Y’all, the number one way to overcome fear is facts. Thanks @Dodger for the transparency. Believe it or not, I think all these issues can be resolved with a fact-based discussion.
I would urge everyone to tone down the rhetoric (less “ludicrous”, “crazy”). Even if we think someone is acting ridiculous, it won’t do any favors to this discussion to include such adjectives in our responses. Of course this is difficult when when one is the butt of serious allegations. But these allegations could be re-hashed ad infinitum by both sides. Instead, let’s just go through the issues one by one and try to reach the best resolution possible. (It seems some resolution is already occurring.)
Also, I think it helpful to look at history to understand that arguments like this are nothing new. Wars have been fought over less. Nobody’s perfect; people are trying their best; people are super passionate about Zcash; people have a lot going on in their personal lives. It’s gonna be ok.
I would like to point out that ZF never to my knowledge linked the issue about licensing of the orchard crate with approval of NU5, and there was no reason to believe that they would do so.
@Shawn@tokidoki or any of the other mods: Is it possible to sticky Dodger’s response as the first response in the thread. It would be great if people didn’t have to scroll down to see a response to some serious accusations. (And I would prefer this thread stays up, precisely so the accusations have a clear and factual response.)
(edit: i flagged this message so the moderators can find it)
A small message for @Dodger@zooko@Matthewdgreen@tromer@secparam & other critical members of Zcash: I believe y’all have respect & love for each other, & are the highest integrity people that I know in crypto. Hope you get some face time with each other, rebuild the broken bridges, not just for you, for Zcash, because we are just getting started & we need your help in bringing economic freedom for everyone.
The purpose of putting the new Zcash shielded money (codenamed “Zcash Orchard”) under the Bootstrap Open Source Licence is to prevent some of the value-extraction that can happen from other coins or other businesses using Zcash’s innovations without giving anything back to the ZEC holders who funded it.
“Zcash Orchard” is not under BOSL. The orchard Rust crate, which contains part of the implementation of Orchard, is under BOSL. The rest, making up a very substantial part, of the implementation of Orchard for zcashd is in the zcashd C++ code, halo2, halo_gadgets, incrementalmerkletree, pasta_curves, and librustzcash including its components f4jumble, zcash_address, and zcash_note_encryption, all of which are licensed as either MIT or MIT/Apache 2.0. I understand that ZF also reimplemented some of this code for Zebra.
Zooko has acknowledged this point privately but has not yet corrected the post, which is why I felt it necessary to post this comment.
Zebra implements everything besides the circuit to validate Orchard transactions in our zebra repo (we depend on the orchard crate’s circuit built on top of halo2) . We also directly depend on incrementalmerkletree as it is better/more efficient than my original naïve tree implementation, the pasta_curves, etc.
Anyone can implement the Zcash Orchard shielded protocol as laid out in the Zcash Protocol Specification and the associated ZIPs [1, 2], it’s just a lot, and as we know building arithmetic circuits is complex and difficult even independent of doing so on a cutting-edge proving system like Halo2.
It’s worth noting that it would be nearly impossible to build a replica of the Orchard circuit from the specifications alone. It’s not specified to that level of detail and the degrees of freedom in its design are enormous. However, I think it would be feasible to specify the Orchard circuit in sufficient enough detail that it can be implemented with access only to MIT-licensed code (halo2_gadgets), though it would still be a huge project to do so.
Zebra implements everything besides the circuit to validate Orchard transactions in our