3rd cycle enjoyerr | {encrypt your bitcoin}
Joined April 2023
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Zefi 🛡️ retweeted
Interesting fact: as of today, this is powered by the most efficient and practical PIR scheme.
Under the hood, there is a ciphertext compression mechanism called packing.
A paper came out a month ago that optimized the packing throughput by 5x compared to the prior state of the art. It’s called ReInsPIRe.
The buffer introduced by the speed up has allowed us to reduce parameters controlling decryption correctness. The security parameters stay the same.
With more room for noise, we applied a number of tricks such as rounding encryption at the client/server boundaries, which reduced total bandwidth.
There are also GPUs involved for the matrix-vector multiplication of the database by the client query.
The results are sub 200KB total per-query bandwidth and sub 50ms server time on a 1.88 GB database.
The wallet PIR databases are sharded into chunks of under 500 MB. So, in production, the server time and bandwidth are even smaller.
Zefi 🛡️ retweeted
Zcash just retroactively self-funded $1.5m to the researcher who found and disclosed the Orchard bug via a permissionless coinholder vote administered by a Zcash non-profit. You can’t build these type of deep governance, institutional, and cultural systems overnight.
Zcash Coinholder Directed Retroactive Grants Program results are in!
forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/q…
Zefi 🛡️ retweeted
Tachyon grafts a Zcash wallet's state machine over a tree of recursive SNARKs.
The most important artifacts of that process are accumulators, and we've specifically designed ours for transaction aggregation and non-membership proofs:
tachyon.z.cash/blog/building…
Zefi 🛡️ retweeted
«.. я считаю, что Интернет станет одной из главных сил, способствующих уменьшению роли государства. Единственное, чего пока не хватает, но что скоро будет разработано, – это надежные электронные деньги, способ, с помощью которого в интернете можно переводить средства от А к Б, при этом А не знает Б, а Б не знает А. Точно так же, как я могу взять 20-долларовую купюру и передать её вам, при этом не останется никаких записей о том, откуда она взялась, а вы можете получить её, не зная, кто я такой. Подобные вещи будут развиваться в Интернете, и это сделает его использование для людей еще проще..»
Zefi 🛡️ retweeted
Bitcoin is the #1 source of cross-chain inflows into Zcash right now.
zcash:native at new ATHs. This is just the start.
Come home. Stay private.
Zefi 🛡️ retweeted
imagine you move funds off ledger after they leak 270k customer addresses
then you move to coldcard, and a seed generation bug drains $130m from 5,200 wallets
then you try trezor, and their support portal leaks 66k users
so you give up on self custody and put it on coinbase, where someone bribes the support staff to get your financial info
fine. you cash out. move it all to revolut like a normal person
you survived it all
today revolut hands your passport and full transaction history to someone pretending to be a government agency
maybe its better to be broke
Zefi 🛡️ retweeted
Thanks to @mert and a few others, I have no Bitcoin anymore.
I got into Bitcoin in 2012, buying my first ever from Bitinstant for around $15 each. I learned about Bitcoin thru some article about The Silk Road. Never used the site, never into drugs, but always anti-authoritarian, so the idea that there was magic internet money that no government could stop was fascinating.
In 2013-2014, I started going to Bitcoin meetups in Portland (PDXBTC), we'd chat Bitcoin and other coins too, if anybody wanted to buy some BTC, there were usually others willing to do a local swap. Some people sold things for BTC, small artisanal knick-knacks or sourdough bread.
We didn't have a term for "Bitcoin maximalists" back then. But the idea that Bitcoin could be the only one, there can be no other cryptocurrency token which has any value to the world... would have sounded ridiculous to any of us.
I learned about other coins, we called "altcoins" (every coin but Bitcoin). Litecoin was a 4x faster Bitcoin, with 4x higher max supply. I thought that was great, because waiting for confirmations for p2p transactions was so slow. Then I discovered Darkcoin -- like Litecoin, but with extra features. I fell in love w/this one, it became Dash, and I was a core dev there for a few years.
So I've been a Bitcoiner since long before most BTC maxis or crypto "OGs", but I can also think rationally about the obvious facts.
- BTC is transparent
- Lightning is confusing, hard to use, fails a lot, ... and not Bitcoin
- Due to the transparent nature, there's a constant quantum threat, a clock ticking down for BTC and all other transparent and obfuscated chains
- Bitcoin is not fungible. Addresses can be censored and added to OFAC lists: github.com/0xB10C/ofac-sanct…. If you follow it out to its logical conclusion, eventually all Bitcoin will be tainted. Even today, a malicious actor with santioned BTC can dust any target addresses, and those become tainted.
But probably the most egregious:
- Bitcoin is ossified. Good luck trying to change any part of it. A sisyphean task.
Wealth seizures, corrupt governments (oxymoron), every CEX requiring KYC. And now with AI to map every transaction. This isn't theory anymore. This is actually happening, and every tax office of every government in the world is hungry to get its hands on this technology.
Meanwhile, there is one cryptocurrency which addresses all of Bitcoin's technical problems, by and large does not have toxic maxis, has a 10-year distribution, with some of the best cryptographers and cryptocurrency software engineers on the planet working on it. With post-quantum and 50k TPS scaling roadmaps.
I still believe other tokens and networks have value, but in my mind, Zcash will take the crown from Bitcoin as the best SoV. There is no advantage to holding BTC over zcash:native .
I don't have any more Bitcoin, because I lost my hardware wallet in a boating accident. But if I did have any, I would have migrated it all to the Zcash Ironwood shielded pool.
Zefi 🛡️ retweeted
um, Zooko, the founder of Zcash, was around since Bitcoin first came out. Satoshi literally quoted him.
For context: Zooko isn't some newcomer trying to re-run the Bitcoin playbook. He was a cypherpunk working on Digicash with David Chaum in the 90s — digital cash before Bitcoin even existed. Satoshi quoted him in the BitDNS discussion back in 2010 (the "Zooko's triangle" problem on decentralized naming), because Zooko was already a recognized authority on this stuff.
And look at the team he built Zcash with: Eli Ben-Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa, Eran Tromer, Madars Virza — the actual academic cryptographers who wrote the Zerocash paper — plus engineers like Sean Bowe (who later invented Halo) and Daira Hopwood. This is probably the most credentialed cryptography team in all of crypto.
Call it a cabal if you want, but these are the people who were doing privacy-preserving digital cash while most of us were still figuring out what a blockchain was.
Zefi 🛡️ retweeted
ZEC going from $0 to $17bn in less than a decade is important, because Zcash is important for society. A civilization requires three coordination primitives to survive and prosper: communication, computation, and money. Zcash is money. Money for an infinite civilization.
ALT https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/zcash?chart=type%3Dmarket_cap%26mode%3Dline%26timeframe%3Dmax
Zefi 🛡️ retweeted
"You worry about the price of Zcash. But you are looking at the wrong thing. Tell me, what would Bitcoin be worth if it actually did what it was made to do? Think about that. When you do, you will find you already know the answer."
Zefi 🛡️ retweeted
People do not appreciate what is happening with Zcash man.
This team is truly fulfilling the dream of digital cash. They have not compromised on any of the essential features of cash such as anonymity, and like a miracle, those design choices opened the door to scaling that Bitcoin could only dream of.
Really feels like we are watching history.
Introducing Zakura Common.
We just shipped 14x faster proving, 21x faster hashing, 1.5x faster trial decryption, and 4-8x faster verification.
New releases of Zakura and wallets that use Zakura Common (such as @vizorwallet) will benefit immediately.
zakura.com/announcements/zak…
Zefi 🛡️ retweeted
Zcash is the easiest sale I've ever done.
I'm not actively trying to get people to buy it. But when people ask what I am investing in, I tell them it's like Bitcoin but private.
They say Bitcoin isn't private? I had no idea!
I then tell them all the work arounds that I went thru as a Bitcoiner to spend Bitcoin.
Buying something like a car or a coffee is very risky with Bitcoin L1. Someone can see your balance and attack you.
I often washed my coins through an exchange or a custodian.
For a long while I ran my own Bitcoin node and lightning node. I felt safe paying with lightning until I realized my channel partner could kick me off the network if they wanted and steal my coins.
To fix that I'd need another service called a watchtower!
Also a ton of my lighting payments failed. I used to frequent PubKey in NYC and eventually started paying in cash (like most customers) because lightning was so unreliable.
I also tried different mixer wallets a few times. But it took hours or days and was very expensive.
It was just service after service adding up to use Bitcoin self custodially and privately.
I will say: I don't really consider myself a huge "privacy" guy. But I definitely don't want someone to see my bank account balance or my email. That's above my line for sure.
When I was about 15 I started working with some cypherpunks in Costa Rica.
One of them told me over a DM that he forsaw a future where anyone could talk to anyone or send money to anyone in the world with no one watching.
That felt wild at the time. Turns out it's now -- just 20+ years later.
We have already seen the big positive impacts of free speech over the last decade with E2EE and uncensored social media.
We are about to see the impacts of free commerce. Zcash legalization and crystallization through the ETF is a major step forward for humanity.
I was late to Zcash. My average cost basis is probably a lot higher than yours.
But I'm glad I changed my mind about it and did a lot of my own research.
Zefi 🛡️ retweeted
"ZCash similar to bitcoin with capped supply and proof of work asset, but also layers in privacy. It is a privacy token," says Grayscale's Krista Lynch after the firm launched the first Zcash ETF bloom.bg/3UUQxiv
Zefi 🛡️ retweeted
$ZEC run has barely started. Double-edged thesis. Pro-open source tech savvy working class deflock movement idealists appreciate Zcash as a financial privacy tool against the state. At the same time, the American tech elite's neo-McCarthyist fear drives them to shield wealth.
