[plasticmachine]

Ummmm no.

1. It's controlled by a corporation with VC backing. This leads to a single point of failure, a ton of disincentives, and makes it easier for an attacker.

2. The cryptography is untested, unproven, and too new to be trusted. Since when did technically competent people advocate for cryptography like that??

3. The 20% tax puts a crazy amount of strain on the economic system, and is inordinately high.

4. The trusted setup is hard to get right, but they completely screwed it up (see my comment upthread).

5. Private transactions take 8gb+ of RAM and several minutes to compute on my laptop, how is that at all scalable or useful?

We should be immensely critical of new cryptography being rushed into production at the behest of investors, and we should not be promoting a centralized, corporate-controlled cryptocurrency.

[anon13]

Answers to your concerns below:

1. As a Bitcoin fork and descendant it is not controlled by anyone but by its network of users. Therefore there is no single point of failure. Development is done today by a corporation with VC backing which does not necessarily mean that will continue to be the case tomorrow. A community of developers and/or users can take the development leadership at any point in the future if it were so needed.

2. The cryptography is currently superior to any other. It has been tested and proven. It is in your hands to prove it wrong. Please do so.

3. The founders reward provides even more security and development resources during the first 4 years. Many people see it in fact as an advantage.

4. The trusted setup process whitepaper has been made public, plus the participants are also known. You can research and certify the process and contact the participants as you wish since it is all public. Please provide the exact point of failure in the process and where exactly has it failed. It seems like a highly secure setup to me.

5. The RAM and time required for private transactions can be done with no problem at all by most users with laptops as of today. Even so, there is development going on by the Zcash team to improve the performance and reduce the ram and time required.

In the spirit of Bitcoin, Zcash is decentralized and built for privacy loving users.

[plasticmachine]

1. Given that not even Zooko understands zk-SNARKs, the ZCash name is trademarked, and they've shut down their Reddit and IRC channels, there is no chance of a community of competent developers that understand the technology springing up. Also I wouldn't be proud of forking Bitcoin, especially when the changes that have been made are so substantial that they can't keep in sync with upstream.

2. No, it's not in my hands to do so. The onus is on ZCash to demonstrate this the way any other cryptography is proven: peer review, and time. ZeroCash has little of either.

3. Anyone that sees it as an advantage has no clue about disincentives or game theoretic attacks.

4. The exact point of failure is that they all booted off the same ISO that was provided by one person. Additionally, when an observer at one of the stations had their phone compromised they didn't shut the ceremony down and restart, they just continued. Also, the participants are just Zooko's buddies - who's to say they aren't conspiring together, and merely compromising the procedure for anyone who isn't part of that (e.g. Peter Todd)?

5. If privacy is not the default, and is immensely hard to use (due to the system requirements), it will hardly be used. The entropy of the private system will be restricted to a relative handful of users.

[anon13]

Answers below:

1. You will probably be surprised that there are a lot of highly qualified people in the community already.

2. If it is so unproven and so untrusted, please go ahead and break it. Words are cheap, mathematical proof and action is what counts.

3. Remains to be seen who is right on this one and we will see it during the next 4 years when the founders reward expires.

4. Conspiracy theories. Well, there will probably be more setups in the future. May be you want to propose a counter-whitepaper with a better way to do the cryptography setup and even be part of the ceremony itself?

5. Zcash uses mathematically proven privacy. Privacy loving users will use it. Research the tech and then may be you will be inclined and destined to use it too.