Topic: Thoughts on Zcash? - page 31. (Read 123362 times)

I've been reading through the benchmarks since and discovered -
On a quad-core benchmark server, generating a private transaction consumes ~3.2 GB of memory and ~50 seconds of compute time."

In light of the above what are the implications for end users?

For example will there ever be a mobile device app for zcash given the amount of resources it takes to create and broadcast a private transaction? I would imagine a remote server building the transaction for you would be out of the question as I should think it would require access to the private components sending the zero knowledge aspect out the window.

I'm using a 4GB core i5 lenovo running ubuntu which I (used to) consider rather high end. 48% of my memory is currently allocated so from what I just read I can't use zcash because I don't have enough RAM, is that right?

Reposted here because limited response in slack...

Putting whichever crypto religion we've sworn our allegiance to this week aside, I'm looking for feedback here:
I can swap some btc for some zcash using bitsquare, perform a zcash transaction to break any traceability and sell my zcash (on bitsquare again) and get myself a lovely new btc with no previous history that can be linked to me.
I can perform the exact same series of steps and achieve the exact same result with zcoin (because it too is based on the zerocoin protocol).

So why then is zcash $70 (down from +2MM) whilst zcoin is $0.70c (down from $10) when the only extra thing zcash seems to offer is undetectable money creation due to the necessity of a trusted setup (which zcoin also had but due to the visibility of the money supply detecting a compromise would be arbitrary)?

The knee jerk reaction I'm expecting is that "it's more anonymous because you cannot see the transaction values" but this is a moot point imo because the whole purpose is to cryptographically break the transaction history which is achieved by both.

Isn't it true that the extra lengths zcash goes to is more like 'security theatre', just like when the zcash founders burned the computer which generated the master private keys. Yeah it looked nice but... so what?

In summary then, why would someone pay 100x more for an equivalent feature found in another coin? Apart from undetectable fraud and higher resource consumption what does zcash offer over zcoin?

Also check out the zcoin and zcash roadmaps respectively.

ps
Don't give me that 'topological analysis' c**p bacause you can see the amounts, you cannot follow coins around in the zcoin blockchain, it's impossible which is why zerocoin was described as perfect money over 3 years ago.

I'm not trying to troll, I'm genuinely intrigued as to what the zcash community knows that I don't?

pps
zcoin is not a zcash clone, in fact zcoin is older than zcash because it was launched ~1 week earlier.

The inherent time-cost to zero knowledge proofs have been well documented for years. The fact is that, while the system is very nicely designed and written (and assuming the cryptography withstands attack vectors), practically speaking there is not a realistic long term usability.

Also, developers deserve to be PAID for their WORK. There is absolutely no problem with the Founders Fee. People in this community expect devs to create code for free so you can profit. Being paid a wage for labor performed and the philosophy of open source are not in conflict with each other.

I'm very familiar with the trade-offs involved in using resource intensive encryption schemes and I have been following this implementation of a ZKP cryptographic token for a while. It will take a lot of work to fix the inherent limitations to user experience.

More likely, the resource intensive nature of the code may possibly limit adoption outside of the open source and developer community. ZKP anonymized functionality, which is the project's defining feature and it's only real broadstrokes argument for it's consumer use case remains, unfortunately, impracticable for daily usage. This is especially true given the team's decision to remove the Qt implementation and implicitly restrict users to Unix systems. I'm quite sure the Qt matter could be resolved by changing their minimum BDB dependency (but this ma,y cause other errors), but the failure to generate proper releases including OSX and Win builds, leaves me with the sense that they are either Unix elitists (lol which I made up) or, more likely, they had nearly depleted their resources and had to launch ad hoc. I get it. And I might have some solutions in the future. Perhaps. 

Overall though, there have been some unmistakable gains made to the community by the zcash team in terms of code quality and innovative genesis and build strategies/implementations among other things. Props.

Also, how the fuck is there zcash classic now? I think polo makes these fucking trader chains for their own benefit. Or perhaps polo or other exchanges are not the originators of bastard chains like (zcash classic or Ethereum classic), but they might as well be, right?

@CoinHoarder. I was too awaiting the release of the technology but sadly it is not as good we expected according to Peter Todd. He is one of the people who knows what they are saying when it concerns cryptography and the science of cryptocoin technology. If you have not read his blog, I suggest you read it.

https://petertodd.org/2016/cypherpunk-desert-bus-zcash-trusted-setup-ceremony#disclaimers

You will be disappointed.

Personally,

I don't care whether Zcash or Zclassic wins out. I am just happy to see Zerocoin/Zerocash tech finally make it to a live blockchain!!

Whether Monero or Zcash/Classic end up being the go-to solution, again I don't care.

All of them have their subjective pros and cons, but all of them bring a much needed layer of privacy to legacy blockchains.

Just wait until polo add next week zclassic...you will see zclassic will be the winner

ZEC volume is 1425 BTC on Polo today... nobody trades on Bittrex

LOL Zclassic hits after only 1 day ZCASH Volume....

I think the Future will really be Zclassic...

I still like the mining income. For now Zcash has been good to me!

Peter Todd was one of the participants of zcash's parameter generation ceremony as a human witness and this is what he had to say about the cryptocoin. Warning to fans and supporters of zcash. You will not like it. I would also like to point out that this is of real concern to some of the people in the community who may think that zcash is the future of cryptocoins because of the strong development team behind it. This is not the case after reading these comments below from Peter Todd's blog here: https://petertodd.org/2016/cypherpunk-desert-bus-zcash-trusted-setup-ceremony#disclaimers



"The cryptography behind Zcash is both highly experimental, and relatively weak. Fact is, if zk-SNARKS turned out to be totally broken, unlike more mainstream crypto, it just wouldn’t be all that surprising..."

"On top of that, there appears to be uncertainty about the strength of the actual parameters chosen for Zcash’s crypto. The threat here is that an attacker may be able to create fake zk-SNARK proofs by breaking the crypto directly, even without having access to the trusted setup backdoor..."

"The current Zcash protocol inherits the same O(n^2) scalability problem that Bitcoin has, and then makes the problem significantly worse. First of all, unlike Bitcoin, Zcash can’t be pruned: every private Zcash transaction results in one or more revealed nonces that must be stored indefinitely by all Zcash nodes.

More importantly, verifying Zcash private transactions is orders of magnitude slower than verifying Bitcoin transactions: tens of milliseconds compared to a few microseconds. This is so slow that if Zcash users used private transactions frequently, even without attacks mining Zcash could become unprofitable for all but the largest mining pools even due to slow block propagation effects; if small miners were not forced out of business the Zcash network could even have difficulty maintaining consensus.

In my opinion the Zcash team has been irresponsible, maybe even dishonest, in their choice of block interval and size parameters."

Math would disagree, a 480x can pull ~160 H/s So for 3 months I would pay 2 BTC or ~1400 USD for what a $220 graphics card and nominally $180 in power would deliver. So I would be paying $1K for the service a markup of 2.5x.

Thus they would not be the "real gainer"

Those, who are availing free mining at www.Zcash-Miner.com in the slow start mining phase, are the real gainer.

What I took from that is that even after all he did he doesn't think his portion was safe so how could all the others be.

I did read that, it was pretty cool with all the pcutures of the burned ram and stuff, but to be honest no matter how many of those cerenomies are performed, I would never trust a coin that needs for the developers to do all that fancy stuff when there are other coins that don't need you to trust on that. I will wait to see how ZCash classic does and maye I buy some just in case it pumps heavy on Poloniex, but its already 0.005 and right now ZEC is 0.15 or something.

Slow start kills the first months, hopefully zcash can get out of that or not.

OFFTOPIC, but interesting


Absolutely! People have been predicting a "run" on COMEX for 10+ years, but somehow they stay in business... a huge ponzi scheme in plain sight... yet the Fed pumps them up and the regulators turn a blind eye - why? Because they are propping up the USD. The Fed forces DOWN the gold price - they NEVER want the price of gold to rise. The USD was orginally backed by gold - the Fed would need 100 billion tons of gold to exchange for all of the USDs in circulation. As people have said, this is fundamental FRAUD of fractional reserve and fiat currencies. If people are stupid enough to buy into bitcoin ETFs and futures contracts, they can do the same thing with bitcoin.

@dino you are correct that the Fed could buy all of the bitcoin - this is called market cornering and it has been tried a few times, most prominently by the Hunt brothers in the silver market. However you must remember that market  cornering causes a HUGE price spike, so your estimate of 50 billion could be off by a factor of 10. Also remember that bitcoin is currently being used as a medium of exchange - if the price goes through the roof, buying and selling of goods and services ends. Nobody can afford coin, and nobody wants to sell things for coin that could devalue in a correction. The other problem with cornering is that bitcoin is highly divisible, so the existing supply of it can be broken down millions of times before it becomes useless... even if one Satoshi were worth a dollar, people could still use bitcoin.

You guys need to read Peter Todds trust setup synopsis.

That is very expensive. One R9 390 costs about $200 at the moment and it can have aroudn 140H/s.