Btw Shadow devs invented Stealthaddresses added by mostly every anon coin to date.
I'm not going to argue about the dramatic bullshit, but the above statement made by OP is clearly false, unless Peter Todd and/or the bytecoin developers are working on shadowcash, which I'm pretty sure is not the case.
Here's a link to an article from January crediting Peter Todd for bringing the concept to bitcoin:
http://www.coindesk.com/stealth-addresses-secret-bitcoin-privacy/Also, bytecoin used stealth addresses in conjunction with ring signatures since late last year (2013) in a non-bitcoin clone, or two years before that if you believe the hype.
Vertcoin was the first altcoin to implement stealth addresses in the core qt-wallet of any altcoin based on the btc codebase, before shadowcoin existed, and execoin also implemented them in an electrum based wallet I think before shadowcash existed.
So who invented stealth addresses on the shadowcash team and when?
Shadow did not invent Stealth Addresses. No where did the SDC dev team claimed to have done so. Vertcoin's stealth addresses were closed source.
Shadow did implement the first in-protocol dual key stealth addresses. In fact you can use it in the daemon cmd "sendtostealthaddress" you don't need a QT. The influx of coins with Stealth Addresses is a direct result of Shadow open sourcing it and has nothing to do with Vertcoin.
This thread is to highlight a major advancement in cryptocurrency (zero knowledge) not mindless bash the efforts made at Shadow. But hey this is Bitcointalk and people could care less about advancements and more about trolling.
I quoted the OP who said "Btw Shadow devs invented Stealthaddresses..."
Here's a more detailed deconstruction of your bullshit from reddit than I can provide (that you guys failed to give any sort of technical response to):
http://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/2k6yu4/shadowcash_introduces_shadowsend_v2_featuring/clinbzkI did. And you are correct, Monero is not zero-knowledge. But I contend that the shadow developers (probably) do not actually have any zero-knowledge technology.
I have some purely a priori logical reasoning, and I also have some experience from the field of mathematics under my belt to support my conjecture. First: if ring signatures work the way everyone in the mathematical community thinks they should, then why bother implementing zero-knowledge proofs? Easy answer: ring sigs aren't zero-knowledge, and are simply highly resistant to blockchain analysis, not immune to blockchain analysis. ZK would still be better to use, after all, even if ring sig technology works the way it's supposed to, unless the costs/constraints to using ZK tech overwhelms the benefits.
Second: if they have ZK technology that actually works, with more advantages than disadvantages, why bother implementing ring sigs? Ring sigs are huge compared to normal digital signatures, complicated in terms of implementation as a developer, and cause a big UTXO-set bloat. If you have ZK tech, ring sigs are not just a waste of time and money to implement, it's a waste of space on the network.
Ok, so maybe these developers are using a Zerocash-style[1] system in which the basecoins are ring-signature based (already obfuscating the block chain). What happens? Size and speed of the protocol explode and all of a sudden we have a massive blockchain and a super slow network. Conclusion: Shadow doesn't have ZK tech under their belt, they are simply going to implement ring sigs and walk away while chuckling.
So, that's my a priori reasoning. Here's the experience from mathematics that supports my conjecture: ZK tech is the holy grail of cryptocurrency, Zerocash[2] is pretty much the only place you'll find a decent protocol. And, as I said, in Zerocash, you still have two types of currency, the basecoin and the zerocoin; if the basecoin choice is a ring-sig based coin, Zerocash is going to blow up in size and speed to the point where it's no longer useful. Anyone trying to sell ZK to you right now is probably scamming you because efficient, secure algorithms that work in a robust, general setting do not yet really exist. But I could be wrong, I could be not-so-up-to-date on non-interactive zero-knowledge algorithms. So let's pretend I'm wrong about their suitability: we still shouldn't be using ZK tech in coins, not yet.
Non-interactive ZK cryptography is currently in very young stages of the technology. The first time any sort of generality was proven to be POSSIBLE was only 2006[3] . So even if these developers have discovered some brand new math research (later than 2011[4] for example), something that is much more efficient and powerful than current technology? All that means they are still using brand-new cryptography. And that's a huge no-no if you actually want to secure your shit. Tech that's been around for 20 years like ring signatures? It's stood the test of time, it's been given a few decades for people to look for avenues of attack. On the other hand, if you pull a random paper out from The Journal of Cryptography published some time in the last year and implement it, you could have every mathematician in the world read that paper, come to the conclusion that the tech is tight and cool. And then the next week some 17 year old in their basement could crack it. Something that's been around for decades has withstood and passed that test of time. ZK proofs sound all fancy and nice, but in reality, they could be no more secure than any system upon which they are built.
Finally: let's just presume for a moment that these folks are brilliant developers who have a great zerocash-style scheme going on, or maybe even some other version of NIZK proofs that are distinct from zerocash and magically small and fast (remember, you get what you pay for in terms of size and speed when you are talking anonymity; there is a tradeoff). These brilliant folks? They are setting their network up to be secured with proof-of-stake. No amount of ZK or ring sig technology can save the coin if you can rewrite the blockchain, and proof-of-stake is mathematically insecure[5] (that link sometimes doesn't work, so just google "Andrew Poelstra Proof of Stake" the paper is a few years old but is very very good).
Look, spend your money where you want. But if you put money into ZK technology now, you are giving your money to a complete genius, a liar, or a fool. Usually fools can't make cryptocurrencies and afaik no one has really made NIZK proofs feasible for currencies yet, so these people are scamming you. Shadow is likely just another pump-n-dump. ZK tech may become feasible in a year or a decade, but the state of technology as-is? ZK is not feasible for currency transactions because it's slow and big and new.
The proof is in the pudding, bro: they won't make available any technical papers describing what zero-knowledge proofs they are actually implementing. I have a zero-knowledge rock here on my desk, it'll do everything they describe in that article, and I, also, refuse to explain how this rock works. Send me money, too, and write articles about me!
Full conclusion: either these folks are just duplicating a ring-sig based protocol like Monero's cryptonote and calling it zero-knowledge to start a pump-n-dump, or these folks are smarter than all the other developers in the world.
If a Shadow developer wants to hop on here and chat about what they are actually implementing, I'd love to hear it, ask questions, and get to the root of this. All I would like to see is 1) an explanation of why doubling up on anonymity with both ring sigs and with NIZK proofs is a good idea and 2) a few technical papers describing how they are doing what they are doing. That would undermine a huge amount of my above argument, possibly all of it except the PoS stuff.
TLDR: non-interactive zero-knowledge technology is too young of a technology to be feasible in a cryptocurrency schemes, and anyone trying to tell you different is probably scamming you.