Topic: [ANN] Zcoin (XZC) - Implementing ZKP privacy without trusted setup - page 327. (Read 663504 times)

there is trust issues with ZCash, its all dependent if people can trust the ZCash devs.
Both coins have there issues its all dependent on which is most trusted while been practical in real world scenarios.

At the end of the day, the algo is gonna change very soon, ZCash is launching tomorrow so who knows where the market is heading. There is going to be a major hype around ZCash but which will be the one that is adopted by the masses?

Exactly.

I could be on here crying over every coin with GPU mining ( since I no longer have my rig ).
Instead, I wait till an opportunity to cloud mine comes along & grab it.

Crazy thing is... anyone can cloud mine, they just need to learn how. Ain't rocket science.

just favours a different crowd; everyone will have a whinge if x mining method isn't within their grasp.

ASICs actually ARE good from a network security standpoint. But that's neither here nor there - most people can take the time to learn how to utilize AWS, don't blame others for your laziness.

The thing that gets lost in all of this is mining SHOULD be hard, it's not easy to mine gold, why should crypto mining be the same? To me the more difficult to accomplish such a task, the more value it gives to it.

I work hard at my dayjob to accumulate extra funds to buy crypto, likewise why shouldn't a miner have to put in a little work to get their share as well?

Great draft! Thanks 

Also curious about scalability, if crypto adoption really kicks in I'm sure we will see some stalled networks.

Zcoin’s private transactions are not memory-intensive as with Zcash. On a quad-core benchmark server, generating a private transaction with “Zerocoin mint” and “Zerocoin spend” consumes ~10 seconds of compute time. Thus, sending a private transaction with Zcoin could be between 5-200 times faster than Zcash, depending on device.

On the other hand, Zcoin’s private transaction sizes are about 50 times larger than Zcash’s transaction sizes. This will not be a limiting issue for several reasons. One easy fix would be to update Zcoin to support pruning:

In his whitepaper, Satoshi had mentioned “pruning” as a solution to Bitcoin’s potential future scalability issue. Surprisingly, it’s not discussed often. When there is greater demand for Zcoin transactions than its capacity, Zcoin can build pruning into the protocol. This way, the storage requirements for Zcoin could be minimal.

By stubbing off branches in the merkle tree to save storage space, pruning could be built into Zcoin in a similar fashion as described in Satoshi’s whitepaper

The thing that gets lost in all of this is mining SHOULD be hard, it's not easy to mine gold, why should crypto mining be the same? To me the more difficult to accomplish such a task, the more value it gives to it.

I work hard at my dayjob to accumulate extra funds to buy crypto, likewise why shouldn't a miner have to put in a little work to get their share as well?

Zcash is an LLC registered in the US, which unfortunately very much makes it vulnerable to pressure from FBI and other suits (in fact they could be subpoenad by the NSA just like Lavabit), and it has the toxic waste problem. Zcoin is... I don't know what it is, apparently no registered company at all, and it uses the RSA-2048 number for its crypto setup (as you can see right here), which has been publicly available for 25 years and means there is no possibility of toxic waste in the developers' hands.

Also the Zerocash protocol hides all amounts, which in theory allows an adversary to use an exploit to generate currency while remaining undetected forever, while in Zcoin amounts are public yet transactions are still private, as explained in my other post above.

In essence, Zcoin has its strengths exactly where Zcash has its weaknesses. Not saying Zcash sucks, it certainly is a cool project with an amazing dev team. But to think that Zcoin has no reason to exist when Zcash is out is just foolish.

ASICs actually ARE good from a network security standpoint. But that's neither here nor there - most people can take the time to learn how to utilize AWS, don't blame others for your laziness.

ASICs actually ARE good from a network security standpoint. But that's neither here nor there - most people can take the time to learn how to utilize AWS, don't blame others for your laziness.

Worse, why would they have the rows increase with every block?

Well a lot of these miners/botnets are dumping these mined coins on the exchanges which also allows distribution With the early stages of any coin, it is always a handful of people who benefit (those who figure out how to get a miner working for the coin and get in early enough).

The whole point of this weird Lyra version was to make it CPU limited until they figured out an ideal algo (which they thought would be MTP). You would think that CPU mined algos would be the best in ensuring a fair distribution but due to AWS and botnets, maybe GPU friendly algos are better. But making it GPU friendly does it make it less asic resistant? Granted, the algo right now is in urgent need of replacement and I know that the devs are currently deliberating their options and were actively soliciting opinions on slack.

just favours a different crowd; everyone will have a whinge if x mining method isn't within their grasp.

Hi Shanem,

I have done a draft writeup for this

Most cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin rely on public ledgers where all transactions are public and the history of a coin can be traced from its inception. Some have tried to make it harder to do this by using coin mixers/tumblers but they involve trusting the mixer/tumbler in that they won't steal your money and that they aren't secretly recording how the coins are being mixed. Zerocoin technology allows the anonymization of coins that doesn't require you to put your trust in a mixer.

The easiest way to visualize Zerocoin tech is a huge jar where everyone who wants to anonymize their coins places their coins in the jar without revealing who they are and then at will, when they show the requisite proof that they did put coins in the jar, they are entitled to redeem any other person's coin in the jar that is of the same value thus the link between the coin that was put in the jar and the new coin she has taken out of the jar is broken. This is alike to having everyone put a quarter in the jar and have it sit there and when they want to spend their coin, they can then dip into the jar and pull out a quarter.

There are other anonymity solutions such as Monero's ring signatures or Dash's private send or Zcash's zerocash implementation. Each has their respective pros and cons.

With Zerocoin, some of its perceived advantages are:
a) Ability to choose whether to do a public or private transaction (which you can't do with Zcash or Monero) (some may see this as a weakness and prefer anonymity by default)
b) Very much less computationally intensive than Zcash to generate transactions so regular computers can still use Zcoin.
c) No need to place any trust in mixers or wait for it to be mixed (such as in Dash)
d) Possibly greater anonymity than Monero since Monero requires it to be 'mixed' with similar denominations transactions in the past so if your denomination is rather unique, it may stand out. However as time passes, this becomes less of a problem.
e) Based on very well reviewed cryptography compared to Zcash which is based on cutting edge tech. With Zcash, the sender, recipient and value are not revealed at all. From an anonymity standpoint this is great however if a bug is discovered and a hacker can secretly mint coins, this is very hard to detect! Total supply of Zcash cannot be determined.
f) Arguably less controversial 'parameter' generation than Zcash. Zcash relies on the initial secret being destroyed and they have figured out a way in which unless all participants collude to not destroy the secret, then the secret is destroyed. Zerocoin uses parameters generated from an a academic challenge (https://github.com/zcoinofficial/zcoin/wiki/Parameters-in-set-up-phase-for-Zerocoin-in-ZCoin)

There are also drawbacks to Zerocoin's implementation of course which is why all these solutions have a role:
a) Locked to fixed denominations 1, 25, 50, 100 for Zerocoin. Meaning you can only put fixed denominations in the jar.
b) When you choose to put a coin in the jar and immediately redeem a new coin, there might be some analysis that can guess that the person putting in and taking out is the same person.
c) Still computationally intensive compared to Monero

What i need to find out is also how does Zerocoin scale compared to Zcash/Monero and that would be an important question to answer.