Hacker News Reader

Comment by pero | Hacker News Reader

ZCash has a myriad of fundamental issues, chief among them:

-ZCash is a US-based LLC, and given what is publicly known about the capabilities and past behavior of its intelligence apparatus I don't see how anyone can claim that such an organization can shepherd a 'truly anonymous blockchain', particularly one that is essentially a black box

-ZCash's blockchain is a black box and requires you to not only trust them with your anonymity, but also to trust them not to create coins arbitrarily - a successful attacker could also mint coins at will - as there is no way to verify circulation

-Anonymous transactions are optional and require tremendous resources to generate

-It is an innovative take on a pre-mine where insiders were given opportunity to pre-purchase coins at the expense of future miners

I suggest that anyone looking for a truly anonymous blockchain experience take a look at Monero.

View on HN

> I suggest that anyone looking for a truly anonymous blockchain experience take a look at Monero.

And I suggest that anyone looking for strong provable anonymity guarantees not look at Monero. The security guarantees of ZCash are stronger than those of Monero, and the trusted setup issue can be mitigated via the MPC protocol detailed in a recent paper.

EDIT: compromising the trusted setup does not compromise anonymity; the zero knowledge proofs used enjoy a property known as "perfect zero knowledge".

> ZCash is a US-based LLC, and given what is publicly known about the capabilities and past behavior of its intelligence apparatus [...]

why does it matter where zcash is incorporated when the apparatus you're describing operates without regard for borders?

zcash is the first effort at a cryptocurrency where I have immense respect and trust for its team right out of the gate. not sure where the FUD is coming from (although I'd hypothesize that you are long monero?).

>Anonymous transactions are optional and require tremendous resources to generate

this is indeed a problem. hopefully temporary.

"why does it matter where zcash is incorporated when the apparatus you're describing operates without regard for borders?"

Yes, they can do intelligence ops and attacks in others countries, but can't issue a subpoena along with gag order. Attacks can be defended against, secret court orders - not. A decision to make this currency US based killed it before it was even born. That's sad, because technically ZCash looks quite interesting.

Subpoena for what? There's no useful data to hand over, that's the entire point of zero knowledge.

"Zero knowledge" is not an excuse, it's way too easy to "miss a bug" or few to leak an information. NSA is known to talk/force companies into adding backdoors to their products. Users can never be sure, so why risk it?

It is too easy to miss a bug, which is why there was an audit.

I really don't understand the risk of US incorporation that you're talking about, or why it is better or worse than any other country without introducing other potentially even less desirable risks. Can you explain further?

More recently the US is known for failing to force companies to add back doors (see Apple/FBI). It's probablg worth noting Jospeh Bonneau (EFF) is on the board of Zcash. I just don't see the risk that you're seeing, sorry.

"Can you explain further?"

No other western country (to my knowledge) has secret courts, that were also proven to target tech companies. If such reason is not enough for you, I don't know what else could it be then.

right, but we already covered that. there is no court order in the world that can compel to you to provide what you do not have. so why is the US a bad place for ZCash to incorporate?

Are you sure such argument would fly against (possibly and probably technically illiterate) judge? I'm not. Apple was a separate case, because it is publicly known and loved company, and there are very few companies that have luxury to say the same. How did that play out to Lavabit (that's a controversial example, but it's to illustrate that court doesn't hesitate to crush a company to achieve its goal)? Also, RSA scenario[1] is not unrealistic too imho.

That's it, I'm not going to argue in circles anymore, I don't trust and will not trust any US based, privacy related tech company unless something fundamentally changes in its legal and power structures -- there are more than enough reasons and examples for me. If you do -- that's fine by me.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_BSAFE#Dual_EC_DRBG_backdoo...

The software is open source with reproducible builds. I'm not saying this is a magic wand, but it's a significant difference from the other cases.

Forum-shopping is a problem, I don't disagree. But Apple didn't win that case on PR, and Lavabit didn't lose that case by making smart decisions. These are not analagous situations.

If you could name a single country that would offer better protections, we might have something to talk about. Western Europe, seriously? [1]

The reason we are going in circles is because you're unwilling to trust ZCash, not because of where it's incorporated. If, like me, you trusted ZCash, it wouldn't matter to you where their articles of incorporation were filed, because you would trust that the zero-knowledge implementation would prevent law enforcement from mattering at all. If open source, audited code by some of the brightest minds in the space doesn't earn your trust, nothing will. IcelandBux won't save you.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/05/france-passes-...

> ZCash's blockchain is a black box and requires you to not only trust them with your anonymity

You do not trust anyone with your privacy in our system. Assuming you're talking about our zk-SNARK parameters, if they were not securely generated you still could not violate anyone's privacy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com