Zcash Open Major Grants

Re:Zcash Open Major Grants by brian_cloutier on Monday December 07, 2020 @04:45PM (#25338018)

I disagree that these are disqualifying, and also disagree Monero is a better alternative, but you missed one big one I do find worrying about zcash: there's no way to verify supply. Not only do you have to trust the trusted setup, but if the cryptography is broken it will be very difficult to find out there's no way to verify that coins are not being created from this air.

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Re:Zcash Open Major Grants by john_alan on Monday December 07, 2020 @04:52PM (#25338115)

> and also disagree Monero is a better alternative

It's empirically better.

Monero uses zero-knowledge proofs for the range proof, cryptographically protects the sender, receiver and notional.

Monero uses known, audited cryptographic primitives, elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman over curve25519, EdDSA signature over the twisted Edwards variant of the same curve, libsodium.

Monero is much less likely to have a production exploit than zcash.

Are you saying if you needed to send money privately you'd actually choose Zcash over Monero?

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Re:Zcash Open Major Grants by Ar-Curunir on Monday December 07, 2020 @06:11PM (#25339032)

> Monero uses known, audited cryptographic primitives, elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman over curve25519, EdDSA signature over the twisted Edwards variant of the same curve, libsodium.

The cryptographic primitives in zcash are also audited.

It's also the case that the cryptography underlying the next generation of zkSNARKs (which will be used by zcash) is the same as what Monero uses for range proofs; it's trustless (or low trust).

> Monero uses zero-knowledge proofs for the range proof, cryptographically protects the sender, receiver and notional.

Again, this is an over-simplification; the anonymity set is smaller, and moreover more difficult to analyze.

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Re:Zcash Open Major Grants by gtrhtrhtrhtr on Monday December 07, 2020 @06:48PM (#25339410)

Monero is cool, but it has fundamental flaws: its anonymity set. And ring signatures is not standard crypto at all. Less complexity than zk-SNARKs for sure, but there's a trade off in confidentiality.

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Re:Zcash Open Major Grants by ianmiers on Monday December 07, 2020 @07:24PM (#25339754)

Auditing the supply would mean transaction amounts were public. That kills privacy. Theres a reason exactly none of the privacy coins, including Zcash, Grin, Beam, Monero and Mobilecoin do it. Hiding transaction values is table stakes for getting privacy right. (but not nearly enough. see https://slideslive.com/38911785/satoshi-has-no-clothes-failu... and https://www.monerooutreach.org/breaking-monero/poisoned-outp...)

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