[ANN] Firo (FIRO) - Implementing ZKP privacy without trusted setup

[Zer0Sum]

To those of you wondering what MTP is and why is it so important to Zcoin, please take a read below:

http://blog.zcoin.tech/what-is-mtp-merkle-tree-proof-and-why-is-it-so-important/

As for those who are talking about working binaries for miners:

Zcoin updated windows and mac miners: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8zzSbCtXAidVDVjOW9NVTRiMkU
This was posted by bolehvpn but is by a trusted third party. Let me know if it works.

Thanks for the official Win binaries. No warnings from Avast... and mining normally.

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[ERossin]

Thanks for clarifying that the cpuminer.exe's were supported by the Zerocoin team, zcoindev.

got it working thanks dev, which is better optiminer or OCMINER??

Optiminer is giving about 25% more H/s than the ocminer for me.

I really like this optiminer. it's running very well with cpu hashwell xeon

[zcoinofficial]

Great to hear the miners are working Using optiminer's as well.

[dfox101]

To those of you wondering what MTP is and why is it so important to Zcoin, please take a read below:

http://blog.zcoin.tech/what-is-mtp-merkle-tree-proof-and-why-is-it-so-important/

As for those who are talking about working binaries for miners:

Zcoin updated windows and mac miners: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8zzSbCtXAidVDVjOW9NVTRiMkU
This was posted by bolehvpn but is by a trusted third party. Let me know if it works.

Thanks for the official Win binaries. No warnings from Avast... and mining normally.

I tried to use the mac version, got this error:

dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/local/opt/jansson/lib/libjansson.4.dylib
  Referenced from: /Users/abc/cpuminers/./cpuminer-ocminer
  Reason: image not found
Trace/BPT trap: 5

any info?

[szafa]

Price falls from day to day to go to the top.

[doktor83]

optiminer version has dev fee ?
I got this at the same time on all my miners with different workers :

[zcoinofficial]

optiminer version has dev fee ?
I got this at the same time on all my miners with different workers :

This looks like you specified a wrong username.worker and password?

[cleverhope]

guys, i see that a lot of people are interested in xzc mining but the price is going down so, i have a simple question - what are you doing now with xzc, what you are mining. just dumped it? and why, the profit is really pitiful at the current price, and you are killing coin. And as we can see on mining chart - in general only big miners left. So guys, why are you dumping?)

[zcoinofficial]

To those who wish to find out more about MTP and why it is important:

https://zcoin.io/what-is-mtp-merkle-tree-proof-and-why-it-is-important-to-zcoin/

Zcoin is working to be the first cryptocurrency to implement MTP as a proof of work algorithm and work is ongoing. As the foundation of a coin’s security with also fundamental implications as to distribution and also verification speed, implementation of MTP is very high on our list of priorities and in our roadmap. Implementation of MTP is also expected to bring down wallet initialization times due to its fast verification as compared to the current stop gap Lyra2 implementation.

The MTP algorithm was devised by Alex Biryukov and Dmitry Khovratovich from the University of Luxembourg in their paper published on the 11 June 2016 titled Egalitarian Computing. These are the same researchers who came up with Equihash that is currently used in ZCash.

Egalitarian Computing

MTP was created as a way to remedy the disparity between ordinary users and adversaries/cheaters where the latter could use botnets, GPU, FPGA and ASICS to gain a significant advantage and mount a cheaper attack. The basic concept is that it should establish the same price/cost for a single computation unit on all platforms. This means that no single device should gain a significant advantage over another for the same price hence promoting egalitarian computing. With egalitarian computing, attackers would need to spend the same amount as ordinary users for equivalent ‘hashing’ power. As attackers need to usesimilar hardware as ordinary users, automated large-scale attacks become no longer possible. This combined with the fact hashing in MTP is highly memory intensive, users infected by trojans to participate in botnets would experience noticeable performance degradation and therefore more likely to suspect something is amiss.

Massive centralization can be seen with many existing proof of work algorithms such as SHA256 (Bitcoin), Scrypt (Litecoin, Dogecoin) and X11 (Dash) where hashing power is centralized in ASIC farms and normal users are not incentivised to participate in the security of the network. Even in newer schemes such as Ethash which is used in Ethereum, although it is deliberately designed to be GPU friendly (more than a 100x more efficient than on a CPU), this still encourages GPU farms and centralization. Equihash despite it being memory hard, is not sequentially memory hard, meaning it can be mostly parallelized which makes development of ASICs more likely.

This doesn’t mean that we discourage GPU mining, but with MTP it is foreseen that even with GPUs mining, CPU mining would still remain competitive.

Fast and lightweight Verification

MTP although it is computationally and memory intensive to find the solution, once found, its solution can be quickly and efficiently verified without requiring a lot of memory.

This is important since by keeping verification quick, this makes the network more resistant to DoS attacks that target verifiers. It also allows lightweight hardware such as smartphones to perform verification which is not possible on many other hard memory hard algorithms. Verification speed of MTP is also expected to be faster than Equihash.



Source: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity16/sec16_paper_biryukov.pdf

There may also be a possibility that as MTP uses merkle-trees, merkle-tree optimizations may be possible and this is an area we are researching into.

Progress Free

A mining algorithm should be ‘progress-free’ meaning that mining must be a stochastic process where there is always a non-zero chance that the solution is found and being independent of any previous events. This prevents centralization and mitigates network delays.

Therefore a mining algorithm with an ‘initialization phase’ is not truly progress-free since the chances of finding a solution when initializing is zero. This is one of the main reasons why Biryukov and Khovratovich decided to develop MTP despite already developing Equihash since Equihash still requires a long initialization phase that certifies the memory allocation and is therefore not ‘progress-free’.

It is believed that the shorter an initialization phase, the more decentralized mining can be since everyone starts from an even playing field and economies of scale or network location plays much less a role in mining efficiency.

Summary

MTP is an amazing new mining algorithm that is high performance, high security and promotes egalitarian computing. Zcoin intends to be the first to implement this and we forsee that MTP will offer good future proofing. Being a privacy centric coin, it is even more important that mining power is decentralized and as such we are focusing on working on the very core of Zcoin’s security first before embarking on other features. We hope to finish MTP implementation in the coming months.

[tomsmith26]

To those who wish to find out more about MTP and why it is important:

http://blog.zcoin.tech/what-is-mtp-merkle-tree-proof-and-why-it-is-important-to-zcoin/

Zcoin is working to be the first cryptocurrency to implement MTP as a proof of work algorithm and work is ongoing. As the foundation of a coin’s security with also fundamental implications as to distribution and also verification speed, implementation of MTP is very high on our list of priorities and in our roadmap. Implementation of MTP is also expected to bring down wallet initialization times due to its fast verification as compared to the current stop gap Lyra2 implementation.

The MTP algorithm was devised by Alex Biryukov and Dmitry Khovratovich from the University of Luxembourg in their paper published on the 11 June 2016 titled Egalitarian Computing. These are the same researchers who came up with Equihash that is currently used in ZCash.

Egalitarian Computing

MTP was created as a way to remedy the disparity between ordinary users and adversaries/cheaters where the latter could use botnets, GPU, FPGA and ASICS to gain a significant advantage and mount a cheaper attack. The basic concept is that it should establish the same price/cost for a single computation unit on all platforms. This means that no single device should gain a significant advantage over another for the same price hence promoting egalitarian computing. With egalitarian computing, attackers would need to spend the same amount as ordinary users for equivalent ‘hashing’ power. As attackers need to usesimilar hardware as ordinary users, automated large-scale attacks become no longer possible. This combined with the fact hashing in MTP is highly memory intensive, users infected by trojans to participate in botnets would experience noticeable performance degradation and therefore more likely to suspect something is amiss.

Massive centralization can be seen with many existing proof of work algorithms such as SHA256 (Bitcoin), Scrypt (Litecoin, Dogecoin) and X11 (Dash) where hashing power is centralized in ASIC farms and normal users are not incentivised to participate in the security of the network. Even in newer schemes such as Ethash which is used in Ethereum, although it is deliberately designed to be GPU friendly (more than a 100x more efficient than on a CPU), this still encourages GPU farms and centralization. Equihash despite it being memory hard, is not sequentially memory hard, meaning it can be mostly parallelized which makes development of ASICs more likely.

This doesn’t mean that we discourage GPU mining, but with MTP it is foreseen that even with GPUs mining, CPU mining would still remain competitive.

Fast and lightweight Verification

MTP although it is computationally and memory intensive to find the solution, once found, its solution can be quickly and efficiently verified without requiring a lot of memory.

This is important since by keeping verification quick, this makes the network more resistant to DoS attacks that target verifiers. It also allows lightweight hardware such as smartphones to perform verification which is not possible on many other hard memory hard algorithms. Verification speed of MTP is also expected to be faster than Equihash.



Source: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity16/sec16_paper_biryukov.pdf

There may also be a possibility that as MTP uses merkle-trees, merkle-tree optimizations may be possible and this is an area we are researching into.

Progress Free

A mining algorithm should be ‘progress-free’ meaning that mining must be a stochastic process where there is always a non-zero chance that the solution is found and being independent of any previous events. This prevents centralization and mitigates network delays.

Therefore a mining algorithm with an ‘initialization phase’ is not truly progress-free since the chances of finding a solution when initializing is zero. This is one of the main reasons why Biryukov and Khovratovich decided to develop MTP despite already developing Equihash since Equihash still requires a long initialization phase that certifies the memory allocation and is therefore not ‘progress-free’.

It is believed that the shorter an initialization phase, the more decentralized mining can be since everyone starts from an even playing field and economies of scale or network location plays much less a role in mining efficiency.

Summary

MTP is an amazing new mining algorithm that is high performance, high security and promotes egalitarian computing. Zcoin intends to be the first to implement this and we forsee that MTP will offer good future proofing. Being a privacy centric coin, it is even more important that mining power is decentralized and as such we are focusing on working on the very core of Zcoin’s security first before embarking on other features. We hope to finish MTP implementation in the coming months.

this news is very important for me. I believe that The price will increase now and who quickly catch up with this information will buy cheap price to day and today is a black friday .

[Burmik123]

To those who wish to find out more about MTP and why it is important:

http://blog.zcoin.tech/what-is-mtp-merkle-tree-proof-and-why-it-is-important-to-zcoin/

Zcoin is working to be the first cryptocurrency to implement MTP as a proof of work algorithm and work is ongoing. As the foundation of a coin’s security with also fundamental implications as to distribution and also verification speed, implementation of MTP is very high on our list of priorities and in our roadmap. Implementation of MTP is also expected to bring down wallet initialization times due to its fast verification as compared to the current stop gap Lyra2 implementation.

The MTP algorithm was devised by Alex Biryukov and Dmitry Khovratovich from the University of Luxembourg in their paper published on the 11 June 2016 titled Egalitarian Computing. These are the same researchers who came up with Equihash that is currently used in ZCash.

Egalitarian Computing

MTP was created as a way to remedy the disparity between ordinary users and adversaries/cheaters where the latter could use botnets, GPU, FPGA and ASICS to gain a significant advantage and mount a cheaper attack. The basic concept is that it should establish the same price/cost for a single computation unit on all platforms. This means that no single device should gain a significant advantage over another for the same price hence promoting egalitarian computing. With egalitarian computing, attackers would need to spend the same amount as ordinary users for equivalent ‘hashing’ power. As attackers need to usesimilar hardware as ordinary users, automated large-scale attacks become no longer possible. This combined with the fact hashing in MTP is highly memory intensive, users infected by trojans to participate in botnets would experience noticeable performance degradation and therefore more likely to suspect something is amiss.

Massive centralization can be seen with many existing proof of work algorithms such as SHA256 (Bitcoin), Scrypt (Litecoin, Dogecoin) and X11 (Dash) where hashing power is centralized in ASIC farms and normal users are not incentivised to participate in the security of the network. Even in newer schemes such as Ethash which is used in Ethereum, although it is deliberately designed to be GPU friendly (more than a 100x more efficient than on a CPU), this still encourages GPU farms and centralization. Equihash despite it being memory hard, is not sequentially memory hard, meaning it can be mostly parallelized which makes development of ASICs more likely.

This doesn’t mean that we discourage GPU mining, but with MTP it is foreseen that even with GPUs mining, CPU mining would still remain competitive.

Fast and lightweight Verification

MTP although it is computationally and memory intensive to find the solution, once found, its solution can be quickly and efficiently verified without requiring a lot of memory.

This is important since by keeping verification quick, this makes the network more resistant to DoS attacks that target verifiers. It also allows lightweight hardware such as smartphones to perform verification which is not possible on many other hard memory hard algorithms. Verification speed of MTP is also expected to be faster than Equihash.



Source: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity16/sec16_paper_biryukov.pdf

There may also be a possibility that as MTP uses merkle-trees, merkle-tree optimizations may be possible and this is an area we are researching into.

Progress Free

A mining algorithm should be ‘progress-free’ meaning that mining must be a stochastic process where there is always a non-zero chance that the solution is found and being independent of any previous events. This prevents centralization and mitigates network delays.

Therefore a mining algorithm with an ‘initialization phase’ is not truly progress-free since the chances of finding a solution when initializing is zero. This is one of the main reasons why Biryukov and Khovratovich decided to develop MTP despite already developing Equihash since Equihash still requires a long initialization phase that certifies the memory allocation and is therefore not ‘progress-free’.

It is believed that the shorter an initialization phase, the more decentralized mining can be since everyone starts from an even playing field and economies of scale or network location plays much less a role in mining efficiency.

Summary

MTP is an amazing new mining algorithm that is high performance, high security and promotes egalitarian computing. Zcoin intends to be the first to implement this and we forsee that MTP will offer good future proofing. Being a privacy centric coin, it is even more important that mining power is decentralized and as such we are focusing on working on the very core of Zcoin’s security first before embarking on other features. We hope to finish MTP implementation in the coming months.

this news is very important for me. I believe that The price will increase now and who quickly catch up with this information will buy cheap price to day and today is a black friday .

nice info, but.. MTp implementation will be in some MONTHS. not now. and in some months price can go down again. unfortunately xzc community has a lot of miners, who only dump coins. But, of course, i wait MTP like a new years morning) good luck devs.

[grrrgrrr]

Anyone got an atom x5 tablet/laptop? Could you check how many H/s can that thing pull off?

[Rabinovitch]

The most popular pool is Suprnova

There should not be any "most popular pool". There should be several pools with more or less the same hashrate.

Why there is no list of the pools in the OP? Devs should take care of it.

[doktor83]

optiminer version has dev fee ?
I got this at the same time on all my miners with different workers :

This looks like you specified a wrong username.worker and password?

No, i think it was a pool problem because this happened on all the computers i am mining with, at the same time, but all the computers have different workers.

[jdh015232]

is suprnova pool offline?

[noobtrader]

uh... why i get "stratum_recv_line failed" message on suprnova ?

EDIT :: fixed after restarting

[zcoinofficial]

The most popular pool is Suprnova

There should not be any "most popular pool". There should be several pools with more or less the same hashrate.

Why there is no list of the pools in the OP? Devs should take care of it.

Yup definitely. We paid a bounty for ocminer to release his code open source so that anyone can run a pool   He's releasing his code to us on Sunday

[zcoinofficial]

We've pushed part of the code for MTP integration: https://github.com/zcoinofficial/mtp

[Nieltoro]

Going to second day without confirmation on my transaction to an exchange...

[noobtrader]

i just realize i havent receive anything from mining this coin since 16 Nov.  @ suprnova