White papers, presentations etc are more for academics. If you have something working, well, then your code is your white paper, so to speak. Others can analyze it and write 10 papers each, but the magic is performed in the result itself. If you have to convince others through papers and presentations, it's game over.
Academia is good for theoretical stuff like Zerocoin but when it comes to actually making something they haven't produced anything - so it's up to the people, like Cryptonote/Bytecoin people, Gmaxwell, Evan, etc to do the planning and coding.
The people can't wait the "academics", funded by the government, to provide solutions for them. They'll find a way to do things, even "dirty" ways and hacks that improve their privacy/anonymity.
I'm sorry I totally disagree with this. It's totally normal to have both high, mid and even low level explanation of the technology involved here to assure investors. To his credit the dev of XC has posted academic papers on cryptography before in the XC forum, and while I'll admit to being unqualified to review the code, the tone so far seems to be "take my word for it". If you are willing to risk $10K, $100K, $1 million or more on promises from someone you don't know, then you are gambling. I would say there is less than a 5% chance that this dev has managed to miraculously pull out of thin air some solution that nobody else in this entire field has been able to come up with. If it were so simple, then don't you think the researchers at Johns Hopkins University would have been able to do it much sooner?
I've posted this in other forums before,
http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/04/zerocoin-making-bitcoin-anonymous.htmlAs you can see in this article, one of the researchers is writing about his students at Johns Hopkins university who researched the technology behind Zerocoin. They are still developing it. Here's a quote,
"In this post I'm going to describe a new piece of research out of my lab at Johns Hopkins that provides one potential solution to this problem. This is joint work led by my hardworking students Ian Miers and Christina Garman, along with my colleague Avi Rubin. Our proposal is called Zerocoin, and we'll be presenting it at this year's IEEE S&P."
Here is Ian Miers twitter:
https://twitter.com/secparam. He regularly discusses these new coins that claim to have anonymous solutions. He claims Zerocash will be superior to Darksend and compares Darksend to a coin mixer. I'm excited about Darksend, however, but the point is that the dev of XC claims to have a solution that is both more decentralized than Darksend (doesn't require masternodes), and is just as secure. How does that actually work? All I've heard so far are Xtunnels and Xnodes. I'm sorry but that sounds like XBullshit to me.
If graduate students researching this stuff for months and years are still working on getting Zerocash launched in the next few months, it seems unbelievable that a single man (who had to hire loljosh to dev the PoS portion of the coin and possibly more) has single-handedly come up with groundbreaking technology in this field well ahead of schedule.
I'm not saying I couldn't be wrong, but there is a serious lack of transparency here and investors are at great risk in this market that is rife with corruption, false promises and scams. I truly hope that this technology is for real, it would be ground breaking and exciting, but until it has been thoroughly vetted people need to stop hyping it up as if it is already safe to use.
Anonymity is not a toy. People trust their lives to anonymity. It must be fool proof, perfect, impervious to years and decades of future scrutiny and attempts at hacks and manipulation. I would argue that cryptography is the single most complex and difficult art to master in all of academia. It is the art of perfect secrecy, perfect trustlessness, elegant in its design and only the most genius of minds are worthy of such an endeavor. The significance of this undertaking cannot be overestimated.