Quote from: playingpoodles on July 07, 2017, 03:08:03 AM

Are you serious? This is "damage control"? The "worst case" scenario is you have staked all on a much vaunted and praised hash MTP that was designed to be more memory hard than the existing hash. In fact, it turns out to be less memory hard by orders of magnitude. This wasn't announced by Zcoin staff, but discovered by a miner who came on here to complain.

You don't have a working wallet, no roadmap for incentivised nodes, and now this MTP that consumed all your effort turns out to be worse than the existing hash. You must realise the reputational damage this causes, both the discovery, and moreover that you didn't announce the discovery as soon as you were aware of it but rather it was discovered by miner coders.

I warned weeks ago on this thread that I thought it was a mistake to focus on MTP at the expense of a wallet. I don't know if the Coinomi wallet works for Zcoin, I haven't used it, but it's clear from all the complaints on this thread that your "new" "fixed" desktop wallet does not.

Guess you need to read the paper and what I wrote. The worst case scenario is the absolute worst case scenario WHICH HAS NOT HAPPENED. The only reason why I bring this up is that many lay people would go omg Zcoin PoW is broken gg without bothering to read what this attack entails and if we did nothing or cannot fix it (which isn't the case). What this attack (if successful) is saying is that MTP isn't as memory hard as it claims to be but it doesn't mean it's 'broken' per se. A question to ask can be is x11 broken? Is Litecoin's Scrypt broken? They're not but they weren't as ASIC resistant as they thought they were.

Again, I repeat...THIS HAS NOT HAPPENED. MTP is still memory hard until further research shows otherwise and we welcome the scrutiny.

The paper's author itself said their proposed fixed completely fixes the attack but remains to be seen if there are other ways to attack. Basically a 'I suspect there may be ways but I don't know and we should research further'.

Now, this isn't the first time the MTT attack was brought up and was left in comments in various news articles which I believe we responded to. We also responded to various pms to us on this. Does it technically affect Zcoin right now in anyway? No. Heck it's on testnet. Is it fixed? Yeah and will continue to be improved. Would we want a bit more clarity from the researchers before putting out a full announcement on a non critical issue? Our discussions with Dmitry only happened in the last week of June and is still ongoing. Usually how it happens is that until you fix it, you don't announce it unless you know you can't fix it. Monero does this as well as I think most projects or even vulnerabilities in general. And again, this is on TESTNET. That's the whole point of the testnet. We knew we could fix it and we wanted the fix in place before an official announcement on it and were picking some brains to just make sure we understood the current situation well enough.

Note it's much easier to accuse than to defend so a lot of time has to be spent in replying.

The wallet upgrade Bitcoin core is proceeding very rapidly which would improve the wallet experience which right now is only bad on the first initial sync. However Coinomi completely works. We went through this discussion before so I won't repeat it.