Re: [cryptography] the Zcash Open Source Miner Challenge (and about Zcash in general)

[lodewijk andré de la porte]

> On 7 Jul 2017, at 22:52, Jaromil  wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 04 Jul 2017, Lodewijk andré de la porte wrote:
> 
>> this is a good answer, in particular your declaration that you
>> "haven't bought or sold any ZEC". I believe you should give this
>> answer to those people considering themselves victims of a market
>> gambling operation you do not take part into.
>> 
>>   Victims to gambling? Do you hear yourself speak?
> 
> I have *written* it reporting the interpretation of circumstances by
> these people who are calling themselves victims of ZCash in public and
> then satisfied by the answer given by ZCash representatives here.
> 
> The reason why I'm debating this is that I find it very interesting
> what is happening around ICOs, both as a researcher and as a crypto
> investor.
> 
> What is the need to bring this debate to an ad-personam attack, if not
> the increase in testosterone production due to the current heat wave
> in .nl? but then please, do us a favor...
> 
> ciao

I don’t like your tone either, doesn’t mean I ignore your statements.

Is this some sort of high road in your worldview?

Is it witty to take an obvious figure of speech literally?

What satisfaction did you obtain?
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Re: [cryptography] the Zcash Open Source Miner Challenge (and about Zcash in general)

[Lodewijk andré de la porte]

>
> I'd agree that "forums" are a poor choice.
> They're magnets for masses of the clueless,
> which is fine for that purpose.


They are easy to use, rather than archaic and unappealing. Not sure what
kind of argument this is, anyway.


> And they're heavyweight, captive, and exploitable.
>

My computer is also heavyweight, so they're equally responsive.

They are typically captive by design, to allow commercial exploitation of
the attached community. You'll note the user agreement typically causes
every submission to be property of the forum's owner. These issues are just
not related to the format proper.

I do not see how it is more or less exploitable than e-mail. Certainly, the
interface is richer, and more is possible for both good and evil. That all
just depends.


> Lists can be archived, replicated, distributed,
> offlined, searched with any MUA, etc. +1.


Why would a MUA search a forum? Why is a forum less archivable, replicable,
or distributable/p2pifieable?


If anything this shows how much you have been remiss, not developing a
modern mode of interaction that complies with your demands. To stay with
Fax is certainly functional, and it will readily appeal to those accustomed
to that format, but to actively defend the superiority of the dated is
foolish.

You're probably right though. Current forum software is an ongoing
disappointment, where e-mail steps into a rich tradition of letter-writing.
I'd say e-mail lists suffer primarily indigestibility through lack of
overview, a lack of multimedia, a lack of interlinking, a lack of hope for
"better than just threading". Ultimately most time is spent parsing text -
so cutting away everything around it (as you seem to have done) is a great
way to optimise if you read everything anyway.


> pardon the dispersion, my question / objection is about the way ZCash
> responds to people that have lost money in financial gambling due to
> the hyped ICO price at ZCash entrance. So far I understand your
> response has been to treat a lawsuit for people using your (tm'ed)
> logo for instance with the @ZCashVictims account on Twitter.


So, there's this thing with risky investments... Hmm. Oh, I recall: you
carry your own risk.

ZCash*Victims*? Certainly, everyone that participated is him/herself a
perpetrator. Every investment an endorsement of this heightened value. One
thing to cry about spilled milk, another to call yourself @milkspillVictims.

note: an ICO has no promise of future value, participating on a market like
Coinbase and getting your stop-losses ran is almost an edge case (Coinbase
allowed overlarge capital influx, causing one of their features to behave
outside normative expectations) but still really your own fault (part of
the game with the rules as they are). I'd say exchanges going bankrupt for
mismanagement - that's a little over the line between "upset" and
"retribution".

that's arguable on more levels, yet from what I understand you don't
> have further control: you have adopted what seems a rather smart
> mining incentive curve on the first 34 days. This certainly does not
> means you have control on the market price, but you have well planned
> mining incentives (and market price is a collateral of it) and this
> plan is public.


As you said, this plan is public. Forks could do away with unfair
incentives, but don't.

this is a good answer, in particular your declaration that you
> "haven't bought or sold any ZEC". I believe you should give this
> answer to those people considering themselves victims of a market
> gambling operation you do not take part into.


Victims to gambling? Do you hear yourself speak?

If we're victims of anything it's the lies of capital - those ideals
enshrined within property that do not support our natures, nor our
realities. We have a collective maths engine, it makes it apparently
impossible to do certain maths without certain information, and bam, you
become a victim! A VICTIM! You /lose some part of yourself/ because you
actually identify with your property! They promised you riches beyond
reason, and all you got was what you bought!
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Re: [cryptography] the Zcash Open Source Miner Challenge (and about Zcash in general)

[Jaromil]

dear Zooko,

On Tue, 15 Nov 2016, Zooko Wilcox-OHearn wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 9, 2016 at 3:07 PM, Jaromil  wrote:
> >
> > ...but ZCash feels a bit scammy. Its pumped up entry on the market
> > burnt a lot of people's money... is it just their fault being stupid?
> …
> > Sincerely, I'm not trolling. Seeing there is some space for a civil
> > conversation, I'd be interested in reading answers from the Zcash ppl
> > themselves here, what they are going to make out this market hype
> > stun. I'm a big fan of all Z- things (ZFS, ZSh, Zorro) but
> > ZCash still.. meh. how about helping us understand?
> 
> I'm not quite sure what your question or objection is. Can you spell
> it out?

pardon the dispersion, my question / objection is about the way ZCash
responds to people that have lost money in financial gambling due to
the hyped ICO price at ZCash entrance. So far I understand your
response has been to treat a lawsuit for people using your (tm'ed)
logo for instance with the @ZCashVictims account on Twitter.

> I and the Zcash dev team have no control over the market price.

that's arguable on more levels, yet from what I understand you don't
have further control: you have adopted what seems a rather smart
mining incentive curve on the first 34 days. This certainly does not
means you have control on the market price, but you have well planned
mining incentives (and market price is a collateral of it) and this
plan is public.

> We don't operate an exchange, we haven't bought or sold any ZEC, we
> have never given anyone investment advice, and we've always striven
> in our public communications to be clear about the risks and
> limitations of the Zcash project.

this is a good answer, in particular your declaration that you
"haven't bought or sold any ZEC". I believe you should give this
answer to those people considering themselves victims of a market
gambling operation you do not take part into.

thanks for your clarifications,
best wishes


-- 
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Re: [cryptography] the Zcash Open Source Miner Challenge (and about Zcash in general)

[Zooko Wilcox-OHearn]

On Wed, Nov 9, 2016 at 3:07 PM, Jaromil  wrote:
>
> ...but ZCash feels a bit scammy. Its pumped up entry on the market
> burnt a lot of people's money... is it just their fault being stupid?
…
> Sincerely, I'm not trolling. Seeing there is some space for a civil
> conversation, I'd be interested in reading answers from the Zcash ppl
> themselves here, what they are going to make out this market hype
> stun. I'm a big fan of all Z- things (ZFS, ZSh, Zorro) but
> ZCash still.. meh. how about helping us understand?


I'm not quite sure what your question or objection is. Can you spell it out?

I and the Zcash dev team have no control over the market price. We
don't operate an exchange, we haven't bought or sold any ZEC, we have
never given anyone investment advice, and we've always striven in our
public communications to be clear about the risks and limitations of
the Zcash project.

Sincerely,

Zooko
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Re: [cryptography] the Zcash Open Source Miner Challenge (and about Zcash in general)

[Jaromil]

On Sat, 05 Nov 2016, David Mercer wrote:

> But a proper mailing list for core engineering work is indeed
> desirable.

I'd offer place on lists.dyne.org...

...but ZCash feels a bit scammy. Its pumped up entry on the market
burnt a lot of people's money... is it just their fault being stupid?

is there any answer to this https://twitter.com/ZcashVictims besides a
trademark lawsuit?

can we just ignore dodgy crypto market dynamics and go on shining up
our projects, even when the crypto market is at the core of the
developer's business model?

Sincerely, I'm not trolling. Seeing there is some space for a civil
conversation, I'd be interested in reading answers from the Zcash ppl
themselves here, what they are going to make out this market hype
stun. I'm a big fan of all Z- things (ZFS, ZSh, Zorro) but
ZCash still.. meh. how about helping us understand?


ciao


-- 
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"+.   CTO and co-founder  free/open source developers
  @)   ⚷ crypto κρυπτο крипто गुप्त् 加密 האנוסים المشفره
@@)  GnuPG: 6113D89C A825C5CE DD02C872 73B35DA5 4ACB7D10
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Re: [cryptography] the Zcash Open Source Miner Challenge (and about Zcash in general)

[David Mercer]

I just finished my port of Zcash to Mac OS X on Nov 3 (see:
https://github.com/radix42/zcash ) and agree that a mailing list
hosted by the Linux Foundation would be ideal. However I wouldn't
shutter the zcash forum: a user there contributed a patch to libsnark
to work around the lack of ::clock_gettime in Darwin/OS X that made
the rest of the port possible, and is where I connected with an
Ethereum Core developer who contributed a patch set that removed the
final few issues I was grappling with. But a proper mailing list for
core engineering work is indeed desirable.

-David Mercer
Tucson, AZ

On Wed, Nov 2, 2016 at 6:47 PM, grarpamp  wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 10, 2016 at 10:55 PM, Zooko Wilcox-OHearn
>  wrote:
>> open-source implementations
>
>> Jump in! The worst that can happen is that you get the fun and
>> education of implementing an interesting new proof-of-work algorithm.
>> :-)
>
> Zcash is Linux only. That's not good for diversity, adoption, code
> exposure, etc.
> Here one place people can jump in the (only known to date?) effort to
> fix that...
>
> # net-p2p/zcash: create initial port and package
> https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=213930
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Re: [cryptography] the Zcash Open Source Miner Challenge (and about Zcash in general)

[grarpamp]

On Mon, Oct 10, 2016 at 10:55 PM, Zooko Wilcox-OHearn
 wrote:
> open-source implementations

> Jump in! The worst that can happen is that you get the fun and
> education of implementing an interesting new proof-of-work algorithm.
> :-)

Zcash is Linux only. That's not good for diversity, adoption, code
exposure, etc.
Here one place people can jump in the (only known to date?) effort to
fix that...

# net-p2p/zcash: create initial port and package
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=213930
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Re: [cryptography] the Zcash Open Source Miner Challenge (and about Zcash in general)

[grarpamp]

I'd agree that "forums" are a poor choice.
They're magnets for masses of the clueless,
which is fine for that purpose. And they're
heavyweight, captive, and exploitable.
Lists can be archived, replicated, distributed,
offlined, searched with any MUA, etc. +1.

(A bidirectional gateway to list, with [un]subscribe,
and only sending message content not all the
damn forum bling, and proper threading of headers,
might be acceptable. However I don't know of any
forum that has that capability and care for email.)
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Re: [cryptography] the Zcash Open Source Miner Challenge (and about Zcash in general)

[Peter Todd]

On Tue, Oct 11, 2016 at 03:34:33PM -, sten...@nymphet.paranoici.org wrote:
> Zooko Wilcox-OHearn  writes:
> 
> > https://z.cash ... There's a lot going on there. ... Jump in!
> 
> I want to jump in but I can't because z.cash has no mailing list.  A
> mailing list is needed because it allows participation by individuals
> for whom any low-latency Internet access, such as posting to the web,
> would allow them to be located and brought under political
> subjugation.  Their Internet utterances can only be by way of
> anonymizing remailers having long random latency and traffic mixing.

Additionally, mailing lists have robust infrastructure available for archiving
them by third-parties. This is important both to ensure that the historical
development record remains available, and to ensure that record is secure from
tampering.

Note how the Bitcoin Core project moved its mailing lists to the Linux
Foundation in part to ensure that discussion was happening on a forum whose
operators were unrelated to Bitcoin Core itself. Similarly day-to-day IRC
development chat happens on Freenode, again run by people distinct from Bitcoin
Core itself. I personally decided to stop posting new technical content on
bitcointalk and instead post it on the Bitcoin development mailing list years
ago for precisely these reasons.

I would strongly suggest that https://forum.z.cash/ be closed and replaced by a
mailing list. Warren Togami could help get it hosted by the Linux Foundation as
well if the Zcash project is interested in that hosting option.

-- 
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Re: [cryptography] the Zcash Open Source Miner Challenge (and about Zcash in general)

[stenski]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Zooko Wilcox-OHearn  writes:

> https://z.cash ... There's a lot going on there. ... Jump in!

I want to jump in but I can't because z.cash has no mailing list.  A
mailing list is needed because it allows participation by individuals
for whom any low-latency Internet access, such as posting to the web,
would allow them to be located and brought under political
subjugation.  Their Internet utterances can only be by way of
anonymizing remailers having long random latency and traffic mixing.

I am a reputable nym [1].  But, true to the privacy principles
motivating zcash, I choose to remain untraceable.

An email gateway to https://forum.z.cash/ would make a good mailing
list, and seems to be supported by its underlying platform [2], but
subscription is only open to those already registered on the web
forum.  Registering to the web forum is only by web access which has
low latency and is therefore traceable even if through Tor (by
end-point traffic correlation).

Help!

 ---

[1] See for example Pull Request #1052 [3], derived from my
contribution on the zcash-dev mailing list [4] and kindly submitted by
Taylor Hornby.

[2] http://www.discourse.org/about/
   Mailing List Support
   Opt into a special mode where all messages are sent to you via
   email, exactly like a mailing list. Start new topics via email

[3] https://github.com/zcash/zcash/pull/1052

[4] https://lists.zca.sh/pipermail/zcash-dev/2016-June/89.html

- -- 
 -- Igor Stenski

OpenPGP Public Key:
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Re: [cryptography] the Zcash Open Source Miner Challenge (and about Zcash in general)

[Russell Leidich]

Hi Zooko, I have a simple challenge for you. But first of all, let me state
that I think Zcash is the most promising of all cryptocurrencies from a
security standpoint. (Yeah, I know. Them's fightin' words. It's just my
personal opinion and plenty of people will disagree.) I may change my mind
at some point, but so far so good.

Now, considering that Zcash may very well become the world's first
"seriously scalable" cryptocurrency, meticulousness is in order. Hence the
following challenge: post a 16-bit Equihash minimodel (2^16 16-bit hashes,
or 128KiB) somewhere publicly accessible, and allow everyone to inspect its
statistical properties. (If 20 bits or 27 bits or whatever is more
convenient, so be it.) It seems to me that "collision rootishness" has
already been confirmed, which is promising, but so much more can be
examined.

To be clear, "minimodel" in this sense means a consistently scaled model of
Equihash. So for example you would generate all 2^16 hashes of 16-bit
values, instead of all 2^N hashes of all N-bit values of the real hash. If
the minimodel looks very unlike true randomness, then we have a problem. If
not, then the test passes and we have nothing further to say by way of
(in)security. Granted, the real hash and the minimodel are not equivalent,
but this is a practical compromise in light of limited computer power.

Obviously I'm biased because I wrote Dyspoissometer, but there are plenty
of other statistical tests that the general public can and should run on
the minimodel in order to enhance the credibility of Equihash.

Russell Leidich


On Tue, Oct 11, 2016 at 2:55 AM, Zooko Wilcox-OHearn <
zo...@leastauthority.com> wrote:

> Hi folks!
>
> I've been quiet on this list for a while now. I've been hard at work
> on creating a Bitcoin-like cryptocurrency with zero-knowledge-based
> crypto:
>
> https://z.cash
>
> This is the most sophisticated crypto that I've ever seen someone
> attempt to deploy at scale to the Internet. (By all means feel free to
> reply and teach me about counter-examples to that generalization.)
>
> There's a lot going on there. To jump into the technical side, I'd
> suggest the Zcash protocol spec:
> https://github.com/zcash/zips/blob/master/protocol/protocol.pdf . For
> an introduction to the bigger picture, probably our blog
> (https://z.cash/blog/) and FAQ (https://z.cash/support/faq.html).
>
> Okay the reason I'm writing today is to let you know about the Zcash
> Open Source Miner Challenge:
>
> https://zcashminers.org/
>
> The Zcash company has donated $30,000 for prize money to reward better
> open-source implementations of Equihash by Biryukov & Khovratovich:
>
> https://www.internetsociety.org/sites/default/files/blogs-
> media/equihash-asymmetric-proof-of-work-based-
> generalized-birthday-problem.pdf
>
> Jump in! The worst that can happen is that you get the fun and
> education of implementing an interesting new proof-of-work algorithm.
> :-)
>
> Regards,
>
> Zooko
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