Richard Stallman: We Can Do Better Than Bitcoin

Re:Richard Stallman: We Can Do Better Than Bitcoin by paulsutter on Sunday November 25, 2018 @11:10PM (#18531003)

Zcash’s privacy is cryptographic whereas Monero seems more like a chain with a builtin mixer. Monero has a history of fixing privacy issues as they are published (for example the paper by the National University of Singapore). Fixing issues is good, having so many is less good. Zcash has scalability limitations because it’s hard to add an L2 solution like Lightning because that would pretty much wreck privacy. But zcash is running at nowhere near capacity so that’s hypothetical.

They’re both great experiments and Stallman would be more impressive proposing better solutions than just sniping at the projects.

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Re:Richard Stallman: We Can Do Better Than Bitcoin by vmsplice on Monday November 26, 2018 @05:00PM (#18537229)

What about the trusted setup of Zcash? Isn't that a significant disadvantage compared to Monero? There is also the dev fee etc.

Monero also has "cryptographic privacy" when it comes to hiding transaction amounts, for example. Describing it just as a coin mixing on chain sounds too simple, something like Dash.

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Re:Richard Stallman: We Can Do Better Than Bitcoin by daira on Monday November 26, 2018 @12:15PM (#18534893)

There's a pretty detailed proposal of a privacy-preserving L2 solution for Zcash, called BOLT (https://z.cash/blog/bolt-private-payment-channels/). The original paper is at https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/701 , and there's a prototype implementation by J. Ayo Akinyele at https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/libbolt . Further development of that implementation is being funded by the Zcash Foundation (https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/GrantProposals-2018Q2/iss...). The Blossom upgrade scheduled for October 2019 is intended to include consensus changes needed for BOLT (https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/announcing-zcash-blossom-... and https://github.com/zcash/zcash/issues/3676).

There are also realistic longer-term possibilities for L1 scaling of Zcash, including the possibility of doing a Coda-like succinct blockchain (https://codaprotocol.com/). I've been working on optimizing recursive validation (https://github.com/zcash/zcash/issues/3425) and researching how to find more efficient pairing-friendly curves in order to make this practical. Networking optimizations and other consensus layer upgrades along the lines of SPECTRE/PHANTOM (https://medium.com/@drstone/an-overview-of-spectre-a-blockda... and https://medium.com/@drstone/an-overview-of-phantom-a-blockda...), etc. are also quite feasible.

It's correct that we're not running anywhere near capacity at the moment, and that gives us time to develop these solutions.

-- Daira Hopwood (Zcash developer)

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Re:Richard Stallman: We Can Do Better Than Bitcoin by paulsutter on Monday November 26, 2018 @02:38PM (#18536165)

Thanks for the links, nice to see the work on Bolt.

And Coda looks incredible if that can be done

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Re:Richard Stallman: We Can Do Better Than Bitcoin by glitch003 on Monday November 26, 2018 @03:19AM (#18531865)

Agreed. Mimblewimble / Grin / BEAM are also interesting ideas here that can provide scalability with privacy.

Additionally, I wish Stallman would research for himself instead of asking an expert, but oh well.

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