Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Zerocoin: Anonymous Distributed E-Cash from Bitcoin
by
caveden
on 17/11/2013, 17:43:09 UTC
well rather than the get rich quick (...) Now thats not as strong an incentive as make-money-fast pyramid speculation on frankly long-term hopeless me-too alts

Please don't replicate the same silly attacks people tend to use to discredit Bitcoin. The financial incentive behind the technology is what brings lots of the manpower, business and infrastructure it has today. Not to acknowledge that is to be willingly blind.

Quote
If there was a technical way to ensure people can get their beta coins converted back into stable coins at the same rate (i.e., pegging), then things could be different. But I don't see how could that be possible.

technically it could be done, (bitcoin could accept coin moving in the other direction) however it imports risk into bitcoin main as a security defect in betacoin that allowed theft or forgery of coins, could then be transferred into bitcoin.

If the defect was only on the betacoin, then the damages would be restrained to those who willingly converted stable coins into beta coins. That's not an issue to me. When you do so, you accept the risks.

Hey, this very feature (allowing the redemption of arbitrary betaCoins built on top of it) could actually be the among the firsts betaCoins. Wink If it works well, it will set up a great platform for experimentation!

Quote
Is there an easier explanation somewhere, that could help technical people without a background in cryptography research to grasp the concept?

see earlier in tis thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175156.msg2378622#msg2378622

and another few posts after it where I tried to explain it a bit.

Thank you. I've just watched this video following a recommendation of jron, and what I could get from it was the following:

Quote
So, let me see if I got the idea: it's possible to accumulate random numbers in such a way that:
  • Prevents observers from knowing which individual numbers were accumulated.
  • Allows the one who knows one particular number to prove he knows it without having to reveal the number itself. Or if you do have to reveal it, it's still impossible to know which particular addition to the accumulator had put that number there, thus creating no link between the addition and the revealing of the number.
Is that a reasonable and sound simplification of the magic behind Zerocoin?

Am I getting closer? Huh
Your explanations kind of hinted me in that direction too.

Thank you!