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A comment on The Security Behind the Birth of Zcash. Parent comment

Re:The Security Behind the Birth of Zcash by plasticmachine on Sunday December 04, 2016 @04:03PM (#13101758)
That's incorrect, Monero does not leak amounts since they created and added RingCT (currently compulsory on testnet, and compulsory on mainnet from a hard fork next year September) - https://lab.getmonero.org/pubs/MRL-0005.pdf

Not only does Monero already do what ZCash is trying to do, but it has two main advantages:

1. EVERY transaction is private, which means that the entropy of the anonymityset is continuously growing. Instead, ZCash restricts privacy to an opt-in mechanism (mostly due to private transactions being horrible - requiring north of 8gb of RAM and several minutes on a modern computer) which means that there is a trivial amount of entropy, and deanonymization is pretty trivial.

2. Monero is focusing on further improvements that ZCash is just dreaming about, such as their C++ i2p router, Kovri. They can do this because they've been in production, tested, and hammered for several years.

The real question is: what does ZCash provide that Monero doesn't, except some sort of ridiculous "star cred"?

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Re:The Security Behind the Birth of Zcash by mrb on Monday December 05, 2016 @12:41AM (#13103603)
Monero doesn't already do what Zcash is doing. As you point out yourself, it will be "next year September" that RingCT will be live.

I agree with your other criticism of Zcash though. The situation is far from perfect.

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Re:The Security Behind the Birth of Zcash by plasticmachine on Monday December 05, 2016 @04:52AM (#13104387)
No, it'll be MANDATORY from next year September, not LIVE from next year September...
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