Notice a few questions coming up:
"Loads of new coins are being issued each day"Zcoin follows the same release schedule as Bitcoin's.
"Why another privacy and anonymity coin? What additional benefit does Zcoin offer over existing anonymity solutions?"Bitcoin and preceding alternative cryptocurrencies have attempted to solve this problem through the use of transaction mixers or ring signatures. However existing methods do not score that well on the traceability set. The traceability set is a key metric to understanding how private a cryptocurrency is. The traceability set in formerly proposed solutions is limited by the size of the mixing cycle or ring signature. Each mixing cycle or ring signature is limited by the number of transactions per cycle, which is transitively limited by the the block size of the cryptocurrency. Thus, the traceability set in previous attempts at privacy tends to only be a few hundred.
With ZCoin, the traceability set is on a dramatically higher magnitude. Instead of having a traceability set limited to the few hundreds, ZCoin has a traceability set that encompasses all minted coins in the ZCoin system. Thus, the magnitude of the traceability could be in the order of millions, rather than hundreds. So its privacy level is magnitudes higher than all previous cryptocurrency.
The other problem is that tumbling methods are only secure under the assumption of a lack of topological analysis and pre-existing network data, which is an incorrect threat model. There are multiple research papers demonstrating that taking a separate network topology like Facebook can be used to de-anonymize a cryptocurrency as long as a long chain of transaction history exists. With all previous cryptocurrencies, a long chain of transactions is publicly viewable on the blockchain and prone to topological analysis.
With ZCoin, this long chain of transaction history simply does not exist, and there is zero information leakage about the sender and receiver of a transaction, so it is not prone to topological analysis and so the link between the sender and receiver disappears.
ZCoin uses zero-knowledge cryptographic proofs. A zero-knowledge proof is a method in which one person can prove to another person that a given statement is true, without conveying any information apart from the fact that the statement is indeed true.
"Where are the bounties going to?"The great majority of the coins being spent from the founder's reward is going towards bounties, some of which may be cashed out. We are considering releasing general categorization of how the bounties are spent.
Of the bounties we're looking at right now that are open to the public:
- Get a top DNM to accept Zcoin: 1000-5000 XZC (depending on size of DNM)
- Assistance with implementation of MTP mining algo: Contact us.
"Your coin is being mined by botnets!"Our Lyra variant is meant to be CPU friendly until we can implement the MTP protocol which is more RAM intensive and therefore less friendly on botnets. From information on the pools and in fact many of the largest miners are public and open about their mining, the vast majority of them are using AWS via cheap AWS credits (
https://aws.amazon.com/awscredits/) which can be obtained from attending certain events, webinars, or using some Quick Starts or buying from other people who have the AWS credits. They are not mining 'for free' but are spending their money and time to get a return. Although we haven't looked at the AWS TOS in detail, this may or may not be a breach of their TOS and there are some early indications that some of them are having their credits removed.
.
