Zerocash Website and Paper Published

domob
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Re: Zerocash Website and Paper Published

Post by domob »

indolering wrote:FWIW I ran the proposal past an operator of an exchange and they did not have any concerns with it. Still, I don't want to give government actors an excuse to go after us.

I haven't read the paper and I won't have time for a few weeks so I guess that I will just ask: is it possible to build the anti-money laundering controls relative to name purchases?
What controls are you talking about? Do you mean that for fear of government repression, we should make it impossible to register names anonymously? If so, than that's a clear no both from my personal vision for Namecoin and also technically if we implement Zerocash. Which is good.
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biolizard89
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Re: Zerocash Website and Paper Published

Post by biolizard89 »

I think Indolering is referring to the proof types that the Zerocash devs reference, which can prove tax compliance without revealing anything about the content of transactions. I'm not certain that this is what he's referring to, though. If so, then I think the Zerocash developers would probably be the ones who would implement that. That's another reason to wait for the dust to settle following their release before we implement outside of a testnet.

Regarding government actors, the US federal level (FinCEN) is looking pretty good, but New York state is unclear. We might want to wait and see how the BitLicense proposal turns out. I think that from a PR standpoint, our focus on naming (pure speech) rather than currency (financial speech) makes us less likely to be a target of money laundering allegations. But, it wouldn't hurt for me to run this by the lawyer I'm in contact with.
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indolering
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Re: Zerocash Website and Paper Published

Post by indolering »

biolizard89 wrote:I think Indolering is referring to the proof types that the Zerocash devs reference, which can prove tax compliance without revealing anything about the content of transactions. I'm not certain that this is what he's referring to, though. If so, then I think the Zerocash developers would probably be the ones who would implement that. That's another reason to wait for the dust to settle following their release before we implement outside of a testnet.
Yeah, I would prefer to have something controlled the ability to money laundering with Namecoins.
DNS is much more than a key->value datastore.

biolizard89
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Re: Zerocash Website and Paper Published

Post by biolizard89 »

Eran Tromer gave a talk in November 2014 on Zerocash.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6qOj9ap6RM

Good talk, not a huge amount of new info, but this talk was more thorough than the previous talks (and had better slides). There's a slide on money laundering at the end. He also mentions using SNARKs as a blockchain compressor, and as a contract system (he specifically compares it to Ethereum). Also it's generally good to see public communication from the Zerocash devs.
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biolizard89
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Re: Zerocash Website and Paper Published

Post by biolizard89 »

The MPC algorithm for generating the public parameters will be released on May 18 at the 2015 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. Abstract is at http://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2015/program.html
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biolizard89
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Re: Zerocash Website and Paper Published

Post by biolizard89 »

A bug in libsnark was discovered recently (and fixed), which would have allowed proofs in some SNARK-based systems (although not Zerocash) to be forged. Details at https://leastauthority.com/blog/a_bug_in_libsnark.html .

This illustrates why caution is necessary with new crypto, and demonstrates that the Zerocash developers are doing the right thing by getting peer review of libsnark before dumping a working currency onto the market.

In other news, the MPC algorithm gets released tomorrow.
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