That doesn’t make a lot of practical sense and I think you know it. Should an inflation bug happen confidence on the whole network will suffer, doesn’t matter that the cap is 21 million.
The long-term (honestly, medium-term) is formal proofs of the circuit. There are a lot of new things on this space that should be able to provide us with safety guarantees. Also, I kinda expect everyone arriving to the conclusion of doing another turnstile in the next upgrade soon.
“either as an upgrade to the existing Orchard shielded pool or as a standalone shielded pool” … “by incorporating a turnstile”
@ebfull Sean, please consider using the turnstile approach for Tachyon, so that the troubled souls of the skeptics may find peace.
The question asked above in the thread regarding “how do we know there was no exploit” can’t be answered the way we’d like to, but here are some thoughts I have regarding the liklihood and how the present risk should be thought of.
Firstly, the plot above shows a continuous period where the growth of the pool has levelled off. The plateau has been ongoing for the past 5 months. This is reassuring that no exploit has happened. A rationale, even one acting subtly would not delay taking advantage of an exploit. Even if they are been deceptive it is well within a reasonable limits to be taking a bit off every day / week. That wasn’t happening. An exploiter has to be concerned that one day the exploit will be found by someone else too. A rationale exploiter has to balance their short term greed with deceptiveness to extract the maximum value they can. This has not been observed.
The second point Id make is, leaving your funds in orchard is akin to leaving your funds on an exchange; there is a counterparty risk. I remember before bitfinex got hacked discussing with my then boss (who is also a trader) estimating counterparty risk of 3% per year. The following week it blew up after 72mm worth of BTC got hacked. Estimating what the counterparty risk is can be difficult. In this case we have the possibility that an exploit has already occured (very low) with probability other soundness exploits exist AND they are found AND blackhats find them before whitehats (also low). I conclude that the most likely people to find the exploits are zcash devs, as is what happened here. So the counterparty risk ranges from 0% (no further exploits even exist) to X% (others exist, may not be findable even with agentic AI and if findable are found by blackhats first), where I percieve X to be a very low number.
My gut tells me there is no exploit, but this is a matter of principles.
So the only way to end the FUD, is telling every honest holder to get all their funds out of Orchard. Coindesk calls it plummeting. Has your thesis been invalidated now?
Why? Someone could’ve been scrapping off that plateau all this time, while we should’ve been at 50% shielded by now.
I suspect there are several really large deposits of 100,000 coins or more in Orchard. But they haven’t touched their coins. Ask yourself, what allows them to remain so calm?
I dunno, faith? Leeway? Not evidence, it would seem.
And, funnily enough, about 100,000 ZEC is roughly what was net unshielded over the past month.
I don’t know either. It’s either mass stupidity or mass confidence. The certainty that there was no practical way to exploit the vulnerability. That it was such a complex thing, requiring not just Zodl or a command line, but a specially built node and a special client and God knows what else, but it was pure theory until Taylor tried to do it. A malicious actor would have needed a brilliant mind to find and exploit it. What would have prevented him from making millions of coins by now? And why does he continue to store coins in Orchard now that everything has been discovered? If he understands this theory so well, he must have known for sure that he couldn’t be detected or stopped. None of this is proof, but it’s just common sense.
Just want to shout out everyone who stepped up to handle this. Your efforts aren’t wasted — if anything, this whole incident has actually strengthened my resolve in Zcash’s future more than any of the recent institutional news, honestly. There will always be detractors, and yeah, sometimes that voice is our own. But this is why the people doing the work matter. Zcash matters.
We can see the flow going into Orchard. Millions more ZEC were not moving in there like you’re suggesting. Movement in stalled. Movement out stalled.
