Zerocoin update!Hello all, I am Gnosis, the new member of the Anoncoin team; I will be implementing Zerocoin in Anoncoin. Since an interested party has chosen to support this development financially, I will be able spend a lot more of my time on this. Expect a release for testing Zerocoin sometime in March!
First of all, I wanted to clear up any confusion with respect to Matthew Green and the other Zerocoin project members. The "new" Zerocoin, called "Zerocash", is based on completely different cryptography than the "old" Zerocoin (I will be implementing the old one). The Zerocoin project has essentially abandoned their previous idea in favor of Zerocash, and expect to release both the paper and the coin in late May.
We are very grateful for the excellent work of the Zerocoin people in developing the original Zerocoin, however they have apparently chosen to ignore our communications, for unknown reasons. Fortunately, I have the knowledge needed to implement this without their help.
It is reasonable to ask why we are working on implementing the old Zerocoin when the cryptographers responsible for it are working on their own alt-coin implementing a new idea. There are two reasons: 1) there is no way of knowing for sure that this new Zerocash coin will be released on time, or will work correctly, and there is strong demand for a truly anonymous crypto-currency ASAP; and 2) the new Zerocash may be fatally dependent on a trustworthy party for setting up the initial parameters, as is suggested by my readings about zkSNARKs. It is an incredible stroke of luck that a workaround exists to this problem for the old Zerocoin (so-called "RSA UFOs", which I am working on at present), and it is likely that no workaround exists for Zerocash.
