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Comment by earlz | Hacker News Reader

Given how complicated the technology is that they will be working with (as someone who has attempted to read the zcash whitepaper), I find this extremely unlikely. Sure there will be clones, but no altcoin "developer" will be able to properly maintain this, so bugs won't get fixed, or it'll always be lagging behind Zcash, or worse, they introduce unintentional bugs and completely wreck their blockchain and lose the money of the few fools who thought that the developers/company running it getting some money is bad

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a/ It's naive to assume market won't work in this one case and people will happily pass ten percent of their money to support staff just because their work is important. What can be competed away will be competed away.

b/ Open source works well for very complicated pieces of software.

c/ As we saw in the case of Ethereum, assuming you can buy due diligence with money alone is a mistake.

Open source works well for very complicated pieces of software, except for complicated cryptography; the material used in ZCash was developed in papers as recent as 4 yrs ago. Rest assured that most programmers understand nothing about the underlying SNARKs.

You are underestimating passionate and very smart people.

I am not underestimating anyone; even within theoretical cryptography, SNARKs are understood by a handful of people.

I am a cofounder of a company in this space and three people in my company are in a position to understand it very well. For example Sergio who also blogs here: https://bitslog.wordpress.com

I don't see anything there about zkSNARKs?

Sorry to get it personal but it seems you are very shortsighted and need to see a specific keyword to understand the capabilities of the people.

Please let me know what specific topic of zkSNARK you find challenging to explain and we can write a blog post about it.

I don't want to see a specific keyword; all I'm saying is that there is nothing on that website indicating any great knowledge of theoretical cryptography. For instance: no proofs, formal definitions, nothing. Not even links to other websites hosting such things.

I really feel frustrated by your lack of search/manual-crawling/link-clicking/understanding capabilities. He was the official security reviewer of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Then some extra references so you can continue your own search:

- "MPF (Mental Poker Framework): A new family of practical and secure Mental Poker protocols" http://www.dc.uba.ar/inv/tesis/licenciatura/2010/lerner

- MAVEPAY: a new lightweight payment scheme for peer to peer currency networks: https://bitslog.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/mavepay1.pdf

- Strict Memory Hard Hashing Functions: http://www.hashcash.org/papers/memohash.pdf referenced in the Ethereum original paper: http://gavwood.com/paper.pdf

I am not doubting Sergio's security expertise, but security expertise != theoretical cryptography expertise. Crypto requires providing clear definitions and proofs of security. All I see in the first two links are adhoc constructions, with heuristic arguments for security; no security definitions, no reductions, no proofs.

The last link is more formal, and talks about models of computation, but once again does not provide any reductions.

Are you part of the Zcash team?

Off topic, I'd actually be very interested in a cryptographer's guide to zkSNARK...

Here are the topics I'd be happy to hear blog posts about

a) the mechanics of the proof generation, including outlining the time for proof generation.

b) How the trusted setup works; for extra credit describe in detail how zcash plans to do it.

c) an ELI5 explanation of zkSNARKS

d) a comparison of the Ben-sasson and Parno implementations.

Your request was routed internally and we hope to have an article in ~1 month.

Sergio's a great guy, but he does NOT understand the mechanics behind SNARKS "very well". You're overestimating his grasp of the moon-math in SNARKS.

The Zcash additions are significantly less complex than the Bitcoin system overall especially once accepting the ZKP as a tidy black box with clear boundaries.

I wouldn't be so sure of that, there already exist some alternatives which seem better in some ways like Monero. I have very low trust for scam developers like the ZCash ones, I'm sure someone quite capable could take it up.

'scam developers'? A bit harsh isn't it?

They're running a pump and dump, sure, they made it rate limited, but a delayed pump and dump is still a pump and dump.

A pump and dump that was started at John Hopkins and been being worked on for three years? Wat?

So the developers are scammers because you use an alternative?

The people behind ZCash are definitely not "scammers"; they're respected computer scientists and applied cryptography engineers.

They may have some flashy names, but there's no truely provable reason to believe they're better than the fly-by-night guys who pop up on bitcoinforums with a new altcoin and dump it as soon as it's up and running.

Since there's no cryptographically provable way to know they won't do this, well, we have to assume it's what they'll do. Distrust is the basis for cryptocurrencies afterall.

Unlike those fly-by-night guys, these people have their reputations at stake; they've have not only their names associated with this project, but also their academic careers.

Moreover, having worked with some of them, I can assure they're not shady no-gooders...

There's no truly provable reason to believe anyone isn't a scammer. Many supposedly reputable people in the finance industry are eventually revealed to be scammers. It's unavoidable.

But these guys are much less likely to be scammers than the typical no-name GitHub/Twitter/Bitcoinforums accounts promoting a new revolutionary coin.

Part of the reason for their share of the mining reward is to give them a strong economic incentive to stick with it for at least four years.

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