Hacker News Reader

Comment by pero | Hacker News Reader

5 hours and almost 100 comments later no one has pointed out that Zcash and Keybase share the same investors.

I am relieved that 'Keybase chose Zcash' purely on merit after an exhaustive and objective selection process, and that this potential conflict of interest is transparently disclosed in the linked adverticle - wait, they did no such thing.

Does it concern no one that this security-focused company is shilling for other (fundamentally questionable) products?

View on HN

I couldn't decide whether to up- or downvote this: it sounds like equal parts 1) information worth bringing to people's attention and 2) slandering a team that seem really nice fellas to me. So I looked both companies up on CrunchBase, and can find zero overlap between investors declared there. Where did your information come from?

http://archive.is/wdNh3

http://archive.is/vnmkv

Thanks very much for this. Based on the one or two private individuals featuring on both lists, I'm inclined to think your original post was exceedingly strongly worded.

Did you read the blogpost? It's basically a Zcash presskit - note the surely calculated title, and the omission of any actual "anonymous" competitor coins in the first paragraph as well as the entire article, all at a time when ZEC price is in free-fall.

It might even be worse if it wasn't as such - a security-oriented business that, motivated by Bitcoin's shortcomings, does due diligence on anonymous crypto and genuinely concludes that Zcash, in its current state no less, is the answer? Come on.

I did, but I (perhaps naively) took it as someone cheerfully geeking out about something cool their friends built, and which they're now interfacing with.

I do appreciate you're pointing out this alternative take. I guess what clouded our discussion is that we mixed questioning their motivations (the investors thing) and their judgement (ie is zcash a good choice?). I missed the latter, focusing on the former only.

Good spot, though not surprising to me.

Worth adding here that it also appears Zcash stakeholders have been internally buying/selling their own ZEC at inflated prices on Poloniex to artificially increase both volume and the market price.

Whilst perfectly legal, it doesn't enhance a "trustworthy" reputation to me.

> Worth adding here that it also appears Zcash stakeholders have been internally buying/selling their own ZEC at inflated prices on Poloniex to artificially increase both volume and the market price.

I don't understand this. None of the stakeholders have even received their money yet; this is publicly verifiable.

Hypothetically, anyone could "prop-up" the crypto market for a newly launched coin by buying the first Asks from Poloniex at a deliberately inflated price and then sell back-and-forth to themselves at the same inflated price to create false volume / pricing.

You wouldn't need any ZEC to begin with.

Just to be clear, I am not specifically claiming the devs are doing this, but somebody with an interest in ZEC performing well (and money to burn to prop up the price) has been.

It's eased off now in any case, but it hasn't gained trust from a trading point of view.

The zcash dev team have stated they aren't trading ZEC [1]. You dispute that?

https://lists.randombit.net/pipermail/cryptography/2016-Nove...

No. I wish they were more open about it, (if that's really the case!) but why would it concern me? Then again I don't see zcash as fundamentally questionable, so that may be the difference.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com