Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Anonymity and Funding
by
gmaxwell
on 18/07/2014, 03:13:35 UTC
the bitcoin development community has offered no assurances or support to the zerocash project of the variety that would entail working together to integrate the zerocoin/libzerocoin code
Of course not. The zercoin code— though very interesting was a technical non-starter for our applications (20-30kb signatures, very slow validation, trusted initialization). As of now it's been abandoned by its developers and not adopted by any altcoins (AFAIK). Of course, techniques improve with time— thus…

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(or the refined code of the zerocash project) into the bitcoin protocol.  Thus, the Zerocash project is working on an alternative coin system in which different cryptocurrencies would be basecoin that could be exchanged for Zerocoins.
Zerocash  (which is unrelated technology to zero-coin) is expected to improve validation speed (signing is still tens of seconds), and get transactions down to only ~5+ times larger than current ones, but will still require a trusted initialization also very new and largely untested cryptography (some of which includes assumptions which are provably non-falsifiable) which, if compromised, grants unbounded undetectable inflation. This isn't exactly a good fit for use as Bitcoin yet. I'd like to use the technology in a side-chain when made available, where the risk could be more contained,— I spent a bit of time making recommendations about how it could be integrated in Bitcoin with them in email and in person— but the people involved seem to be very interested in creating an altcoin specifically as an altcoin. (Which goes along with not publishing an actual implementation of the complete zerocash cryptosystem, e.g. what was benchmarked in the paper).

I have an implementation of bytecoin ring signatures suitable for our system but if I publish it at this time, it will just result in more altcoins... All these cryptographic anonymity proposals are very immature and come with high costs attached (resource usage or cryptographic risks), and are rapidly developing science, some of which I've been directly contributing to. Bitcoin core— under live fire in a consensus system— is precisely the wrong place to be developing them, but a reasonable place for them once they're mature, tested, and have some of the ugly compromises engineered out of them (e.g. trusted initialization (for zerocoin), transaction bloat, or imperfect privacy (BRS)).

There are several other cryptographic approaches which have been invented (some by me), but all have unfortunate tradeoffs so far... but the technology seems to be rapidly improving.

Schemes which provide improved privacy in a safe and compatible way like CoinJoins (e.g. see darkwallet) are already being developed by multiple parties now and are flourishing. They aren't where we need ultimately but they do have good tradeoffs for the short term.

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This convolution would not be necessary if bitcoin development was more friendly to anonymity systems developers.
This isn't my experience, but if you'd care to point out any specific instances where something was unfriendly— I'll be glad to go work to resolve it.

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The Bylaws contain no restrictions on what the funds from member dues (or any other funds the Foundation may receive) can be used for. None whatsoever.
I was referring to the donors themselves making a condition as part of their donation (obviously this wouldn't cover dues), other funds— the bylaws wouldn't say anything about this.

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As a member, I'd like to see that change.
As a member you're free to ask— though a better forum might be the foundation forum.  Since this isn't the foundation's current area of interest I'd expect you'd see more success elsewhere with less effort though.