On Fri, Dec 22, 2017 at 5:09 AM, Georgi Guninski <guninski@guninski.com> wrote:

On Fri, Dec 22, 2017 at 12:27:50AM -0500, grarpamp wrote:

...

The Zcash Foundation’s Powers of Tau Ceremony https://z.cash.foundation/blog/powers-of-tau/

Don't know if this is true or not, some concerns over zcash:

https://www.coindesk.com/investors-know-trading-zcash/ What Investors Should Know Before Trading Zcash

RSA was at one time new and insufficiently understood and not yet reviewed by large numbers of cryptographers and cryptanalysts, even to this day and in the future some of RSA may be unknown. Zk-SNARK related crypto is no different. Continued publication and review will yield better understanding of its security and any potential weaknesses and breaks. Calling a crypto new pursuant to that process is fine. Considering if new crypto is redundant use case and design to existing well tested crypto families is fine. Using new crypto in critical applications can be debated. Simply calling new crypto bad or good without that public process backing up the finding is wrong. For coins that offer two modes, any default as to private or transparent should be left to user choice, with client unset and unusable upon startup until set pursuant to plainly documented helptext, with per tx options thereafter. Then this is a non issue. Many news outlets fail to understand that the docs say that for the ceremony to fail it is all-must-fail, not one-must-fail. Review the actual docs and code, determine if they are both correct and strong. "Cypherpunk Desert Bus" including intermediate versions and as Updated on/after 20171010... archive.org, and other internet commentaries from others available to date... Yes, it is a good thing that you can search and find all sorts of material regarding the crypto behind Zerocoin and Zerocash that needs to continue going through the very serious matter and process of understanding, reviewing. proving, reproducing builds and ceremonies, etc. Here are two more papers... http://zerocoin.org/ http://zerocash-project.org/ Zcash seems actively calling for such review. People should engage in that review since regardless whether Zcash any of the other Z coins or even cryptocurrency is of interest, the new zero knowledge crypto and use cases will apply to a wide range of applications, thus it really does need to be proven or debunked by a much wider crypto and applied community. No different than say both the underlying crypto and ceremonies of DNS root and CA keys... serious business. Crap about founders rewards, "volatility", etc could apply to any coin and isn't part of zk-snark crypto, builds, ceremonies. Who designed and implemented a crypto could apply, though usually ends up being transcended / mooted over sufficent timescales under opensource public analysis. As with the ongoing "M" mix question, the only way to answer the "Z" question is to get down to the business of reviewing it...