<i>"This technology can do for cooperation what the Internet did for communication two decades ago."</i><p>Huh? Why? How? It's an altcoin with more anonymity than Bitcoin. That's nice, but no big deal.<p>I went to hear Tromer's talk on the theory behind Zcash at Stanford last Wednesday.[1] There were a lot of very strong claims and a lot of hand-waving. I'm not an expert in that area, but the claims were awfully strong and the presentation didn't back them up sufficiently. Here's his key paper.[2] He claims, at least, to have developed a new way to generate cryptographically strong hash functions. See section 1.1 of that paper. That's a hard problem. Of the existing crypto-grade hash functions, Snefru, MD2 (128-bit), MD4, MD5, RIPEMD, HAVAL-128, and SHA-0 have all been broken, and SHA-1 is looking weak. Solving that problem alone would be a noteworthy achievement. So where's Tromer's proposed hash function, evaluated by the crypto community?<p>On the financial front, the insiders take a 20% rakeoff of new Zcash coins for the first four years. That's a huge cut for a financial product. The investors include Roger Ver, the convicted felon who publicly said Mt. Gox was sound. What could possibly go wrong?<p>[1] <a href="http://web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/" rel="nofollow">http://web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/</a>
[2] <a href="https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/580.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/580.pdf</a>
Here is a sweet little block explorer tweeted by Zooko (although it gets the hash rate value completely wrong and unit wrong too--It's Sol/s not H/s and it's about 400 Sol/s right now):
<a href="https://explorer.zcha.in/" rel="nofollow">https://explorer.zcha.in/</a> Edit: it gets this info from zcash itself (zcash-cli getmininginfo) which is probably buggy and doesn't compute the network's speed correctly.<p>My Equihash PoW solver silentarmy gets 45 Sol/s on an R9 Nano, so there seems to be only about 10 GPUs mining worldwide, 65 minutes after the launch of Zcash :)<p>Edit: oops scratch everything I said. I forgot difficulty 1 was redefined for the mainnet. In testnet difficulty 1 was defined as:<p><pre><code> genesis.nBits = 0x200f0f0f;
</code></pre>
So you needed the 32-byte SHA256 hash to be less than 0x0f0f0f00_00000000_00000000_... But with the mainnet it was redefined as:<p><pre><code> genesis.nBits = 0x1f07ffff;
</code></pre>
This value is 0x0007ffff_00000000_00000000_... so only 1 in 8192 random hashes is less than this. So the network's speed seems to be around 130,000 Sol/s. So that's already 3-4k GPUs mining. Ouch.
> Zcash is a technology, and like any technology it has multiple uses. I suspect that many of the best applications of this technology haven't been conceived of yet.<p>> 10% pre-mine to founders<p>This smells super fishy. Altogether, I've yet to see anything to do with cryptocurrencies be useful. Nothing but scams, hiding illegal activities, and hopeless optimism so far.
In other news TumbleBit[1] seems to bring good enough anonymity to bitcoin as well.<p>1. <a href="https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/575.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/575.pdf</a>
Genuine, blunt question here, why is this technology important and needed?<p>I ask this as someone who is intrigued by cryptocurrency, but never felt a pressing need to be able to transact 100% anonymously.
Is this the one that forked off BitCoin due to differences centered around how it didn't make its investors/founders enough money?<p>From the last thread they pointed out:
"Zcash's monetary base will be the same as Bitcoin's — 21 million Zcash currency units (ZEC, or ⓩ) will be mined over time. 10% of that reward will be distributed to the stakeholders in the Zcash Company — founders, investors, employees, and advisors. We call this the “Founders Reward”."<p>It's nice to have a currency with more security and privacy features in mind but I would be extremely wary of compromises like this for that achievement.
As I said here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12796310" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12796310</a><p>I don't see how it's arguable for a <i>currency</i> to have a 10% cut for the founders. That's too high.
10% premine and run by a private company? No thank you! I don't care what cool ZKP crypto they use; one of the <i>critical</i> aspects of Bitcoin's success is that there was no premine (no unfair advantage for the creator) and no company to go after if someone starts feeling litigious. Bitcoin is a protocol, this is a product.
So now someone could / should...<p>- fork this<p>- remove the 10% economy imbalance<p>- remove centralized alerts and anything centralized<p>- integrate ethereum & namecoins<p>- Get a governance body that would be very neutral and protect principles of the blockchain (EFF? ...)<p>And then we could have a normalized, standardized, basis for the rest of blockchain based protocols...
You can see the markets reacting here:<p><a href="https://cryptowat.ch/poloniex/zecbtc/5m" rel="nofollow">https://cryptowat.ch/poloniex/zecbtc/5m</a><p>Pretty crazy, it hit a high price of 3300 BTC! That's $2MM.
I want to buy zcash for 10 euro, then wait until it explodes like bitcoin, how can I do this? It's not currently traded at Bittrex I see it's there but as "disabled". When can I buy?
Not sure how this affects parameters ceremony compromise or the alert system, but we can't have an economy with such imbalance from the start:<p><a href="https://twitter.com/HeyRhett/status/792332276453416960" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/HeyRhett/status/792332276453416960</a>
Please use the title to explain what makes ZCash special. Nobody cares about just another Bitcoin clone, so "Zcash begins" is not enough as a title.
It looks like the Bitcoin fan boys are already rushing to poison the proverbial water hole and hijack this discussion. It's always disappointing to see just how much politics have managed to infect this space. I mean, everyone knows that with politics a person's preferences end up being based largely on whether or not they like a given candidate's character (hence the quote "politics is the mind-killer") ...<p>But within the cryptocurrency space people are even less rational since after investing their money they now have a perverse incentive to try discredit any competition and the effects of their confirmation bias after investing are truly immense. Bitcoin in that sense, is one of the most toxic communities out there since its entire community seems to be against any kind of innovation taking place outside of Bitcoin and are quick to dismiss any such attempts as "crapcoins."<p>I wish we could go back to 2011 when people were more opened minded ... It's honestly gotten to the point where no one can work on anything new in this space without some shill from Bitcoin trying to cast doubt on their project to steer people back to it ... So I guess pick your favorite investment and support your side.<p>"Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you're on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it's like stabbing your soldiers in the back—providing aid and comfort to the enemy. People who would be level-headed about evenhandedly weighing all sides of an issue in their professional life as scientists, can suddenly turn into slogan-chanting zombies when there's a Blue or Green position on an issue."<p>Cryptocurrencies are the new mind-killer.