Quote from: derrend on November 20, 2016, 04:56:16 AM

Reposted here because limited response in slack...

Putting whichever crypto religion we've sworn our allegiance to this week aside, I'm looking for feedback here:
I can swap some btc for some zcash using bitsquare, perform a zcash transaction to break any traceability and sell my zcash (on bitsquare again) and get myself a lovely new btc with no previous history that can be linked to me.
I can perform the exact same series of steps and achieve the exact same result with zcoin (because it too is based on the zerocoin protocol).

So why then is zcash $70 (down from +2MM) whilst zcoin is $0.70c (down from $10) when the only extra thing zcash seems to offer is undetectable money creation due to the necessity of a trusted setup (which zcoin also had but due to the visibility of the money supply detecting a compromise would be arbitrary)?

The knee jerk reaction I'm expecting is that "it's more anonymous because you cannot see the transaction values" but this is a moot point imo because the whole purpose is to cryptographically break the transaction history which is achieved by both.

Isn't it true that the extra lengths zcash goes to is more like 'security theatre', just like when the zcash founders burned the computer which generated the master private keys. Yeah it looked nice but... so what?

In summary then, why would someone pay 100x more for an equivalent feature found in another coin? Apart from undetectable fraud and higher resource consumption what does zcash offer over zcoin?

Also check out the zcoin and zcash roadmaps respectively.

ps
Don't give me that 'topological analysis' c**p bacause you can see the amounts, you cannot follow coins around in the zcoin blockchain, it's impossible which is why zerocoin was described as perfect money over 3 years ago.

I'm not trying to troll, I'm genuinely intrigued as to what the zcash community knows that I don't?

pps
zcoin is not a zcash clone, in fact zcoin is older than zcash because it was launched ~1 week earlier.

Your questions should be directed at the Zcash team, however since we are using Zcash as the backbone of our crypto I will attempt to answer your concerns.

You are forgetting who you are revealing yourself to in the description of "cleaning" coins. In Bitsquare, p2p exchange is done with an escrow (arbitrator). The escrow (arbitrator) "knows" that you have sent the zcash and the escrow "knows" someone sent the bitcoin to be exchanged. Get enough corrupt arbitrators who are collecting data and they can start piecing together data linking groups of transactions. Komodo, through EasyDex and atomic swaps will allow you to conduct the "cleaning" all in one wallet and without the need of an arbitrator. Also unlike Bitsquare, trade pairs are not all linked to btc, you can exchange any bitcoin compatible for any other bitcoin compatible.

The extensive process of the trusted setup was to not only reduce the chance of the key being assembled after parameter generation but the calm down the unnecessary FUD surrounding the minuscule potential of it be reassembled. Perhaps they went a little overboard, but I'd rather have increased security than the mentality of " good enough".

Not seeing the transaction values has several effects: It makes transaction linkage impossible and prevents mantissa attacks. A mantissa attack is linking transactions through a pattern of numbers beyond the decimal point. For instance, if I am looking at the blockchain and I see 1.4444444444 being sent again and again, despite the possible differences in addresses, I can have a greater than average assumption that the different addresses sending that specific amount are the same person. This combined with other analysis techniques can give up the anonymity of an individual.

Why did people pay ridiculous prices in the opening days of Zcash, limited supply + hype + misguided assumption of demand = people being dumb with their money

Komodo brings to the table additional functionally internally through Delayed Proof-of-Work and PAX/Assetchains as well as externally through EasyDex/Instantdex , Iguana, Jumblr and in the future through "Gecko" smart chains, PAX2 and other future projects.