Namecoin Forum

biolizard89 wrote: It might be wise to wait for the Zerocash guys to release their stuff; if it's usable for our purposes that would be cool. There's so much innovation going on in the Bitcoin privacy space right now, it's hard to tell what might be obsolete in a year.

That is true. Zerocoin has made a big development by reducing the transaction size but it is still not usable until the trusted seed problem is not solved.
Zerocash I am not sure but may be similar.

virtual_master wrote:

biolizard89 wrote: It might be wise to wait for the Zerocash guys to release their stuff; if it's usable for our purposes that would be cool. There's so much innovation going on in the Bitcoin privacy space right now, it's hard to tell what might be obsolete in a year.

That is true. Zerocoin has made a big development by reducing the transaction size but it is still not usable until the trusted seed problem is not solved.
Zerocash I am not sure but may be similar.

I saw a talk by Matthew Green in January about Zerocash, he said that the trusted seed could be generated by an arbitrary number of people, and as long as one of them was honest and deleted their portion of the data after generation, then the backdoor would be impossible.

I have no idea what the current status on Zerocash is; there's a talk coming up in a couple weeks about it. I guess we'll see then.

The price of Darkcoin has risen 2-3 times during the last week:
http://coinmarketcap.com/drk_7.html
That shows us that people are worried about their privacy. We should better implement simple, existing, working and tested privacy features then waiting for complicated new ones.

virtual_master wrote:The price of Darkcoin has risen 2-3 times during the last week:
http://coinmarketcap.com/drk_7.html
That shows us that people are worried about their privacy. We should better implement simple, existing, working and tested privacy features then waiting for complicated new ones.

Keep in mind that Darkcoin has, to my knowledge, not been audited by academics nearly as much as Zerocoin has. Zerocash is also likely to receive a lot of peer review because it's developed by academics.

I have no specific objection to considering Darkcoin's algorithms for Namecoin, but it's not the only option.

biolizard89 wrote: Keep in mind that Darkcoin has, to my knowledge, not been audited by academics nearly as much as Zerocoin has. Zerocash is also likely to receive a lot of peer review because it's developed by academics.

I have no specific objection to considering Darkcoin's algorithms for Namecoin, but it's not the only option.

I have also nothing against Zerocoin/Zerocash. I even like them and consider a very promising technology.
But it is not about Darkcoin or Zerocoin but about a simple, understandable(not only by academics) and used technology vs. a more complicated one which is still not working.
At least this is my opinion.
CoinJoin is already used not only by Darkcoin.
Zerocash is not used and is still not usable. To implement it in Namecoin would be also impossible alone because the (reduced) transaction size is 1k which doesn't fit in our 0.5 k limit.

But I am speaking only about the actual situation. This could be completely different in 1 year.

virtual_master wrote:

biolizard89 wrote: Keep in mind that Darkcoin has, to my knowledge, not been audited by academics nearly as much as Zerocoin has. Zerocash is also likely to receive a lot of peer review because it's developed by academics.

I have no specific objection to considering Darkcoin's algorithms for Namecoin, but it's not the only option.

I have also nothing against Zerocoin/Zerocash. I even like them and consider a very promising technology.
But it is not about Darkcoin or Zerocoin but about a simple, understandable(not only by academics) and used technology vs. a more complicated one which is still not working.
At least this is my opinion.
CoinJoin is already used not only by Darkcoin.
Zerocash is not used and is still not usable. To implement it in Namecoin would be also impossible alone because the (reduced) transaction size is 1k which doesn't fit in our 0.5 k limit.

But I am speaking only about the actual situation. This could be completely different in 1 year.

Complicated in itself isn't bad; in general the negative associated with complicated is lack of auditing. Given that neither Darkcoin nor Zerocash has gotten much auditing yet, it's hard to say which is more secure -- but it appears likely that Zerocash will be getting much more peer review than Darkcoin in the near future. (And quite honestly, Matt Green has a way stronger reputation than the Darkcoin developers.)

I'm not sure what you mean about transaction size. Zerocash uses zk-SNARK proofs which are around 400 bytes (I don't remember the exact number). There is no 0.5 KiB limit on transaction size in Namecoin; Namecoin is the same as Bitcoin in this respect (transactions can be many many KB, I'm not sure what the limit is but it's huge). The 520 byte limit is on data pushed to the script stack, which again is exactly the same as Bitcoin (which is being adapted for Zerocash). Other than that, the 520 byte limit on stack data is a single number in the source code; it's well-known exactly how to change it (but it would be a hardfork).

All that said, the Zerocash source code is not yet released, and the developers haven't said much about how they're dealing with trust issues... so I'm not committing myself to supporting Zerocash yet. Let's see how things develop.

Yeah. It seems that they are problems with Darkcoin's masternodes.
Bad masternodes caused a fork:
http://www.usacryptocoins.com/thecrypto ... exchanges/

DarkCoin had to change its code in order to use masternodes, and they did a controlled fork of the blockchain to achieve this. Everything appeared to be running smoothly for a few hours after the masternodes began to work, but then the DarkCoin blockchain split into many forks. Apparently some “bad” masternodes were the cause of the forks.

Another issue is that many master nodes can be controlled by one entity, and those master nodes can see the transactions.

They are also planning(Darkcoin) to implement CryptoNote's ring signatures which will also require hardfork and is not recommended for Bitcoin like blockchains.
Jeremy - What do you think about ring signatures(like used by Monero) ? Could be an option for Namecoin ?
It is very interesting the scalable anonymity concept depending of the signature length and fee and not depending of the number of actual participants but can be scaled over an extended period of time..

I don't know enough about ring signatures to be able to evaluate them, but from what I can tell they appear to be an improvement over the existing Darkcoin methodology.

biolizard89 wrote:I don't know enough about ring signatures to be able to evaluate them, but from what I can tell they appear to be an improvement over the existing Darkcoin methodology.

This is true.
Some good point of views:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Anoncoin/commen ... es_gnosis/
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic ... msg6837456

Zerocash is the most anonymous, Zerocoin (original) is next, Cryptonote is close behind, and Darkcoin and Darkwallets are poor-man alternatives. All are better than nothing.
Nevertheless, you need to put this is perspective and consider some practical aspects: Darkcoin is working, CryptoNote coins are working but with no graphical interface, Zerocoin (original) does not exist now

http://www.coindesk.com/blockchains-sha ... ty-expert/
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comment ... is_broken/