Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

(Article date: Oct 29th 2016). This is so last week. Zcash has already crashed. Peaked around $5000, today $127. Not only that, the anonymity feature didn't work. You can't send to "z addresses" only. This is claimed by the developers to be a bug they will fix. Since that was the main feature of this altcoin, and they shipped with it broken, they're either incompetent or disabled it to avoid regulatory problems.

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...

Zcash prices were insanely high on day one because demand was high and there was practically no supply. Everyone knew that was going to happen and the price is now normalizing.

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).

There's a lot of absurdity in your comment, but I wanted to reply to one thing:

> 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.

It's not wrong. (The poster above has previously disclosed a connection with ZCash.)

- 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...

[2] https://github.com/zcash/zcash/issues/1819

The article you're citing is wrong. (I know because I fixed the bug.)

That would be the fix with the comment "This patch is a temporary fix and disables the shuffling of input and output notes"?[1]

[1] https://github.com/zcash/zcash/pull/1790

No. The issue in the article is fixed in 1.0.1 and the fix is not a stop gap. Here's [0] the pull request. And here is the correct github issue[1]. You are linking to a completely unrelated issue.

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.

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