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Author Topic: Zerocoin when?  (Read 4978 times)
Sergio_Demian_Lerner
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July 09, 2013, 04:13:08 PM
 #21

I hope next week I will publish my two years late AppeCoin paper. Appecoin is even more anonymous than Zerocoin since it hides the amounts (it doesn't require denominations).

The problem I see with Zerocoin and Appecoin when implemented on Bitcoin is that people trust Bitcoin because it relies in a very simple cryptographic scheme (ECDSA) that is well studied. Any other cryptographic protocol will only weaken the trust on the system.

Do people trust AppeCoin/ZeroCoin source code as much as they trust OpenSSL code ?
I don't think so.

For example, if you break AppeCoin you can create money from thin air, which you cannot do in Bitcoin.

AppeCoin and ZeroCoin are complex protocols, and require much more complex implementations. Trust on complex crypto protocol requires time and review for many years.

Best regards, Sergio
 
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Hal
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July 11, 2013, 02:25:12 AM
 #22

E.g. N parties show up in a communications group and want to make a joint transaction. They each name an input they want to spend and signmessage for a zerocoin creation showing that they have the authority to spend that coin.  They then return anonymously and provide zerocoin spends that specify the outputs they're interested in. Everyone then knows what the final transaction should look like and they all sign.

In this case the zerocoin part is used to prevent parties from jamming up the mix, e.g. by joining and providing inputs but refusing to sign. If someone refuses to sign— it can only be because either zerocoin has been exploited (and their preferred output isn't in the mix) or because they're trying to jam it.  In any case, you just blacklist their input, and restart the process. Because zerocoin is only used for anti-dos in that context it also means that you could use a faster reduced security instance of it, also allowing some experimentation with the security boundaries.

The zerocoin part does more than defend against DOS, doesn't it? It also provides a degree of anyonymity, if I understand it. In the conventional multi-party anti-taint protocol, every participant knows the mapping from inputs to outputs. But in your improved protocol using libzerocoin, nobody sees the mapping. Now, this requires more than two participants, so considerable organization is needed to coordinate.

Still, this an application of the zerocoin protocol which doesn't have an impact on the blockchain. OTOH, it has a small anonymity set, so the benefit is rather modest.


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July 19, 2013, 05:17:51 PM
 #23

The zerocoin part does more than defend against DOS, doesn't it? It also provides a degree of anyonymity, if I understand it. In the conventional multi-party anti-taint protocol, every participant knows the mapping from inputs to outputs. But in your improved protocol using libzerocoin, nobody sees the mapping. Now, this requires more than two participants, so considerable organization is needed to coordinate.

Still, this an application of the zerocoin protocol which doesn't have an impact on the blockchain. OTOH, it has a small anonymity set, so the benefit is rather modest.
Indeed. Although there are simpler ways to hide the connection: e.g. Tor plus blind signatures:  parties provide inputs, get a blind signature from all other parties, reconnect and expose their blindsigned tokens to get into the output list, but they leave open a DOS attack without an even more complicated protocol.  Using ZC solves both the connections problem and gives you anti-DOS, which blind signatures themselves don't provide.

I was working under a (handwave handwave) assumption that the parties would meet over Tor, Bitmessage, or some other anonymity preserving transport.  Practically speaking, a direct usage Zerocoin requires something similar.

I'm not sure about the anonymity set impact, it's a bit hard to reason about. One of the scaling arguments for ZC is that you could use it infrequently for a fairly small set of high value transactions. This has an impact on the anonymity set too.  Because throughput isn't very limited in the joint-transaction case, and because it could potentially piggyback on regular transactions (E.g. I want to donate to Foo, but instead of donating directly I do it via a mix transaction), it should be possible to cascade many stages of mixing and increase the anonymity set size.
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September 07, 2013, 05:08:33 PM
 #24

Here is CoinJoin, a followup authored by gmaxwell.

Please do not pm me, use ron@bitcoin.org.il instead
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September 07, 2013, 06:30:45 PM
 #25

Here is CoinJoin, a followup authored by gmaxwell.

Wow, that CoinJoin thinger looks really interesting...

Zerocoin was really exciting when I first heard about it, and still is. I love the idea of forking bitcoin to use zerocoin proofs much better than CoinJoin, mainly because the anonymity pool would be larger by orders of magnitude, but sadly I have to agree with the earlier posts pretty much explaining why it can't easily happen (mainly, computation and storage overhead... orders of magnitude more cost for the network)

Thanks for whichever mod switched this post to being its own thread rather than off-topic. I otherwise wouldn't have seen this tangent discussion on whichever thread it was hiding in originally.
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