Another crypto-currency is born
economist.com
economist.com
Roger Ver, a convicted felon who claimed Mt. Gox was sound[1], is involved with ZCash. What could possibly go wrong?
ZCash is from Tel Aviv, headquarters of "binary option" scams. The entire Tel Aviv based binary options business has been exposed as a scam. [2] (Short version: a binary option is a bet against the house, not other investors, and the house cheats. Online binary option companies claimed to be in lots of places, including Trump Tower, but they're almost always really in Tel Aviv.) People in the "binary option" industry are now looking for new scams. "Forex" is one. There's a lot of interest in "blockchains" there.[3] This is a worry.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UP1YsMlrfF0 [2] http://www.timesofisrael.com/the-wolves-of-tel-aviv-israels-... [3] http://bravenewcoin.com/news/bitcoin-and-blockchain-startups...
> Not only that, the anonymity feature didn't work. You can't send to "z addresses" only.
This is untrue, there was a bug that _delayed_ mining of some transactions to z addresses, but not all of them, and it was fixed last week.
- ZCash unable to send to Z-addresses without a send to a non-anonymous address.[1] Fixed in v1.0.2, released last week.
- Some randomization features removed temporarily.[2] Not clear how much anonymity this costs, but some developers are concerned.
[1] https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/zcash-bug-prevents-private-t...
The article is referring to a bug where mining of zaddr transactions were delayed under some circumstances. They were still mined. The post we had announcing the bug was rather terse and so some details were lost. The article was written from that post. We(Zcash) were the ones who found the bug and announced it.
As you can see from this transaction[2] before the update, there were zaddr transactions that got mined.
It does of course make an amusing headline to say private crypt currency has bug that prevents private transactions and it was written off of scant information, so it's understandable. But all that happened was private transactions took longer under some circumstances and that has now been fixed.
[0] https://github.com/zcash/zcash/pull/1718 and here is the correct issue [1] https://github.com/zcash/zcash/issues/1705 [2] https://explorer.zcha.in/transactions/de1d78ee310ba2c9fbeb13... pre update, there were zaddr transactions.
There is a bug with mining to zaddresses but Zcash developers have been extremely transparent about it and were the first to say that this crypto is untested and will be iterated.
As for Tel Aviv... it doesn't matter where technology is developed, does it? Your comment strikes me as xenophobic muck raking.
ZCash has unique properties. You're free to not buy it and honestly the negative speculation helps those of us that are interested in using it as it keeps prices down (for now).
I'm not an expert by any means, but this seems like a good compare/contrast that elucidates zcash's actual place in the space: https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/41vg68/monero_vs_zc...
Anonymity is not a binary. Monero, even with the addition of RingCT, is vulnerable to transaction graph analysis (intersection attacks) that can de-anonymize users. Zcash takes a completely different approach that achieves ledger indistinguishability -- shielded transactions in the blockchain have no apparent relationship with each other, which is an essential privacy benefit.
Much of what I read in that thread is wrong or misleading: Monero does not have a trusted setup, but it's important to note that a failure in Zcash's setup does not disrupt the privacy of the system. The "poison-pill" vulnerability is not a concern in our system. The claims about the anonymity set are very misleading. It is possible to do far more than multi-sig in our system, we just haven't implemented it yet. The point about mining is specific to the paper and is irrelevant.
There are downsides to the system, such as our performance problems, but they are solveable given time. Zcash is obviously not the only player, but it's also going to continue to grow and adapt and improve, just like other cryptocurrencies will.
Your comment is highly misleading. RingCT solves 4 of the 5 remaining, known, privacy vulnerabilities in Monero ## The last remaining vulnerability has to do with transactions made with very little turnover, i.e. an amount is received and then immediately spent again. The privacy is stronger as the amounts are held in the wallet for longer.
Monero is useable on a magnitude greater scale in 2017, and a full node can be run with small CPU and memory. Zcash on the other hand requires minutes to send anonymouse transactions.
In other words, Zcash provides 100% privacy at the expense of scalability while Monero provides privacy approaching 100 percent as variable with time.
## http://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/1495/what-privacy-...
My favorite example of anonymity is Richard Stallman's description of an anonymous currency: you should be able to pay a publisher for every article you read on their website, without them being able to associate the payments.
I looked but seem to have missed the disclaimer for this paid advertising. A curious omission of its author too?
"The first few issues of The Economist were...written almost entirely by James Wilson, the founding editor, though he wrote in the first-person plural.
...
Having started off as a way for one person to give the impression of being many, anonymity has since come to serve the opposite function at The Economist: it allows many writers to speak with a collective voice."
http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/09/ec...
I really hope they succeed, anonymous currency is badly needed.
Zcash has a "mining slow start" which slowly ramps up the mining reward for the first two weeks, to reduce the threat that a large amount of the ultimate monetary base would be in control of early-advantage miners. As a result of the significantly reduced supply, the price was very high shortly after launch.
That would be the same as the Ubercoin they mention I suppose.