. This speed up was accomplished by optimizing the Zero Knowledge Proof algorithm.    CredaCash has a Windows binary with source code on GitHub. The website is credacash.com

never heard of it, when this coin was created before monero and others? if it was really so innovative and was created before zcash, why zcash did not evolved it's code, to match the speed of this credacash coin? also why this coin is not known?

[tromp]

also why this coin is not known?

Maybe because it's not the least bit decentralized?!

[CredaCash]

never heard of it, when this coin was created before monero and others? if it was really so innovative and was created before zcash, why zcash did not evolved it's code, to match the speed of this credacash coin? also why this coin is not known?

The project was started well over a year ago, and we've been quietly working on writing code, not self-promotion.  We just finished our first beta release last week.

Maybe because it's not the least bit decentralized?!

For the first release, blocks are assembled by a small group of permissioned witnesses, but the blocks are checked by all nodes on the system, so blocks that are invalid or attempt to revert cleared transactions are not accepted by the network.  In that sense, it is just as decentralized as any other currency.  In the future, we will implement permissionless proof-of-stake and the ability to scale to thousands of witnesses.  In addition anyone will be able to set up their own public or private blockchain with transactions seamlessly routed across blockchains from source to destination.

Proof-of-work blockchains are slow and have no finality guarantee.  We are also not convinced proof-of-work is secure in any new cryptocurrency that does not have the hash power of bitcoin behind it.  For those reasons, we architected CredaCash to start with permissioned witnesses with an eventual migration to permissionless proof-of-stake and multiple interlinked blockchains.  We believe the speed and finality will provide big advantages in the long run as the currency becomes more widely used.

We currently have a beta release with a Windows binary on our website CredaCash.com and source code on GitHub.