<story><title>Zcash begins</title><url>https://z.cash/blog/zcash-begins.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Animats</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;This technology can do for cooperation what the Internet did for communication two decades ago.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Huh? Why? How? It&amp;#x27;s an altcoin with more anonymity than Bitcoin.  That&amp;#x27;s nice, but no big deal.&lt;p&gt;I went to hear Tromer&amp;#x27;s talk on the theory behind Zcash at Stanford last Wednesday.[1] There were a lot of very strong claims and a lot of hand-waving.  I&amp;#x27;m not an expert in that area, but the claims were awfully strong and the presentation didn&amp;#x27;t back them up sufficiently.  Here&amp;#x27;s his key paper.[2] He claims, at least, to have developed a new way to generate cryptographically strong hash functions. See section 1.1 of that paper. That&amp;#x27;s a hard problem. Of the existing crypto-grade hash functions, Snefru, MD2 (128-bit), MD4, MD5, RIPEMD, HAVAL-128, and SHA-0 have all been broken, and SHA-1 is looking weak. Solving that problem alone would be a noteworthy achievement. So where&amp;#x27;s Tromer&amp;#x27;s proposed hash function, evaluated by the crypto community?&lt;p&gt;On the financial front, the insiders take a 20% rakeoff of new Zcash coins for the first four years.  That&amp;#x27;s a huge cut for a financial product.  The investors include Roger Ver, the convicted felon who publicly said Mt. Gox was sound. What could possibly go wrong?&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;web.stanford.edu&amp;#x2F;class&amp;#x2F;ee380&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;web.stanford.edu&amp;#x2F;class&amp;#x2F;ee380&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;
[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;eprint.iacr.org&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;580.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;eprint.iacr.org&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;580.pdf&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Zcash begins</title><url>https://z.cash/blog/zcash-begins.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mostly_harmless</author><text>&amp;gt; Zcash is a technology, and like any technology it has multiple uses. I suspect that many of the best applications of this technology haven&amp;#x27;t been conceived of yet.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 10% pre-mine to founders&lt;p&gt;This smells super fishy. Altogether, I&amp;#x27;ve yet to see anything to do with cryptocurrencies be useful. Nothing but scams, hiding illegal activities, and hopeless optimism so far.</text></comment>