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Comment by fourstar | Hacker News Reader

Why is being peer-reviewed what Cardano fans always lede with? That doesn’t automatically make something “better”, IMO. Also, what even uses Cardano? Project has been “in progress” for years and all I’ve seen are photos of Hoskinson with his mouth open taking selfies in various parts of the world. Algorand is probably the best project right now in crypto aside from ZCash that’s an actual contender against ETH (disclaimer: I hold none of either).

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Zcash had this which wasn't great: https://bitcoinist.com/zcash-inflation-bug-infinite-tokens/

You also only get privacy with transactions between two z-addresses, and those require a fair amount of resources to generate (I think HW wallets can't sign those transactions due to computational limitations). Most zcash transactions are between t-addresses which don't have any benefits over BTC (they're public).

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/49115/whats-the-...

As far as cardano, I'm skeptical of proof-of-stake compared to proof-of-work (though I might just not understand it fully). Proof-of-work seems like the main BTC innovation against abuse and a lot of the coins that use stake (stellar lumens, tezos) seem like they drop the defining characteristic of BTC decentralization in order to get faster transactions. Without proof of work you don't really get true decentralized protection from the system itself, you have to put trust somewhere. At least the tezos putting coins at risk approach is interesting. The cardano website also really sets off my bullshit alarms: https://cardano.org/

> You also only get privacy with transactions between two z-addresses, and those require a fair amount of resources to generate

FWIW this is rapidly improving. The main thing we need to implement Zcash-style private payments is a Merkle proof in a zk-SNARK, so that we can prove ownership of an account in the Merkle tree without revealing the account. So the proving cost depends heavily on our choice of hash function.

Since most SNARKs operate over large finite fields, traditional bit-oriented hashes are a poor fit, but the designers originally went with SHA-256 anyway to be on the safe side. More recent versions of the Zcash circuit use Pedersen hashes, which are much cheaper and still provably collision-resistant (assuming discrete log hardness).

Future versions will probably use more specialized hashes designed to minimize field operations, like Rescue [1]. There's also the idea of using an embedded GKR protocol to verify gMIMC hashes with a very low incremental cost [2], although it might be overkill for Zcash-style circuits.

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/426

[2] https://hackmd.io/@uCHu_NMSQ4mIUvA8i4qAyg/rkxBcmvcI

Interesting - thanks for the context and additional links.

I saw in your profile you work on Mir, are you also involved in Zcash?

I'm not really involved, just a fan of their work :) I think Mir and Zcash have some similar long-term goals, like using SNARKs to scale without affecting security. We just felt that starting over with a new blockchain seemed like the most practical way to get there.

I really fail to see why it being peer reviewed is not a strong point in favor of the project. If blockchains are supposed to be something other tech is supposed to be built on top of, then shouldn't it be build with the help of the scientific method? Breaking things moving fast doesn't work all the time you know ?

>>photos of Hoskinson with his mouth open taking selfies in various parts of the world

Honestly don't really know how to answer this. For someone who isn't interested in cardano you seem spend a lot of time stalking a blockchain ceo ;)

>> disclaimer: I hold none of either

congratulations!

Because peer review doesn't mean nearly as much for the credibility of something as people think it does. It basically just means two other qualified people looked over the research and said "There are no obvious flaws in methodology or reasoning," it doesn't mean that the reviewers verified every claim made or that they agree with the conclusions reached.

Even though academia is not perfect, it seems like going through peer review is on many dimensions better than not doing so. For instance, you get feedback and you document your reasoning and approaches for others to learn from. The only argument against it that I could see is added cost in terms of resources and time invested but for something like a blockchain it seems worthwhile to take the plunge.

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