Competition watch... Any comments on the new
Zerocash paper and how it compares and contrasts with Darkcoin? Is it looking more or less of a threat to our rightful world domination?
Zerocash carries a level of trust that Darkcoin does not. If I remember correctly, all transactions are encrypted and the key to those encrypted transactions are given to a third party to destroy.
There are 2 Huge risks with Zerocash.
1) The third party might not destroy the key and thus know all activity on the blockchain(making it not anonymous)
2) The government or a company/individual figures out a way to see all the encrypted information on the blockchain, especially with more advanced computers and quantum computers coming out etc.
1) Wrong. Transactions would still be anonymous, however, if they did not destroy the seed key then that key could be used to spawn unlimited amounts of Zerocash - without anybody being able to tell. There could be endless mintage and nobody would know.
2) Potentially correct, the encryption is bleeding edge and has not been as extensively tested as the encryption scheme used in Darkcoin.
#1 alone is a deal breaker for me.
The original work was also funded by the US Military or Navy, i.e. the US Government which said that it doesn't allow the NSA to spy on anyone that is a friend.
hmmmmm....
Acknowledgements. We thank Stephen Checkoway, George
Danezis, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful
comments. The research in this paper was supported in part
by the Office of Naval Research under contract N00014-11-
1-0470, and DARPA and the Air Force Research Laboratory
(AFRL) under contract FA8750-11-2-0211.
http://spar.isi.jhu.edu/~mgreen/ZerocoinOakland.pdfThat scares me ...
I wouldn't say it scares me. It just tells me that the enemy of all that is good and decent is in bed with it, so it cannot be trusted. This makes it absolutely the LEAST trustworthy thing in crypto, ever. I'd buy into any number of shitcoins before I trusted something funded by a government. Especially the USA government, holy crap... I can't believe anyone with an IQ above room temperature would even look in the direction of something like this. Trust that they key was destroyed, guv was in on it, sure... That combination is a guarantee that the key was not and never will be destroyed. It's not even a maybe...
+1
Also, the new Zerocash paper is out, a bit of night time reading later.
That is also funded by the US government
This work was supported by: Amazon.com through an AWS in Education research grant; the
Broadcom Foundation and Tel Aviv University Authentication Initiative; the Center for Science of
Information (CSoI), an NSF Science and Technology Center, under grant agreement CCF-0939370;
the Check Point Institute for Information Security; the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) under contract FA8750-11-2-0211;
the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement
number 240258; the Israeli Centers of Research Excellence I-CORE program (center 4/11); the Israeli
Ministry of Science and Technology; the Oce of Naval Research under contract N00014-11-1-0470;
the Simons Foundation, with a Simons Award for Graduate Students in Theoretical Computer
Science; and the Skolkovo Foundation with agreement dated 10/26/2011.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not re
ect the ocial policy or position of the
Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.
http://zerocash-project.org/media/pdf/zerocash-extended-20140518.pdf