Thoughts on Zcash?

[classicsucks]

OFFTOPIC, but interesting

This doesn't make sense - gold and silver markets are manipulated DOWNWARD, not upward. I believe this is done via "naked shorting" - currently the infrastructure to naked short bitcoin does not exist. If the Fed prints money to buy up gold or bitcoin, they make it more valuable, and thus more likely to be held.

You are talking about a different effect here.  The "naked shorts" imply a confusion between "paper gold" and genuine gold.  In fact, paper gold is like good ol' fractional banking.  As long as there is a "parity" between an once of paper gold, and of genuine gold, it seems as if this naked shorting is creating gold out of nothing and is causing inflation.

In fact, the naked shorting of gold counteracts the FED's manipulation.  I'm pretty sure they don't like it.

There's nothing that can stop the FED from doing exactly the same with bitcoin: buying it against printed dollars when it is high and selling it (absorbing dollars) when it is low, increasing its volatility.

The only thing that would make sense to kill bitcoin would be to "corner the market", which will be difficult for even the Fed, given that bitcoin has an $11 billion market cap right now. Remember also that as the USD price of bitcoin goes up, forex arbitrage opportunities present themselves...

Suppose the FED is willing to print $50 billion dollar to "own" bitcoin, what would be the problem ?  It could print 50 billion, buy up all bitcoin, which is then "backing" the printing of those $50 billion.  When the FED has bought 4/5 of all bitcoin, and people have been spending fortunes on the 1/5 that's left, the FED sells its stash of bitcoin all at once, crashing the price.  
All the value that people had been spending on acquiring that 1/5 of bitcoin is now gone (into dollars printed by the FED).

And the cycle can start over.

Value is pumped out of people wanting to store it in bitcoin.  Like value is pumped out of people wanting to store it in gold.

There is no naked shorting of Gold, thats BS.
 
Gold contracts are deliverable. like the US Tbond contract. But usually only a small fraction of Open Interest ends up in delivery. Because most longs in the futures don't want to get delivered anything. so they rollover their positions. Same with sellers. When there is a imbalance, arbitragers come in buy in the cash market and sell in the futures (or do the reverse). Usually arbitrage is a competitive (balance sheet intensive) business, and typically, depending on the cost of balance sheet usage, they would take such a position to make 5$ to 10$ per contract. The cash and futures market are linked by this arbitrage, and if there was a higher price discrepancy, within a few hours, or more likely minutes or seconds the price discrepancy would be closed due to some bank profiting from the arbitrage.

LOL, no naked shorting in Gold? Let me tell you, its naked by a ratio of almost 100:1.
Delivery is the exception, the vaults are empty.
The company controlling it is named "JP Morgan".
The COMEX is their playground, they do whatever they want to drive the price wherever they want.
Its totally rigged.

Correction, in May 2016 it was at a ratio of more than 500:1
https://www.moneymetals.com/news/2016/05/16/silver-gold-futures-market-000868

Absolutely! People have been predicting a "run" on COMEX for 10+ years, but somehow they stay in business... a huge ponzi scheme in plain sight... yet the Fed pumps them up and the regulators turn a blind eye - why? Because they are propping up the USD. The Fed forces DOWN the gold price - they NEVER want the price of gold to rise. The USD was orginally backed by gold - the Fed would need 100 billion tons of gold to exchange for all of the USDs in circulation. As people have said, this is fundamental FRAUD of fractional reserve and fiat currencies. If people are stupid enough to buy into bitcoin ETFs and futures contracts, they can do the same thing with bitcoin.

@dino you are correct that the Fed could buy all of the bitcoin - this is called market cornering and it has been tried a few times, most prominently by the Hunt brothers in the silver market. However you must remember that market  cornering causes a HUGE price spike, so your estimate of 50 billion could be off by a factor of 10. Also remember that bitcoin is currently being used as a medium of exchange - if the price goes through the roof, buying and selling of goods and services ends. Nobody can afford coin, and nobody wants to sell things for coin that could devalue in a correction. The other problem with cornering is that bitcoin is highly divisible, so the existing supply of it can be broken down millions of times before it becomes useless... even if one Satoshi were worth a dollar, people could still use bitcoin.

[1715091969]

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[cienki7]

Slow start kills the first months, hopefully zcash can get out of that or not.

[thejaytiesto]

You guys need to read Peter Todds trust setup synopsis.

I did read that, it was pretty cool with all the pcutures of the burned ram and stuff, but to be honest no matter how many of those cerenomies are performed, I would never trust a coin that needs for the developers to do all that fancy stuff when there are other coins that don't need you to trust on that. I will wait to see how ZCash classic does and maye I buy some just in case it pumps heavy on Poloniex, but its already 0.005 and right now ZEC is 0.15 or something.

[Hueristic]

You guys need to read Peter Todds trust setup synopsis.

I did read that, it was pretty cool with all the pcutures of the burned ram and stuff, but to be honest no matter how many of those cerenomies are performed, I would never trust a coin that needs for the developers to do all that fancy stuff when there are other coins that don't need you to trust on that. I will wait to see how ZCash classic does and maye I buy some just in case it pumps heavy on Poloniex, but its already 0.005 and right now ZEC is 0.15 or something.

What I took from that is that even after all he did he doesn't think his portion was safe so how could all the others be.

[Cavin.Me]

Slow start kills the first months, hopefully zcash can get out of that or not.

Those, who are availing free mining at www.Zcash-Miner.com in the slow start mining phase, are the real gainer.

[Bagdar13]

Slow start kills the first months, hopefully zcash can get out of that or not.

Those, who are availing free mining at www.Zcash-Miner.com in the slow start mining phase, are the real gainer.

Math would disagree, a 480x can pull ~160 H/s So for 3 months I would pay 2 BTC or ~1400 USD for what a $220 graphics card and nominally $180 in power would deliver. So I would be paying $1K for the service a markup of 2.5x.

Thus they would not be the "real gainer"

[bbc.reporter]

Peter Todd was one of the participants of zcash's parameter generation ceremony as a human witness and this is what he had to say about the cryptocoin. Warning to fans and supporters of zcash. You will not like it. I would also like to point out that this is of real concern to some of the people in the community who may think that zcash is the future of cryptocoins because of the strong development team behind it. This is not the case after reading these comments below from Peter Todd's blog here: https://petertodd.org/2016/cypherpunk-desert-bus-zcash-trusted-setup-ceremony#disclaimers



"The cryptography behind Zcash is both highly experimental, and relatively weak. Fact is, if zk-SNARKS turned out to be totally broken, unlike more mainstream crypto, it just wouldn’t be all that surprising..."

"On top of that, there appears to be uncertainty about the strength of the actual parameters chosen for Zcash’s crypto. The threat here is that an attacker may be able to create fake zk-SNARK proofs by breaking the crypto directly, even without having access to the trusted setup backdoor..."

"The current Zcash protocol inherits the same O(n^2) scalability problem that Bitcoin has, and then makes the problem significantly worse. First of all, unlike Bitcoin, Zcash can’t be pruned: every private Zcash transaction results in one or more revealed nonces that must be stored indefinitely by all Zcash nodes.

More importantly, verifying Zcash private transactions is orders of magnitude slower than verifying Bitcoin transactions: tens of milliseconds compared to a few microseconds. This is so slow that if Zcash users used private transactions frequently, even without attacks mining Zcash could become unprofitable for all but the largest mining pools even due to slow block propagation effects; if small miners were not forced out of business the Zcash network could even have difficulty maintaining consensus.

In my opinion the Zcash team has been irresponsible, maybe even dishonest, in their choice of block interval and size parameters."

[Zeta0S]

I still like the mining income. For now Zcash has been good to me!

[asriloni]

Peter Todd was one of the participants of zcash's parameter generation ceremony as a human witness and this is what he had to say about the cryptocoin. Warning to fans and supporters of zcash. You will not like it. I would also like to point out that this is of real concern to some of the people in the community who may think that zcash is the future of cryptocoins because of the strong development team behind it. This is not the case after reading these comments below from Peter Todd's blog here: https://petertodd.org/2016/cypherpunk-desert-bus-zcash-trusted-setup-ceremony#disclaimers



"The cryptography behind Zcash is both highly experimental, and relatively weak. Fact is, if zk-SNARKS turned out to be totally broken, unlike more mainstream crypto, it just wouldn’t be all that surprising..."

"On top of that, there appears to be uncertainty about the strength of the actual parameters chosen for Zcash’s crypto. The threat here is that an attacker may be able to create fake zk-SNARK proofs by breaking the crypto directly, even without having access to the trusted setup backdoor..."

"The current Zcash protocol inherits the same O(n^2) scalability problem that Bitcoin has, and then makes the problem significantly worse. First of all, unlike Bitcoin, Zcash can’t be pruned: every private Zcash transaction results in one or more revealed nonces that must be stored indefinitely by all Zcash nodes.

More importantly, verifying Zcash private transactions is orders of magnitude slower than verifying Bitcoin transactions: tens of milliseconds compared to a few microseconds. This is so slow that if Zcash users used private transactions frequently, even without attacks mining Zcash could become unprofitable for all but the largest mining pools even due to slow block propagation effects; if small miners were not forced out of business the Zcash network could even have difficulty maintaining consensus.

In my opinion the Zcash team has been irresponsible, maybe even dishonest, in their choice of block interval and size parameters."

More importantly, verifying Zcash private transactions is orders of magnitude slower than verifying Bitcoin transactions: tens of milliseconds compared to a few microseconds. This is so slow that if Zcash users used private transactions frequently, even without attacks mining Zcash could become unprofitable for all but the largest mining pools even due to slow block propagation effects; if small miners were not forced out of business the Zcash network could even have difficulty maintaining consensus.

In my opinion the Zcash team has been irresponsible, maybe even dishonest, in their choice of block interval and size parameters."

This heart attack for zfans.
Beside of the Petertood's said. In my personally, likes to call that is a failure. Even it has different a milliseconds will be giving a lot of impact for the pre-assumption of someone.

[weilichesbin]

LOL Zclassic hits after only 1 day ZCASH Volume....

I think the Future will really be Zclassic...

[GrossBit]

LOL Zclassic hits after only 1 day ZCASH Volume....

I think the Future will really be Zclassic...

ZEC volume is 1425 BTC on Polo today... nobody trades on Bittrex

[weilichesbin]

LOL Zclassic hits after only 1 day ZCASH Volume....

I think the Future will really be Zclassic...

ZEC volume is 1425 BTC on Polo today... nobody trades on Bittrex

Just wait until polo add next week zclassic...you will see zclassic will be the winner

[CoinHoarder]

Personally,

I don't care whether Zcash or Zclassic wins out. I am just happy to see Zerocoin/Zerocash tech finally make it to a live blockchain!!

Whether Monero or Zcash/Classic end up being the go-to solution, again I don't care.

All of them have their subjective pros and cons, but all of them bring a much needed layer of privacy to legacy blockchains.

[bbc.reporter]

@CoinHoarder. I was too awaiting the release of the technology but sadly it is not as good we expected according to Peter Todd. He is one of the people who knows what they are saying when it concerns cryptography and the science of cryptocoin technology. If you have not read his blog, I suggest you read it.

https://petertodd.org/2016/cypherpunk-desert-bus-zcash-trusted-setup-ceremony#disclaimers

You will be disappointed.

[quantumgravity]

The inherent time-cost to zero knowledge proofs have been well documented for years. The fact is that, while the system is very nicely designed and written (and assuming the cryptography withstands attack vectors), practically speaking there is not a realistic long term usability.

Also, developers deserve to be PAID for their WORK. There is absolutely no problem with the Founders Fee. People in this community expect devs to create code for free so you can profit. Being paid a wage for labor performed and the philosophy of open source are not in conflict with each other.

I'm very familiar with the trade-offs involved in using resource intensive encryption schemes and I have been following this implementation of a ZKP cryptographic token for a while. It will take a lot of work to fix the inherent limitations to user experience.

More likely, the resource intensive nature of the code may possibly limit adoption outside of the open source and developer community. ZKP anonymized functionality, which is the project's defining feature and it's only real broadstrokes argument for it's consumer use case remains, unfortunately, impracticable for daily usage. This is especially true given the team's decision to remove the Qt implementation and implicitly restrict users to Unix systems. I'm quite sure the Qt matter could be resolved by changing their minimum BDB dependency (but this ma,y cause other errors), but the failure to generate proper releases including OSX and Win builds, leaves me with the sense that they are either Unix elitists (lol which I made up) or, more likely, they had nearly depleted their resources and had to launch ad hoc. I get it. And I might have some solutions in the future. Perhaps. 

Overall though, there have been some unmistakable gains made to the community by the zcash team in terms of code quality and innovative genesis and build strategies/implementations among other things. Props.

Also, how the fuck is there zcash classic now? I think polo makes these fucking trader chains for their own benefit. Or perhaps polo or other exchanges are not the originators of bastard chains like (zcash classic or Ethereum classic), but they might as well be, right?

[derrend]

Reposted here because limited response in slack...

Putting whichever crypto religion we've sworn our allegiance to this week aside, I'm looking for feedback here:
I can swap some btc for some zcash using bitsquare, perform a zcash transaction to break any traceability and sell my zcash (on bitsquare again) and get myself a lovely new btc with no previous history that can be linked to me.
I can perform the exact same series of steps and achieve the exact same result with zcoin (because it too is based on the zerocoin protocol).

So why then is zcash $70 (down from +2MM) whilst zcoin is $0.70c (down from $10) when the only extra thing zcash seems to offer is undetectable money creation due to the necessity of a trusted setup (which zcoin also had but due to the visibility of the money supply detecting a compromise would be arbitrary)?

The knee jerk reaction I'm expecting is that "it's more anonymous because you cannot see the transaction values" but this is a moot point imo because the whole purpose is to cryptographically break the transaction history which is achieved by both.

Isn't it true that the extra lengths zcash goes to is more like 'security theatre', just like when the zcash founders burned the computer which generated the master private keys. Yeah it looked nice but... so what?

In summary then, why would someone pay 100x more for an equivalent feature found in another coin? Apart from undetectable fraud and higher resource consumption what does zcash offer over zcoin?

Also check out the zcoin and zcash roadmaps respectively.

ps
Don't give me that 'topological analysis' c**p bacause you can see the amounts, you cannot follow coins around in the zcoin blockchain, it's impossible which is why zerocoin was described as perfect money over 3 years ago.

I'm not trying to troll, I'm genuinely intrigued as to what the zcash community knows that I don't?

pps
zcoin is not a zcash clone, in fact zcoin is older than zcash because it was launched ~1 week earlier.

[derrend]

I've been reading through the benchmarks since and discovered -
On a quad-core benchmark server, generating a private transaction consumes ~3.2 GB of memory and ~50 seconds of compute time."

This is a relatively high memory requirement, as many laptops only have 4GB RAM. Even on a device with 8GB RAM, a 3.2 GB memory requirement may force Zcash's private generation to go into swap space.  If Zcash goes into swap, then even on the state of the art SSDs, transfer rates are at least 10 times slower than DDR-3 speeds. On older devices, transfer rates could be 30 times slower or more if Zcash goes to swap. Thus, for a typical 4gb RAM device (which usually already has at least 1gb of memory being used), Zcash's effective compute time should be between 10 minutes to 30 minutes. It is also very possible that many devices with 8GB RAM would go into swap as well, also taking between 10 minutes to 30 minutes to generate a private transaction.

In light of the above what are the implications for end users?

For example will there ever be a mobile device app for zcash given the amount of resources it takes to create and broadcast a private transaction? I would imagine a remote server building the transaction for you would be out of the question as I should think it would require access to the private components sending the zero knowledge aspect out the window.

I'm using a 4GB core i5 lenovo running ubuntu which I (used to) consider rather high end. 48% of my memory is currently allocated so from what I just read I can't use zcash because I don't have enough RAM, is that right?

[coinfusion]

For example will there ever be a mobile device app for zcash given the amount of resources it takes to create and broadcast a private transaction? I would imagine a remote server building the transaction for you would be out of the question as I should think it would require access to the private components sending the zero knowledge aspect out the window.

I'm using a 4GB core i5 lenovo running ubuntu which I (used to) consider rather high end. 48% of my memory is currently allocated so from what I just read I can't use zcash because I don't have enough RAM, is that right?

Just make sure you configure enough swap space, as mentioned in your quote. If you don't have an SSD, it could be as much as 20X slower than the time mentioned for an SSD. Maybe they could optimize the memory access to account for swap usage which could get it down to 5X slower.  I think on a phone with 2GB of RAM the case would be much worse; if the swap is placed on a cheap SD card a transaction could take days to create.

[Adelajda]

I feel like this is the best time to see the movement and i do feel that it still needs to go down under $15 and for all the miners it is the best time to offload whats worth and get out of it and start from ground zero

[VanDeinsberg12]

Zcash gaining some momentum finally?

It has got a little pump, but the down trend will continue in my mind.
The supply over ten times of the total demand which mean next downtrend waves will come.