"This technology can do for cooperation what the Internet did for communication two decades ago."Huh? Why? How? It's an altcoin with more anonymity than Bitcoin. That's nice, but no big deal.
I went to hear Tromer'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'm not an expert in that area, but the claims were awfully strong and the presentation didn't back them up sufficiently. Here'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'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's Tromer's proposed hash function, evaluated by the crypto community?
On the financial front, the insiders take a 20% rakeoff of new Zcash coins for the first four years. That'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?
[1] http://web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/
[2] https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/580.pdf
Huh? Why? How? It's an altcoin with more anonymity than Bitcoin. That's nice, but no big deal.
I went to hear Tromer'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'm not an expert in that area, but the claims were awfully strong and the presentation didn't back them up sufficiently. Here'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'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's Tromer's proposed hash function, evaluated by the crypto community?
On the financial front, the insiders take a 20% rakeoff of new Zcash coins for the first four years. That'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?
[1] http://web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/ [2] https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/580.pdf