Not _all_ cryptocurrencies, no - it's mostly just the scammy ones of little genuine utility and/or technological merit.
Both Bitcoin and Monero have fair distribution; development of neither is done by for-profit LLCs financially supported by any pre-mine, miner tax, insider investment/ICO, or other fancy scheme paid out by either the underlying monetary system or taxed from the users and/or those securing the network, and while Blockstream Inc. does employ Bitcoin Core developers, Monero development is entirely decentralized without even a foundation to its name.
The original comment purports that ridiculous enrichment schemes are a carpet necessary evil for initial and continued development of cryptocurrencies, which is simply not true - what you're pointing out is a different argument.
> Cleaning up that is not enough, abstracting kernel API like kmalloc or i2c, or similar, is a no go. If the current drm infrastructure does not suit your need then you need to work on improving it to suit your need. You can not develop a whole drm layer inside your code and expect to upstream it.
> Cleaning up that is not enough, abstracting kernel API like kmalloc or i2c, or similar, is a no go. If the current drm infrastructure does not suit your need then you need to work on improving it to suit your need. You can not develop a whole drm layer inside your code and expect to upstream it.
But abstracting all this is fitting the infrastructure to their needs (which is having a common driver infrastructure for many operating systems).
Sure, but then why not just continue with the binary blob?
Kernel development is largely an optimization process of the internal model of what a kernel should do, and for that developers need first-class raw data, the DRM maintainer wants to know how you'd like to change DRM. And though you can put that into a translation/abstraction layer, it's not helpful, because that doesn't scale, because the maintainer would have to look at every such layers and come up with a common one, and repeat this grueling task every time they want to move forard with DRM itself.
Well, there are ways to make a point and emphasizing an idea without resorting to swearing. The Linux kernel project has lost some maintainers because of this.
Now to be fair, one merit of Linus is that he is direct and says he doesn't like something, and not weasel language like "maybe later" or other time-wasting expressions that force people to guess what he is thinking.
5 hours and almost 100 comments later no one has pointed out that Zcash and Keybase share the same investors.
I am relieved that 'Keybase chose Zcash' purely on merit after an exhaustive and objective selection process, and that this potential conflict of interest is transparently disclosed in the linked adverticle - wait, they did no such thing.
Does it concern no one that this security-focused company is shilling for other (fundamentally questionable) products?
I couldn't decide whether to up- or downvote this: it sounds like equal parts 1) information worth bringing to people's attention and 2) slandering a team that seem really nice fellas to me. So I looked both companies up on CrunchBase, and can find zero overlap between investors declared there. Where did your information come from?
Thanks very much for this. Based on the one or two private individuals featuring on both lists, I'm inclined to think your original post was exceedingly strongly worded.
Did you read the blogpost? It's basically a Zcash presskit - note the surely calculated title, and the omission of any actual "anonymous" competitor coins in the first paragraph as well as the entire article, all at a time when ZEC price is in free-fall.
It might even be worse if it wasn't as such - a security-oriented business that, motivated by Bitcoin's shortcomings, does due diligence on anonymous crypto and genuinely concludes that Zcash, in its current state no less, is the answer? Come on.
I did, but I (perhaps naively) took it as someone cheerfully geeking out about something cool their friends built, and which they're now interfacing with.
I do appreciate you're pointing out this alternative take. I guess what clouded our discussion is that we mixed questioning their motivations (the investors thing) and their judgement (ie is zcash a good choice?). I missed the latter, focusing on the former only.
Worth adding here that it also appears Zcash stakeholders have been internally buying/selling their own ZEC at inflated prices on Poloniex to artificially increase both volume and the market price.
Whilst perfectly legal, it doesn't enhance a "trustworthy" reputation to me.
> Worth adding here that it also appears Zcash stakeholders have been internally buying/selling their own ZEC at inflated prices on Poloniex to artificially increase both volume and the market price.
I don't understand this. None of the stakeholders have even received their money yet; this is publicly verifiable.
Hypothetically, anyone could "prop-up" the crypto market for a newly launched coin by buying the first Asks from Poloniex at a deliberately inflated price and then sell back-and-forth to themselves at the same inflated price to create false volume / pricing.
You wouldn't need any ZEC to begin with.
Just to be clear, I am not specifically claiming the devs are doing this, but somebody with an interest in ZEC performing well (and money to burn to prop up the price) has been.
It's eased off now in any case, but it hasn't gained trust from a trading point of view.
No. I wish they were more open about it, (if that's really the case!) but why would it concern me? Then again I don't see zcash as fundamentally questionable, so that may be the difference.
I don't think you understand how Monero works _at all_ - let me fix one of your arguments to illustrate:
>When you spend money, you basically say "I am one of 2^256 people", where 2^256 is usually fairly small.
Disappointing/embarrassing level of insight from a crypto project leader - here's a good layman-friendly video https://youtu.be/GEVm1dMn5Ks?t=14m to bring you up to speed (the simplified example is continued at 20m).
Hmm. I don't think this is clear issue at all. I have been looking at monero block explorer, and there seems to be "mixing level" etc parameters. What do these parameters imply if not the level of how many people you mix the inputs with?
I mean, your argument "you're stupid, look at this youtube video" is not very convincing either.
The Monero blockchain is comprised of inputs and outputs - public keys/one-time addresses to power of 10 denominated amounts into which each transaction is split and mixed with past public keys of identical power of 10 amounts. There are no 'orthodox' addresses on the blockchain which can be linked to transactions or to an identity.
That's just a misunderstanding of inherent blockchain limitations. It's very easy for me to reveal a bunch of addresses on the Monero blockchain.
Step 1: make a bunch of addresses
Step 2: the world know it was you
That reduces the anonymity set for everyone else. They thought they were mixing with you anonymously but now that you are revealed, your participation in the mixing is useless, people would have done better to select someone else.
Combine this with Sybil attacks, criminal investigation, and other unmasking techniques and you might get the anonymity set down to 1 for a particular output, allowing you to further reduce other anonymity sets.
I was not aware, but apparently the Monero blockchain has a snowball effect to help mitigate this.
Basically, unless you own 80% of the outputs on the blockchain you don't have enough to identify subsequent transactions, so any foothold you gain in owning outputs becomes rapidly weaker. Given the cost of owning 80% of the blockchain outputs, it's not an attack that is particularly effective even at Monero's current state of usage.
Individuals who publish their input history won't make any significant difference.
ZCash has a myriad of fundamental issues, chief among them:
-ZCash is a US-based LLC, and given what is publicly known about the capabilities and past behavior of its intelligence apparatus I don't see how anyone can claim that such an organization can shepherd a 'truly anonymous blockchain', particularly one that is essentially a black box
-ZCash's blockchain is a black box and requires you to not only trust them with your anonymity, but also to trust them not to create coins arbitrarily - a successful attacker could also mint coins at will - as there is no way to verify circulation
-Anonymous transactions are optional and require tremendous resources to generate
-It is an innovative take on a pre-mine where insiders were given opportunity to pre-purchase coins at the expense of future miners
I suggest that anyone looking for a truly anonymous blockchain experience take a look at Monero.
> I suggest that anyone looking for a truly anonymous blockchain experience take a look at Monero.
And I suggest that anyone looking for strong provable anonymity guarantees not look at Monero. The security guarantees of ZCash are stronger than those of Monero, and the trusted setup issue can be mitigated via the MPC protocol detailed in a recent paper.
EDIT: compromising the trusted setup does not compromise anonymity; the zero knowledge proofs used enjoy a property known as "perfect zero knowledge".
> ZCash is a US-based LLC, and given what is publicly known about the capabilities and past behavior of its intelligence apparatus [...]
why does it matter where zcash is incorporated when the apparatus you're describing operates without regard for borders?
zcash is the first effort at a cryptocurrency where I have immense respect and trust for its team right out of the gate. not sure where the FUD is coming from (although I'd hypothesize that you are long monero?).
>Anonymous transactions are optional and require tremendous resources to generate
"why does it matter where zcash is incorporated when the apparatus you're describing operates without regard for borders?"
Yes, they can do intelligence ops and attacks in others countries, but can't issue a subpoena along with gag order. Attacks can be defended against, secret court orders - not. A decision to make this currency US based killed it before it was even born. That's sad, because technically ZCash looks quite interesting.
"Zero knowledge" is not an excuse, it's way too easy to "miss a bug" or few to leak an information. NSA is known to talk/force companies into adding backdoors to their products. Users can never be sure, so why risk it?
It is too easy to miss a bug, which is why there was an audit.
I really don't understand the risk of US incorporation that you're talking about, or why it is better or worse than any other country without introducing other potentially even less desirable risks. Can you explain further?
More recently the US is known for failing to force companies to add back doors (see Apple/FBI). It's probablg worth noting Jospeh Bonneau (EFF) is on the board of Zcash. I just don't see the risk that you're seeing, sorry.
No other western country (to my knowledge) has secret courts, that were also proven to target tech companies. If such reason is not enough for you, I don't know what else could it be then.
right, but we already covered that. there is no court order in the world that can compel to you to provide what you do not have. so why is the US a bad place for ZCash to incorporate?
Are you sure such argument would fly against (possibly and probably technically illiterate) judge? I'm not. Apple was a separate case, because it is publicly known and loved company, and there are very few companies that have luxury to say the same. How did that play out to Lavabit (that's a controversial example, but it's to illustrate that court doesn't hesitate to crush a company to achieve its goal)?
Also, RSA scenario[1] is not unrealistic too imho.
That's it, I'm not going to argue in circles anymore, I don't trust and will not trust any US based, privacy related tech company unless something fundamentally changes in its legal and power structures -- there are more than enough reasons and examples for me. If you do -- that's fine by me.
Forum-shopping is a problem, I don't disagree. But Apple didn't win that case on PR, and Lavabit didn't lose that case by making smart decisions. These are not analagous situations.
If you could name a single country that would offer better protections, we might have something to talk about. Western Europe, seriously? [1]
The reason we are going in circles is because you're unwilling to trust ZCash, not because of where it's incorporated. If, like me, you trusted ZCash, it wouldn't matter to you where their articles of incorporation were filed, because you would trust that the zero-knowledge implementation would prevent law enforcement from mattering at all. If open source, audited code by some of the brightest minds in the space doesn't earn your trust, nothing will. IcelandBux won't save you.
> ZCash's blockchain is a black box and requires you to not only trust them with your anonymity
You do not trust anyone with your privacy in our system. Assuming you're talking about our zk-SNARK parameters, if they were not securely generated you still could not violate anyone's privacy.
I'm but a layman but browser-side SSL verification is essentially 3rd-party centralized validation of the authenticity of one side of an encryption mechanism - predetermined vendors tell the browser whether a SSL cert is as claimed and an SSL cert is only an encryption key.
This service doesn't care whether a browser-maker thinks its cert is real; they also provide a means to validate that their downloadable cert is as claimed - the cert is valid encryption between you and them, from anyone not you and them, despite whatever errors a browser throws up.
It's becoming apparent that describing Snowden's role at the NSA as a "regular/vanilla" analyst, or system administrator (media/government narrative) is an imprecise understatement.
There was a NYT story a couple of days ago which claimed that he was a NSA-trained 'hacker', he self-described as a 'infrastructure analyst', and a long time ago as a 'wizard.'
I know people who with just 'Analyst' as their titles have tech-PM'd MS Project implementations at large telco's, and others making stupid money in finance - it's also the title extraordinary spies are given in movies.
Much more plausible from a CI perspective is that he had fairly massive help on the inside, combined with known incompetence at designing and enforcing internal controls in Today's NSA (vs. the NSA of the 80s).
I imagine there were people with access and knowledge inside NSA who didn't want to risk becoming whistleblowers themselves, and pointed him in the right direction or outright gave him stuff.
Well to be honest, I don't think anyone needs an article to understand that an analyst/admin/whatever working at NSA, has knowledge of computer security. It's kinda mandatory for people in these positions, even if they work for a small company.
Does the fact that they're contractors and not employees absolve the contractee of some/any liability/culpability? Perhaps, further, even recursively as the contractors themselves wouldn't be able to discuss the contractee's business to the extent a direct employee could?
It does seem absurd if there isn't politico-judicial rationale.
I'm a PM in digital advertising and normally I wouldn't work with code - I largely build one-offs with vendors so issues/bugs and deliverables - Sifter is by far the best I've used. It does one thing and it does it really really well, has a negligible learning curve, and looks pretty - oh, and it's cheap.
Both Bitcoin and Monero have fair distribution; development of neither is done by for-profit LLCs financially supported by any pre-mine, miner tax, insider investment/ICO, or other fancy scheme paid out by either the underlying monetary system or taxed from the users and/or those securing the network, and while Blockstream Inc. does employ Bitcoin Core developers, Monero development is entirely decentralized without even a foundation to its name.