Quote from: uvwvj on January 21, 2016, 05:03:18 PM

I got a great idea dump that Ethereum shit for Bitcoin and we all be happy.

Also Monero's competitor ZCash is 6 months out , does the emission rate of XMR kill it for good?

I made a comparison of Monero vs ZCash in another thread, I'll just quote it here. Klee, if you find this off-topic, feel free to delete it.

Quote from: dEBRUYNE on January 21, 2016, 11:42:55 AM

Quote from: dEBRUYNE on January 20, 2016, 06:09:01 PM

Quote from: tifozi on January 20, 2016, 06:04:05 PM

zcash alpha has been launched

https://github.com/Electric-Coin-Company/zcash

http://www.wired.com/2016/01/zcash-an-untraceable-bitcoin-alternative-launches-in-alpha/

I'll just copy my reddit comment here:

I've made this list earlier:

List of possible pitfalls wrt ZeroCash/ZeroCoin:

[1] If ZeroCash/ZeroCoin is launched on behalf of a company, which seems the case here, the company can be given a gag order (e.g. to add a line of malicious code).

[2] If I recall correctly, the creator of the genesis block holds some kind of masterkey. As a result, you have to trust this person. Even if this key was held by a group, you still have to trust that particular group. In addition, you have to trust the program they run to create the Genesis block (the masterkey could be in there).

[3] It's too opaque in my opinion. If a bug existed that would create additional coins, there is no way you would see it.

[4] The math and cryptography backing it isn't peer reviewed yet and in an infancy stage.

[1] seems to be confirmed. They will be launching as a for profit company, see:

Quote

For its first four years online, a portion of every mined Zcash coin will go directly to Wilcoxs Zcash company

This could also invoke some legal issues, since they are basically not a decentralid currency and bear in mind they are **US** based (http://www.bizapedia.com/de/THE-ZEROCOIN-ELECTRIC-COIN-COMPANY-LLC.html). Just remember what happened with Ripple.

Basically, with Ring Confidential Transactions included in Monero it's basically pepsi vs coke (thanks to u/smooth_xmr for this analogy), where both have their advantages and disadvantages.

P.S. They are currently only on testnet, the "real-version" is at least 6 months away.

P.P.S. It seems like they transactions are also quit inefficient compared to Monero's. See this description on how to get from the basecoins (the transparent ones) to the zerocoins (anonymous ones):

Quote

This operation (called a pour) might take a minute or two depending on your hardware. It is producing a zero-knowledge proof. (This operation's performance will be improved in the coming months.)

Shen Noether (aka NobleSir), who is obviously more knowledgeable about this subject than me, also made a comparison on reddit:

Quote

I've done a little bit of comparison in the Ring CT paper / you can also look here for some facts on zcash- there are a few I've seen so far

[1] Setup: Monero (Trustless) vs Zerocash (Must Trust zcash company)

[2] Proof Generation: Monero (100's second ) vs Zcash (1/minute)

[3] Algorithm auditability: Monero (a decent number of people seem to understand ring signatures and confidential transactions) vs Zerocash (I'm not sure how many people actually understand the proofs besides the small group of authors) - although this point is certainly subjective.

[4] Poison-pill attack vulnerability: Monero (attacker would need 51%) vs Zerocash Vulnerable, (see zerocash extended paper section 6.4

[5] Anonymity set: Monero (although the zcash proponents note that a ring signature is a "smaller" anonymity set, they usually don't mention that the stealth address factor actually means that each transaction is masked, whereas the ring signatures provide additional plausible liability, furthermore, since keys appear in different ring signatures in different blocks in time, the anonymity set for when a given key is spent grows infinitely, and could eventually grow larger than the zcash anonymity set at any fixed instant in time) vs Zcash (anonymity set is the entire blockchain )

[6]Anonymous Multisig: Monero (yes! see "written up" link on ring ct sticky, this could make things like lightning potentially possible ) vs Zerocash (?)

[7] Mining: Monero (has it's own strongly decentralized mining process) vs Zerocash protocol from the paper lacks it's own mining (it's essentially just a distributed anonymous database), so there must be another coin which is mined to convert to zerocash tokens

--note that point 4. is an actual potential compromise of anonymity, which contradicts some of the statements the zerocash team has made.
.
Other Differences are slight: Slight differences in transaction size - however Monero transactions should end up being a bit larger when transmitted, but cost less in terms of storage (their eventual block-chain cost will be approximately 32 bytes* (n+1) where n is mixin + epsilon, where epsilon is the current tx size - ring signatures (Note in the recent Ring CT drafts, there is pruning mentioned for the range proofs, see the "written up" link)

https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/41vg68/monero_vs_zcash_eli5_fundamental_differences/cz63pqw

And:

Quote from: dEBRUYNE on January 21, 2016, 02:08:31 PM

TPTB_need_war has repeatedly been stating that Zerocash does not need IP obfuscation and therefore is not subject to I2P/TOR, which are, in his opinion, flawed.

However, it seems like Zerocash actually needs IP obfuscation as well and they seem to go with TOR, see -> https://twitter.com/ioerror/status/689958030859960321

I took out this excerpt from the discussion in this thread -> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1139756.msg13623846#msg13623846 (starting point).

Quote from: TPTB_need_war on January 21, 2016, 06:15:43 AM

Quote from: smooth on January 21, 2016, 05:57:26 AM

Quote from: TPTB_need_war on January 21, 2016, 05:50:00 AM

Quote from: smooth on January 21, 2016, 05:47:27 AM

Quote from: TPTB_need_war on January 21, 2016, 05:43:06 AM

Look way back in 2014 when you launched Monero, I told you smooth and fluffypony that IP address correlation was the weakness. Fluffypony proceed to try to integrate I2P. I warned you all many times that was not an adequate direction. But you wouldn't listen.

I2P, and even somewhat Tor, is perceived as adequate by 99% of the market. The remaining 1% may be smarter but isn't obviously much of a market at all. Very niche-y.

By the speculators because they are clueless.

But the corporations do not use darknets. They want privacy on the block chain, like we have disk encryption. Mention dark nets, illegal drug trade, etc, and they won't touch it with a 100 foot pole.

I would guess that many corporations do use Tor now for certain things. I2P will be integrated and invisible. No one will know or care how it works, except that the obvious network level vulnerabilities having to do with broadcasting transactions will be removed, and it will pass routine (though not intelligence agency level) technical muster for being private sufficient to satisfy most of the market. That's my opinion, and you are welcome to disagree.

Zerocash still needs IP obfuscation for a lot of private usages in practice too. They acknowledge it in the paper.

Zerocash does not need IP obfuscation when all the transactions are in the private zerocoins. Cite the section of the paper. I think you must be misunderstanding something. You are probably conflating the use of the regular non-anonymous coins mentioned in the paper.

Here you are making excuses again. Corporations are not going to trust unprovable shit. And moreover, mixnets are always vulnerable to flood attacks. They are very, very unreliable. Not only do I disagree, but I also think you are ignoring basic fundamental realities about the technologies.

Edit: arguing for Tor/I2P is akin to arguing for Dash's off chain mixing. Now look in the mirror and remember your arguments for End-to-End Principled ring sigs (versus off chain mixing) and realize the same logic applies to why Zerocash is superior to using off chain mixnets. Hypocrite.

Edit#2: okay I see the section you are referring to:

Quote

6.4 Additional anonymity considerations
Zerocash only anonymizes the transaction ledger. Network trac used to announce transactions,
retrieve blocks, and contact merchants still leaks identifying information (e.g., IP addresses). Thus
users need some anonymity network to safely use Zerocash. The most obvious way to do this is
via Tor [DMS04]. Given that Zerocash transactions are not low latency themselves, Mixnets (e.g.,
Mixminion [DDM03]) are also a viable way to add anonymity (and one that, unlike Tor, is not as
vulnerable to trac analysis). Using mixnets that provide email-like functionality has the added
benet of providing an out-of-band notication mechanism that can replace
Receive
.
Additionally, although in theory all users have a single view of the block chain, a powerful
attacker could potentially fabricate an additional block
solely
for a targeted user. Spending any
coins with respect to the updated Merkle tree in this \poison-pill" block will uniquely identify the
targeted user. To mitigate such attacks, users should check with trusted peers their view of the
block chain and, for sensitive transactions, only spend coins relative to blocks further back in the
ledger (since creating the illusion for multiple blocks is far harder).

I will need to understand this attack better. Seems to me they are saying that you need to spend from a block where your pour transaction was the only transaction in the block. But the user would I think know this and thus not spend the coin any more. Thus I believe the anonymity remains provable without the use of any mixnet. I will need to understand this more deeply to be sure.

Bear in mind that I2P will be integrated in Monero, but you can always choose to run Monero over TOR if you want.