>> "The number of people who really understand zk-SNARKs, and therefore the Zcash protocol, is probably small enough that you could feed them all with one Thanksgiving turkey."
If the list is so small, who are they?
If the list is so small, who are they?
[1] http://web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP8TPeYQyN4
In all seriousness though, if I were one of a handlful of people who understood a rising anonymous currency platform, I wouldn't want to be publicly exposed that way.
That aside, the MPC (Multi-Party Computation) setup is more of a security theater than actual security. It completely goes against of what cryptography is all about and I'm puzzled as to why any cryptographer would base their system's security in such a way.
http://zerocash-project.org/media/pdf/zerocash-oakland2014.p...
It's a peer-reviewed conference and basically the top venue (along with Usenix Security and ACM CCS) for academic computer security.
I'm not sure what you mean by "for something that ground-breaking"?
(For background, I used to publish at this conference and others, did my share of paper reviewing, and my colleagues were working on e-cash crypto around the time of bitcoin's rise.)
[My own background is firmly in systems security – I've had papers at Oakland and CCS – and I'm not as familiar with the crypto side]
SNARKs have gotten the appropriate peer review from the right parts of academia. To everyone else reading this: Of course, that doesn't make it secure and there are limmits to peer review. Just because 3 to 5 reviewers read the paper and thought it was publishable doesn't mean it's correct. However, those works were high enough profile that others have looked at the papers once they were published, which is the real meaningful part of peer review and that comes after publication.
None the less, snarks are one of the more sophisticated cryptogrphic techniques ever deployed. And peer review also says abosultely nothing about the security of the implimentations of software instantiating the cryptography. But the only way to remidy that is to build software, deploy it, and get people to look at it.
Zerocash itself is a fairly simple protocol built on top of SNARKs, so the fact that it was published at Oakland isn't the biggest worry. It's also gotten a bunch of scrutiny after that.
[0] http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-38348-9_3... [1] http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-40084-1_6... [2] https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/507.pdf
Speaking of - why did you rush it out? Because your investors wanted to make profit? Absolutely despicable.