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by chrispeel 3343 days ago
Andrew Miller does not hide his ties to Zcash; I believe none of the other authors are associated with Zcash. I do not think he needs to recuse himself from academic study of competing currencies, just because he has loose ties to Zcash.

Also, the authors do not hide the fact that the vulnerability is not new. Most science is incremental; I haven't seen any evidence of 'academic dishonesty'.
2 comments
lethos3 3343 days ago
>The Zcash Foundation will now be endowed with 273,000 zcash, worth more than $13m at press time. As part of the network’s rules, 10% of the cryptocurrency’s mining rewards are automatically awarded to stakeholders.

>The four-person board of directors includes chair and president Andrew Miller, associate director of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3), and Matthew Green, assistant professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University.

Source: https://archive.fo/BoxUe

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plasticmachine 3342 days ago
> I haven't seen any evidence of 'academic dishonesty'.

How about one of the authors Tweeting out that 80% of the Monero transactions have been deanonymized (https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/852918816455655425), a claim that is neither true nor remotely correct?

This paper is akin to me publishing a paper noting how insecure Windows for Workgroups 3.11 is, providing advice for securing it, and then Tweeting out that that the paper found that "Windows is trivially insecure out the box". Sure, the paper would technically be correct, and my Tweet might even technically be correct, but it would be irrelevant since nobody uses Windows for Workgroups 3.11.

Nobody CAN use mixin-0 transactions in Monero, because they've been banned since a March 2016 hard fork that took over a year for them to plan and roll out. Nobody can be affected by down-chain use of those mixin-0 transactions because RingCT doesn't allow you to create ring sigs form them, which was added in the December 2016 hard fork.

It's no wonder, then, that the paper, and accompanying website, only go up to the end of 2016 - they have no valid data from the beginning of 2017 onwards, and have published the paper seemingly only as a 'hit piece'.

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