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No closed source. The key would be produced publicly at a ceremony.
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Using what operating system and firmware?
Of course they will need to convince the public the master key is sound. Or use my idea above of having multiple mixers and timing them out. I believe there is a solution, yet I will agree the current organization of their plans seems legally and structurally flawed.
That is why I say we can transition and beat them. But the technology is real anonymity. If you want real anonymity, you have to find a way to use their technology. Period. (and I have been studying this for a long time)
This does not answer my question which is cut and dry and goes to the heart of the trust issue.
If you apply that line of thinking, then every anonymity is insecure because operating systems and computers are never 100% secure.
I already proposed how to spread the risk out and make it non-systemic.
Note that Monero (Cryptonote one-time rings and every other kind of anonymity technology) also has systemic risk due to combinatorial analysis cascade as more and more users are unmasked with meta-data and overlapping mixes.
Proprietary software solutions have by their very nature a centralized systemic risk that Free Libre Open Source software solutions do not. The type of risks you describe in Monero are trivial compared to the risk of the DRM in the operating system used to generate master key in a centralized proprietary solution such as the one you propose. Furthermore I still do not have an answer to what is a straight forward yes or no question.
. As long as no one saw nor can recover the private key before it was discarded, then there is nothing proprietary remaining in the use of the Zerocash open source. The Zerocash open source code requires a public key to be pasted in. It is the public (ceremony) generation of that key, which determines whether anyone had access to the private key when the public key was created.
DRM has nothing to do with it all. Thus I assume you don't understand the issue.
The only issue is whether the public key can be computed at a public ceremony and the private key was securely discarded. So for example, they could use any computer, encase it in lead before running the computation, and no external connection to the computer other than the screen which reads out the public key.
Then slide the computer into a barrel of acid so that it is permanently destroyed. All done at a public ceremony so there can be no cheating.
Of course one could envision elaborate/exotic means of cheating, such as using radio waves to communicate the private key out to external actor, but again that is why I wrote encase it in lead. There is the issue of how to destroy it while not momentarily removing it from its communication barrier. But I am confident these physics issues can be worked out to a sufficient level of trust.
As for trust, not even the Elliptic Curve Cryptography and other math we use for crypto can be 100% trusted. So if you start arguing silly about 100% trust, then it is safe to ignore as loony.