I hate to be "that guy" - but a birdie told me Zerocoin is working on setting up a trust-less setup (possibly slated for this fall). Can anyone confirm this?
I like ZCash except for this part. I'm interested in the first coin to implement the Zerocoin technology that comes up with a way to do it without the trusted setup.
Also on a different note (did some digging and couldn't find the answer). Is the current trusted setup for Zerocoin able to de-anonymize transactions or just create arbitrary inflation (like ZCash)?
Also - it looks like ZCash and ZCoin were both released in October. And from what I understand both have bitcoins inflation schedule. Can someone explain to me why ZCoin has 2,500,000 coins vs ZCash's 1,600,000? 30 days between releases should only result in 144,000ish coins shouldn't it? (50 coins X 4 per hour (every 15) X 24 hours per day X 30 days = 144,000).
(Edit: 10 min block times as poster below pointed out. So 50 X 6 X 24 X 30 = 216,000 minted in a month. Still seems like we have almost a 1,000,000 coin difference when there should only be 216,000 difference. Even with the bug that released 200K extra coins - that's still 900,000 discrepancy when there should only be a 400,000ish supply discrepancy.)
And one more question. I was around back when ZeroVert came out with ZeroCoin never being implemented and devs faded into the background. It looks like Poramin was the dev of that supposed "first implementation of Zerocoin" years ago. Until it turned out to be a scam (I think?). Coin wasn't even around for a few months.
Can someone confirm that Poramin Insom was or was not the dev of that coin? I'm not trying to FUD here or detract from others who are fine with the ZeroVert incident. I would just like an explanation if there is one. And if Paramin started it and abandoned it even with the 168K premine due to lack of funding or whatever. I understand many will be ok with this. I'd just like to gather more information for myself.
Hey no problems pretty good questions but dang all the most controversial ones
The Cointelegraph article is actually not correct that we would do it by the end of the year. Likely to spill over into 2018. You can read more about this here:
https://zcoin.io/zcoin-moving-beyond-trusted-setup-in-zerocoin/.
https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/764.pdf Roadmap is here:
https://imgur.com/Vad2DG7The current trusted setup for Zerocoin if broken, transactions are NOT de-anonymized. The privacy is guaranteed through the zero-knowledge proofs as the accumulator is not involved in the privacy part. The only security we need from the accumulator is that you can't claim that you have a coin in the accumulator which is actually not there. So that's just orthogonal to privacy. So yes arbitrary inflation is the issue though note that it would still be a serious issue but it will be detected in Zcoin at least.
ZCash had a slow release schedule if I'm not mistaken during its initial mining period. We also had a bug that allowed coins to be generated which was subsequently fixed. Not our finest moment for sure but you can read about it
here. We also released in September 28.
Poramin Insom indeed was the dev of ZeroVert and was with the previous founder Gary (who is no longer with the project). You can read about our explanation on that incident
here and you will notice that the premine was untouched.