If its true that the trusted setup was done behind closed doors and with only 6 people involved then it surely cant be trusted. Can anyone confirm how the setup was done?
Why wouldn't they use hundreds or even thousands of people generating shards of the golden key and have them all doing it in different ways to just about guarantee that there was no funny business in the setup. Without the ability to audit the blockchain we cant know if they created a gazillion coins or just 21 million. The technology behind Zcash whereby making the entire blockchain a black hole is great for anonymity but not so great if we cant trust how many coins are in this black hole.
I don't even think that this is the major problem. It is likely that one or more computers of them is infected. It is just to easy for professional hackers. And this not a kind of conspiracy theory. It's a honey pot for any hacker to get these data for a money printing maschine.
Exactly. We have to trust the setup, and if this was how it was done, then that doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in it.
I'm sure that the trusted setup is all right. They did a lot to ensure it's security and also something one could call "decentralized honesty".
Peter Todd was involved for example etc. But: As far as I know it won't even be visible on the blockchain how many Coins exist at a certain point of time. It doesn't need a compromised setup but "just" a bug like it happened to Bitcoin in 2010 (*) while nobody would know about it - just the market.
At the same time: Because of this ridiculous hype I rented some hash-power at bnkofthefuture - so I hope it will be all right and people will buy this. Futures are trading at 1.5 Bitcoin right now:
https://www.bitmex.com/app/trade/ZECZ16 What is an interesting question: Futures are nothing reliable, but if we think about the market-situation: There will be nearly no supply for days and weeks. After about 2 weeks just 20k Coins will exist while the first 3 days not even 1000 ZEC will be out there. Day 1: just about 100 ZEC. I believe it's possible that some really will buy to prices like that or at least really high.
* On 6 August 2010, a major vulnerability in the bitcoin protocol was spotted. Transactions weren't properly verified before they were included in the transaction log or "blockchain" which let users bypass bitcoin's economic restrictions and create an indefinite number of bitcoins.[16][17] On 15 August, the vulnerability was exploited; over 184 billion bitcoins were generated in a transaction, and sent to two addresses on the network. Within hours, the transaction was spotted and erased from the transaction log after the bug was fixed and the network forked to an updated version of the bitcoin protocol.[18][19] This was the only major security flaw found and exploited in bitcoin's history.[16][17]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_bitcoin