I think you are spending too much time being negative in this thread.
You are saying you’re not negative in the first sentence, but every sentence after that is negative.
Yeah! We are here to make sure that the world will have a reliable private internet money for when they need it the most.
Onward for freedom!
Vive la républizec!
Knowing the supply of coins seems like a very important fact to know. Many people want crypto because they don’t trust money printing. If zcash can’t guarantee holders of the supply of coins, they lose a major reason to buy zcash in the first place. It’s more important than privacy to many. Eg most investors will never buy a company who can issue an unlimited shares. The zcash coin supply needs to be auditable and verifiable.
Current solution is turnstile which doesn’t use t-addr. There could be better solutions to prove supply is not infinite without having raw data (actual ZEC number) publicly visible.
Why can’t the same snark concept be applied to recognizing a validated mined coin?
*zaddr 
not t-addr 
Given how that thread was going, I think the typo was in fact apt
Are we going to have official poll on future deprecation of t-addr?
What happens if ZF wants to deprecate t-addr & ECC doesn’t want?
The integrity of the monetary base is already a part of the proof that is made for a shielded output. And even when miners mine to shielded coinbase, ZIP 213: Shielded Coinbase specifies that:
Full Sapling note decryption MUST succeed using the all-zero outgoing viewing key. More precisely, all Sapling outputs in coinbase transactions MUST have valid note commitments when recovered using a sequence of 32 zero bytes as the outgoing viewing key.
This thread and this quote is the most important one I have read on this forum since its creation. I hate the dev tax, centralization of power, censorship (partially enforced with trademarks and control over forums such as this) but I love math and privacy. For those reasons I have followed zcash development (and all academic papers that predated it) from the beginning.
After reading this forum for years, I finally decided to create an account today in order to show my support for a renewed focus on privacy. If we can do the following I will volunteer 100s of hours of my time to help grow the zcash ecosystem and recruit others to do the same:
Some exchanges will drop zcash if we eliminate T address support. Net usage will likely improve in both the short and long run nevertheless, a significant portion (but likely not most in the short run) of the Monero community finally taking Zcash seriously for the first time.
The core competency of Zcash is privacy. Our only chance to fight the network effect of other projects is to emphasize that core competency. Halo 2 does offer better privacy guarantees than Monero and if T addresses go away Zcash will flourish. With t address support around for the long term, people that care the most about privacy will leave for Monero (perhaps eventually using ZK-STARKs as a sidechain).
After reading the trademark agreement, I would expect lots of drama and further community splintering. It’s a major centralization concern which could have been avoided. That is part of the reason why this thread is so important. Ive seen many Zcash believers feeling helpless over the years as ECC leadership has seemed to lost if focus on shielded development (and continued to support t address development).
The developer community would show Zcash a lot more support as soon as a plan for a shielded only network crystallizes. Hopefully Both the ZF and ECC (Bootstrap) will allow Zcash to thrive by not using the trademark to stand in the way of progress.
If you want to build a community, focus on your core competency. Zcash related entities are well funded and as a result Zcash has more support from major exchanges that Monero. Despite this developer, community and transaction growth has heavily favored Monero (see GitHub, forum usage and transaction stats). Money alone is not enough. Without a clear focus on privacy Zcash will not be able to convince people to utilize the very math that gives it value. Network effects matter. Stop wasting time on areas where Zcash does not have a competitive advantage and focus on privacy.
DO NOT MAKE ZCASH spend worse by adding T address support to shielded wallets or waste time on atomic swap or other developments that are not shielded only. Let’s keep things moving in the right direction.
Glad we have folks aligned on this!
Completely agree. We are here to provide privacy for those who need it (i.e. everyone).
My proposal for the first step that we need to take: create a formal ZF poll regarding t-address. The poll does not have to happen next week or next month but at least we need to start the preparation soon. Let’s have a healthy discussion regarding the poll, I personally would prefer if we take this poll as seriously as the ZOMG poll. Cheers!
why not? What’s the point of delaying the poll. IMO, there doesn’t need to be any poll if ZF & ECC are fine because they own trademark jointly. Alternate option is ZF community poll which is accepted by them.
I think rushing for the poll would unintentionally exclude the community at large. The leapfrogging taddr thread has shown that we still do not have a common understanding of what do we mean by “deprecating t-address”. At least there are still many who would interpret that as “deprecating t-address now!” which many would not agree. Also, it’s a holiday period for many people so we might as well wait until most people are back online.
I would not object if the ZF community poll were to occur next month though.
Oh yeah, even designing the poll would take a week or so. At this point, acknowledgement of having a poll is a good starting point. I realize it is holiday time, so not expecting to have this done in a week. In other words, I agree w/ u.
That is in fact what happens every time you do a Spend proof. If you don’t trust it, then what you’re complaining about is how the overall concept of Zerocash works.
Personally, I trust the current protocol for balance preservation more than I would trust Monero. I do realize that I’m biased and understand the protocol better than most.
I’m just trying to understand how it’s possible for there to be counterfeit coins. The articles implied there was a bug that could have let someone create coins. So general public is going to see that as a risk to owning zcash even if this bug was fixed. So my complaint is — it seems like the supply of coins can not be known for sure and if coins were hypothetically to have been created via the bug, the system could not distinguish between the two (counterfeit or validly mined). So can you say definitively that you know the supply of coins at any given point in time?
Zcash, Monero, Grin, Beam, Mobilecoin, and indeed all sane privacy coins hide the value of a payment and use cryptography to ensure you don’t take $20 you have and pay someone $200. If they didn’t, you could follow the flows of funds by matching values in and out. There’d be no privacy.
If the cryptography is broken (either mathematically, which is unlikely, or just there’s a bug ) then nothing stops you from inventing money. Adding more cryptography can’t stop that because … what if that has a bug, then … it’s turtles all the way down.
Problem is, you can also get inflation in Bitcoin where someone invents money. But in Bitcoin, the amounts are public so you could see that this happened. That wouldn’t do you much good anymore though, there isn’t a good way to recover from it. Rolling back the chain is infeasible and a smart attacker would cash out quickly hoping no one noticed. So I think hidden inflation is mainly FUD directed at Zcash.
Fundamentally, privacy coins have a risk of undetectable hidden inflation, You can’t make that go away and to me, thats most of what people mean when they talk about trusted setup. No one really believes all 80+ participants in each phase of the setup for zcash conspired to print money. It’s just not plausible, a single honest person stops that. And the hacking scenarios that back door the setup software are even less plausible and apply just as equally to the core zcash protocol software and to Bitcoins for that matter.
Note, this doesn’t mean we can’t minimize the risk. Do formal verification, use the same protocol for a long time and has gotten extensive vetting, remove trusted setup since setup is more code that can have bugs in it. But that won’t make the concern go away. We need a rhetorical answer, because there is no technical one.
Would you put CVE-2019-7167 in the “math” category or the “bug” category or does it straddle both categories?