I've got a few question about this coin and hopefully someone can give me some answers.
1. Where's the source? Looked at both threads, the official site, the wiki and either I'm completely blind or is it not open source?
2. What method does the PoS use? Like peercoin with coin age? Like NXT? Or like the newer BC PoS V2 or Reddcoin PoSV? Or maybe something unique?
3. Is the coin based on ZeroCash? From what I've read and with the upcoming implementation of zk-snarks it would appear it is.
4. Assuming it's based on ZeroCash, I'm wondering about:
4a. "They used a brand new technic called SNARK, which has certain downsides: for example, a large initial database of public parameters required to create a signature (more than 1 GB) and the significant time required to create a transaction (more than a minute)" - What does all this really mean and what, in terms of practical use, would it mean to users?
4b. "Another important note is about trusted setup in Zerocoin. In easy words the whole system is based on some secret values nobody should know (for example, this secret allows to make a double spend). How to acquire these values? ZC devs says: we can generate them and then "forget" OR we can implement the special algorithm to do in a distributed way at the system start (everybody know only his own part of the secret)." - does this issue also exist in Zerocash and (if Shadow uses it), ShadowCoin as well?
4c. "The proofs of Zerocash can be computed by a i7 single core 2.7 GHz CPU in a matter of 3 minutes" - What exactly are these "proofs" and again, what would this mean to regular users?
I really don't understand fully the difference between Zerocoin and ZeroCash etc so not sure if all this really would apply but maybe someone in the know could educate me.
Hi Viper
1. The project is open source, the link for the repo is on the ANN theres a little icon for Github. I can see how you would miss it though., we should probably add a link to it.
https://github.com/SDCDev/shadowcoin2. Shadow is using coin weight/age. Any change to the PoS scheme will happen after zk.
3. ShadowSend is based on a combination of dual-key stealth addresses and zero knowledge proofs. The underlying technology in ZeroCash is zk-snarks, but the initial setup of the parameters in zerocash requires trust. Shadow is using its own zero knowledge scheme (proving a statement without revealing any information) and our setup doesn't require trust.
4a. In the WP they are referencing the initial parameters of Zerocash. Our system uses a different setup, so that issue only applies to ZC. All this translates to for the end user is that the ZC opts for a trusted setup.
4b. This is a non-issue because of 4a.
4c.
https://self-evident.org/?p=995Here's a detailed video covering the differences:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXU65XsLiFkI've attached this pdf for zero knowledge in laymen's terms:
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~mkowalcz/628.pdfAwesome, thanks for the details answers. Yeah, now that I look back at the OP, I can see the source icon there. I just assumed those were all some sort of wallet downloads lol
So I was just looking up "dual key stealth" and came across DarkWallet. Then I came across this post of yours which actually laid it out a bit more clearly for me.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.8153845Am I correct if I were to say that ShadowSend is an improved derivative of DarkWallet? Or maybe that's not really fair to say as I can't figure out who actually implemented what first. lol
So right now there seems to be I guess 4 anon "methods". We've got Darkcoin which one could argue isn't all that trustless given you need the masternodes. Then there's CN which, near as I can tell, is generally perceived as the only "true" anon implementation out there. I found it interesting though that one of the CN guys seemed to be saying ZeroCash was a more advanced method although I'm not sure if he also meant better. And then there's some other coin that will remain nameless that seems to be implementing some derivative of CN which they claim will resolve at least the blockchain bloat issue of CN coins. The Monero guys recently put out a white paper outlining some issues with CN that could potentially result in exploits.
So, if we assume that CN is the "best" currently despite some of it's issues, what makes ShadowSend better and what are some of the issues with it. i.e what are the currently known Pros and Cons.