Quote from: Last of the V8s on Today at 11:33:08 AM

meanwhile a hilarious and very dry pastiche of shitcoin blogs

https://medium.com/@sixtenhodler/intolerant-zeal-5b5b1dd6ec0e
https://archive.vn/dScZj

Quote

Many haters will claim that Zcash is just for criminals. This is prejudice — block chains matter. What makes Zcash unique is its purity. Each cybercoin, each commitment, is unblemished. One cybercoin is perfectly interchangeable with another — they are all clean. Thanks to state-of-the-art zero-knowledge proofs, every ZEC is just as innocent as another. No other asset comes close to providing the same level of pure nobility and cleanliness. Every zatoshi is a virgin.

The metaphor is sensible, although it could be better stated. Within the shielded pool, each note commitment/nullifier pairing has, in practical effect, no prior history. (Unless you can break the cryptography: The Zcash designers gave up the statistical hiding of Zerocoin for computational hiding. But then, an attacker who could break Zcash’s cryptography could probably also break an awful lot of other cryptography, and thus violate my privacy in total.) No taint tracing (double entendre here). No blacklisting—no Mike Motherforker Hearn jerking off all over your coins. No Chainalysis doing a genetic analysis of every transaction that has fucked your coins before! Each transaction is indeed the spend of a metaphorical virgin.

Bitcoin is not perfect. Among other things, it has serious problems with fungibility—and with privacy. We need to be able to discuss that, without the kind of groupthink “cult mentality” that anti-Bitcoiners accuse Bitcoin of having. I’m a believer (LOL), but I am also a freethinker.

Zcash does have the very best currently-available technology for fungibility and privacy. (Yes, Heuristic. When I use Monero, I avoid, and have always avoided coin merge. I never touched Monero before it got both Confidential Transactions and mandatory ring sizes; and strictly avoiding coin merge always been my policy. If I understand correctly, this makes me immune to the sort of statistical analysis that CipherTrace is doing, or trying to do; but total avoidance of coin merge is very difficult, and rather impractical. On this and other points, I do things with the Monero CLI wallet that >99.9% of users will not do.) Zcash is still the only real-world deployed coin with which, for fully-shielded transactions, I don’t even think about coin control!

Unfortunately, as I myself discovered the hard way, technology alone does not make the coin. For privacy, the only right way to use Zcash (or Monero) is to hold it: Cross-chain analysis trivially links transactions in which people swap Bitcoin → [X] → Bitcoin; and due to subset sum analysis and timing correlations, it is surprisingly difficult to avoid all practical potential of linkage or probabilistic linkage. Well—speaking from experience, if you want to hold Zcash, prepare to lose significant wealth—as you hold something that’s not even very useful, in terms of “where can I spend this?” In Zcash, that problem is even worse if you want to make fully-shielded transactions. Monero has thus far much better market acceptance, albeit still not much at all compared to Bitcoin.

So... What can we do to improve Bitcoin’s fungibility? Much to my dismay, we seem to be stuck with transparent on-chain transactions; and the only virgin coins are coinbase. PayJoin and CoinSwap are helpful; but in my vehement opinion, we really need to move most transactions off-chain: Lightning Network, among other things. Nobody can do taint tracing on an atomic multipath transaction with onion routes, or whatever else the Lightning wizards magic up. And there is thereby no global, immutable, transparent database of all transactions, publicly available for anonymous download. (The thing that made me run away screaming in horror when I first saw Bitcoin. Wherefore I am not Bitcoin-rich, but I sleep quietly without worrying about someone tracing my early transactions.)

Disclosure: I still have a small amount of Zcash—within the Sapling shielded pool, of course! It’s small enough that I really will not get rich if it moons—from an investment perspective, it is downright trivial; and I am anyway under no illusions about the power of one of my posts to influence the market. Same with Monero. (Same with fiat...) My modest Bitcoin holding is overwhelmingly larger in current market value—Bitcoin is where I store value. And I don’t day-trade. I have no vested interest in pumping anything here, but I very much do have a personal self-interest in improving Bitcoin’s privacy and fungibility.