from Hacker News

Keybase chooses Zcash

by aston on 11/17/16, 4:17 PM with 159 comments

  • by malgorithms on 11/17/16, 5:24 PM

    Author here. Seeing some of the discussion go down on Twitter, I feel maybe I should explain further the "white supremacist" example in the post. (one tweet at me: "So now you can hide the fact that white supremacists are sending you money? F!@#ing weird example.")

    When I shared a draft post with some friends, a lot of them had an ah-ha moment, so I was hoping for the same from others. I was trying to illustrate 2 privacy concerns around the graph Bitcoin exposes: (1) accidental associations and (2) exposing the people you transact with to each other.

    In the blog's hypothetical, you're not receiving money from some asshole because you're collecting Klan dues from him. Rather, you performed some public transaction with a stranger. For example, maybe you sold him some tickets. An external observer of the graph who knows he's a dangerous character may start applying high odds that you, too, are a dangerous character, since they don't know why he sent you money. This would suck. And, second, this character who sent you money may also be learning things about you. Since you sold tickets to a local show and mailed them to him, (1) he's likely to live near you, and (2) he knows your return address. You really don't want him seeing that you're sending money to causes he opposes. If so, he might show up at your door.

    The goal was to clear up this misconception that a private cryptocurrency is there to protect criminals. This is especially important if you'd like to post a static address on a profile.

  • by pero on 11/17/16, 9:58 PM

    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?

  • by CiPHPerCoder on 11/17/16, 4:35 PM

    I like Zcash. I think it's a good solution to a problem that Bitcoin did not solve, and creates a cryptocurrency more in line with the vision spelled out in A Cyperpunk's Manifesto than the previous attempts.

    (Yes, I've looked at the other attempts to build a private alternative to Bitcoin, including Monero: https://github.com/monero-project/monero/issues/1271)

  • by computerwizard on 11/17/16, 5:19 PM

    I recommend supporting Zclassic also ( http://Zclassic.org ) It's the same exact code as Zcash except there is no 20% "genius" tax for 4 years. It's the fair choice and even has the blessing of Zcash developer Zooko.
  • by gtlondon on 11/18/16, 12:21 AM

    Wouldn't it make more sense to use Monero instead of ZCash?

    Privacy is compulsory with Monero and also the entire platform is decentralised.

    The privacy features in Zcash are optional & very slow / difficult to use -- most users will simply make non-private transactions. Also Zcash requires trust of the founders (Any "private" coin that requires trust of a third party is a fail in my mind).

  • by choffman on 11/17/16, 6:27 PM

    I think Keybase is making a mistake in choosing Zcash over Monero - especially so soon after Zcash's launch. But that's okay - they'll come around soon enough. Zcash has been fantastic advertising for Monero.
  • by Panino on 11/17/16, 5:57 PM

    The biggest criticism of Zcash is the Founder's Reward. Some people say it's greedy, that they should have given away their work for free. I disagree. I think it's great that they will get paid for their work, and it also gives me confidence for the future of the coin. They have an incentive to make Zcash a long-term success. Getting paid for work done should be the default, of course. I could understand that if a billionaire ran a lemonade stand for an afternoon and steadfastly demanded payment with no free handouts, people would criticize that. But it should be expected that normal people get paid for doing real work.
  • by kneel on 11/17/16, 5:10 PM

    https://z.cash/blog/funding.html

    ctrl-f 'founders reward'

  • by Uptrenda on 11/18/16, 4:22 AM

    Completely unrelated to the article but boy do I like the design for Keybase. The blog is beautiful and minimal with no crap popping up on your screen asking for your email (every modern blog now seems to do this.) The colors work perfectly too. In fact, that combination of white, blue, black, and gray is very similar to what Bitcoinica originally used for their popular Bitcoin margin trading platform back in the day (and I like it as much now as I did back then - contrasts so well on every screen type.)

    The home page also follows a similar pattern: just beautiful, uncluttered, no bullshit design, that gets straight to the point. Why can't more websites do this? A+++ would browse again.

  • by EvilMonkeyMat on 11/18/16, 2:11 AM

    I have read almost all comments, and it seems like nobody has pointed out that the supposedly anonymous transactions (using z addresses) are still not working. All mining pools are warning about it. For example:

    http://zcash.flypool.org

    If anonymity is so important for people, there are already excellent solutions, Monero being one of the best, if not the best, with a strong and serious dev team.

    Disclaimer: I am not a Monero dev and I own a huge total of 0.6 XMR. This is only my opinion as a software dev.

  • by yownie on 11/18/16, 3:23 AM

    Doesn't anyone else find this post funny for talking about discovery of social graphs while the main product keybase.io offers does exactly this? I mean the entire service acts an a nice centralized graph linking users nyms across various services. Irony much?
  • by mtgx on 11/17/16, 4:49 PM

    Since Zcash uses the same codebase of Bitcoin, does that mean it would be possible to later integrate it back into Bitcoin, and just transition Zcash T-addresses to regular Bitcoin addresses, and then add the Z-addresses on top of the Bitcoin addresses ecosystem?

    I also wonder about how much of a risk to its own ecosystem Zcash being a private company represents. Was that really better than making it a non-profit? And won't this make it easier for law enforcement to go after Zcash as the sole culpable entity for "money laundering" and other such charges?

  • by speps on 11/17/16, 4:55 PM

    > HN users: those PM'ing me for an invitation.... in the FAQ there is a temp code to skip the queue. We'll turn that code off in a day or two.

    > use the invitation code "zcash" during signup

  • by anondon on 11/17/16, 5:44 PM

    Is there any way to mimic Zcash's z-addresses in Bitcoin?

    I like the ideas behind Zcash and it solves important privacy issues, but I don't like the idea of a for profit company being the heavyweight behind Zcash.

    From what I gather, Bitcoin is more of a community effort than most other altcoins, which inspires trust.

    I looked up Zcash's price chart, it fell from ~$1300 at launch to ~$90 now. Ouch.

  • by jszymborski on 11/17/16, 9:03 PM

    Slightly OT, but I realllyy wish Keybase would prioritise email validation so that it could fulfill the much needed role of general PGP key server, with the added "sum of your social identities" assurance.
  • by doozler on 11/18/16, 1:33 PM

    Is it too late to get started with Zcash? If not would you recommend buying it or trying to mine it? Last question, would AWS be a good resource to mine it?
  • by alexmingoia on 11/18/16, 8:16 PM

    Why not Monero? Why not Ethereum? The reasons stated aren't very consistent.
  • by rgbrgb on 11/17/16, 5:16 PM

    How do you purchase zcash with USD?
  • by dstaten on 11/17/16, 8:26 PM

    "The sex toy shop knows you gave to UNICEF so that feels good."
  • by brilliantcode on 11/17/16, 5:11 PM

    Consider that after by end of this month there will be 200,000 ZEC released following every month with 20% going to the founder's coffers after 4 years.

    Extreme inflation will continue sending prices crashing. Recall early this month prices were hovering around 2 Ferrari 458 and now it's tanked to under a 100 dollars.

    If we were to assume that in 48 months X 200,000 ZEC = ~100,000,000 ZEC with 20,000,000 ZEC belonging to the Founders.

    edit: why the downvotes? I'm just reporting the facts: https://twitter.com/TommyEconomics/status/793435785097646081...

  • by xiphias on 11/17/16, 4:46 PM

    I'm not that much into zcash, but this is cool:

    https://petertodd.org/2016/cypherpunk-desert-bus-zcash-trust...

  • by alvarosm on 11/17/16, 5:03 PM

    You need a ton of space and/or processing power for the zero-knowledge transactions. The anonymity isn't free!

    In practice Zcash/zcoin (different tradeoffs) are of no use to you unless you are willing to go the extra mile to hide something (criminal activities and such). There's no point in paying for the extra effort for normal transactions.

  • by nickik on 11/17/16, 6:30 PM

    PM me if you are interested in invites, I have a bunch.
  • by prashnts on 11/17/16, 5:41 PM

    I have ~15 invites left, in case someone needs it they can ping me at ps+hn <at> noop <dot> pw. :)
  • by Walkman on 11/17/16, 5:15 PM

  • by atweiden on 11/17/16, 6:41 PM

    The "zaddress" is already implemented in Bitcoin in the form of a stealth address, pioneered by libbitcoin [1].

    This news spurred me to delete my Keybase account. I regret ever giving a corporation that much control over my personal privacy.

    [1] https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-explorer/wiki/Steal...