Quote from: Melbustus on November 07, 2015, 04:20:49 PM

Quote from: smooth on November 07, 2015, 02:28:33 PM

Quote from: Melbustus on November 07, 2015, 01:56:39 PM

First of all, I never said "safe". Just that after working for a while, people would tend to not worry about it.

That's kind of true for a highly leveraged debt based system too. It took several years post-2008, but most now ignore systemic risks, or deny they even exist at all.

So I agree with you that many will behave that way in practice, but I also believe there is a role to play for systems built on a stronger foundation.

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if the best argument against Zerocoin adoption vs Monero adoption in the privacy-coin niche is that ZC uses new crypto

That is a massive issue though (even if many people may ignore it). In cryptography the only thing that makes most real systems secure is that they have been around for a long time and vulnerabilities have been either identified and fixed or unable to be found. It is essentially impossible for new crypto to be usefully secure. 10 years is a widely recognized rule-of-thumb aging period. The key components of zerocash are far newer than that.

This is not just an issue of privacy either. If the system breaks there could be huge or total monetary losses.

Understood, but you have to view that risk in the context of the rest of the risks in any crypto-coin system. A break of the underlying crypto seems down the list relative to other (probably more likely) failure scenarios that can be equally catastrophic from an investment standpoint.

I think you are extrapolating from the experience with cryptocurrencies using mature cryptography. Also for the most part other than Cryptonote (only slightly different) they all use essentially the same cryptography, which means none of them are going to break unless they all break. We of course now know from experience that they haven't broken, but this wasn't guaranteed in advance. Zerocash is using completely different cryptography from every other cryptocurrency, and is starting out using cryptography that is far newer and less proven than what Bitcoin used at the start. It is true that estimating the risk of problems with immature cryptography is difficult, but that doesn't necessarily make it small. When it comes to experience here, all bets are off.

But I don't necessarily expect people to respond to these risks correctly; people are in general terrible at that.