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Comment by jstandard | Hacker News Reader

> "I don't want them to know who I donate to"

This part seems to be the major problem zcash solves from what I can tell. Delivering on the promise of true anonymity which Bitcoin currently lacks. I see the appeal to current Bitcoin users, but outside of that group, can't see the appeal in a broad "general consumer" sense.

zcash seems like a company addressing a small problem (true anonymity) in the broader context of issues cryptocurrency faces (ubiquity, liquidity, ease of transacting, fraud prevention). Creating an entirely new currency which has to retread the efforts of building out the ecosystem to support that currency is a huge mountain to climb.

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According to Matthew Green, they tried for years to get this (or one of the earlier versions) into Bitcoin and Bitcoin weren't having it. Their options were to make an entirely new coin, with the problems you point out, or to let the crypto they had developed die.

I can see the tension there. In a certain sense it's a shame to see good crypto languish.

It's also highlights why I feel the concept of a "decentralized" currency is essentially impossible. Someone always controls some facet of it, be it features of the currency, supply, restrictions, or value.

In the case of cryptocurrencies, the authors of the protocol and governance put in place to maintain it are the central authority. For zcash, the central bitcoin authority (whoever you referenced as 'Bitcoin') wouldn't/couldn't integrate features they wanted so they rolled their own currency of which now THEY are the central authority.

That's simply not true. I was actually hired as a consultant by Green, and he did hardly anything with that contract. I know of no proposal actually made to any Bitcoin devs for inclusion, and in any case, it took a long time to improve the tech to the point where resource requirements were low enough for either Zerocoin or Zerocash to be viable in any currency.

I went and dug up where I had read Green talk about this and it turns out it was in a conversation with you.

It seems you and him disagree, he says ZCash couldn't/wouldn't have happened in Bitcoin and you say it could.

Is your blog post about this still coming?

https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/78153309118155571... https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/78154154453702656... https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/78154374789720064... https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/78153489377171865... https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/78154782708016742...

> I went and dug up where I had read Green talk about this and it turns out it was in a conversation with you.

Ha!

> It seems you and him disagree, he says ZCash couldn't/wouldn't have happened in Bitcoin and you say it could.

Yeah, I'm just surprised he feels so strongly about that, given how little I remember him actually doing along those lines. Like I said, I actually was hired by him on a monthly retainer to do consulting... and he did almost nothing at all with that contract. :(

> Is your blog post about this still coming?

Yes, although holy fuck I have a lot on the todo list. :( I also need to writeup my part of the trusted setup ceremony too.

And a blog post on that isn't paid work, so doesn't get as high priority as paying rent. :)

> According to Matthew Green, they tried for years to get this (or one of the earlier versions) into Bitcoin and Bitcoin weren't having it.

Can you cite this? If he said said it-- it's an outright lie.

Very true, but at least it's open source and can be used in other future coins. I never will claim to be a crypto, currency, or econ expert, but I think it's safe to claim it's still very early days for cryptocurrencies.

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