Is ZCoin XZC Mining Legal In The Us

The Zerocoin logo Demographics Zerocoin is a proposed by professor and graduate students Ian Miers and Christina Garman as an extension to the that would add true cryptographic to transactions. Zerocoin was first implemented into a fully functional cryptocurrency released to the public by Poramin Insom, as the Zcoin. Zerocoin provides anonymity by the introduction of a separate known as zerocoin that is stored in the bitcoin blockchain. Though originally proposed for use with the bitcoin network, zerocoin could be integrated into any. Contents • • • • • • • • • • • • • Rationale [ ] Bitcoin transactions are all stored, by design, in a public ledger (the ) that is accessible to everyone.

These transactions provide privacy through, in that while each transaction is associated with the public address of the sender and receiver, the names of the owners of these addresses are at no time made known to the bitcoin network. To increase privacy, each person could create as many public addresses as they like, making it difficult to link transactions to the same person. If additional privacy were required, it is possible to bitcoin through a trusted third party, where the input coins are mixed in a large pool and output to a new address. Regardless of the best precautions, by data mining of the blockchain, it becomes possible in certain cases to link a set of public addresses to a specific (unnamed) individual. For example, this could be done by the analysis of spending habits, or by having the change of a transaction from one public address being sent to another. Furthermore, by utilizing information external to the blockchain, such as public bitcoin addresses posted on a web site, or the postal address used with a bitcoin purchase, the possibility exists that every single bitcoin transaction of a given person could be determined.

Zerocoins are purchased with bitcoin in fixed denominations by a zerocoin mint transaction. Later, these zerocoins can be redeemed for bitcoin to a different bitcoin address by a zerocoin spend transaction. Through the use of and with, it is not possible to link the bitcoin address that was used to mint the original zerocoin to the bitcoin address used to redeem the zerocoin. Zerocoin protocol [ ] The zerocoin extension to bitcoin would have functioned like a money laundering pool, temporarily pooling bitcoins together in exchange for a temporary currency called zerocoins. While the laundering pool is an established concept already utilized by several currency laundering services, zerocoin would have implemented this at the protocol level, eliminating any reliance on trusted third parties.

It anonymizes the exchanges to and from the pool using cryptographic principles, and as a proposed extension to the bitcoin protocol, it would have recorded the transactions within bitcoin's existing blockchain. The anonymity afforded by zerocoin is the result of cryptographic operations involved with separate zerocoin mint and spend transactions. To mint a zerocoin, a person generates a random serial number S, and encrypts (that is ) this into a coin C by use of second random number r. In practice, C is a. The coin C is added to a cryptographic accumulator by miners, and at the same time, the amount of bitcoin equal in value to the denomination of the zerocoin is added to a zerocoin escrow pool. To redeem the zerocoin into bitcoin (preferably to a new public address) the owner of the coin needs to prove two things by way of a.

In zcoin.conf, enter in the details below but change the password. Remember if your IP and password is known anyone can access your. Mar 16, 2017 - MTP is an amazing new mining algorithm that is high performance, high security and promotes egalitarian computing. Zcoin intends to be the first to implement this and we forsee that MTP will offer good future proofing. Being a privacy centric coin, it is even more important that mining power is decentralized.

(A zero-knowledge proof is a method by which one party can prove to another that a given statement is true, without conveying any additional information apart from the fact that the statement is indeed true.) The first is that they know a coin C that belongs to the set of all other minted zerocoins ( C1, C2. Cn), without revealing which coin it is. In practice, this is done quickly by use of a one-way that does not reveal the members of the set. The second is that the person knows a number r, that along with the serial number S corresponds to a zerocoin.

The proof and serial number S are posted as a zerocoin spend transaction, where miners verify the proof and that the serial number S has not been spent previously. After verification, the transaction is posted to the blockchain, and the amount of bitcoin equal to the zerocoin denomination is transferred from the zerocoin escrow pool. Anonymity in the transaction is assured because the minted coin C is not linked to the serial number S used to redeem the coin. The used for the zero-knowledge proof would have to be re-computed every time a spend transaction is verified, and although this can be done incrementally if the accumulator checkpoint is carried on from earlier blocks to the new block, it would still add some overhead to the verification-process. Additionally, both the accumulator checkpoint and all the zerocoin serial numbers would have to be added to every bitcoin block, thus increasing the size (although not substantially).

Since the verification process for zerocoins is much more computationally heavy than for bitcoins, the verification time for a block would increase up to 6 times depending on the ratio between bitcoins and zerocoins. Preliminary tests done by the developers show that even with the increased verification time and blocks twice the size of current bitcoin blocks, the verification time for an entire block would not exceed five minutes, and since a new bitcoin block is currently created every ten minutes on average, the increased verification time should not be a problem. Zcoin (XZC) [ ]. • Unofficial.

Zoin is a community governed digital currency that has implemented the Zerocoin Protocol. Zoin was created in November 2016 from a early fork of Zcoin. Private Instant Verified Transaction (PIVX) [ ] PIVX is the first cryptocurrency that has implemented the Zerocoin protocol. Zerocoin went live on PIVX on October 16th, 2017. The Zerocoin PIVX tokens are known as zPiv.

SmartCash (SMART) [ ] SmartCash (SMART) is a Keccak SHA-3 algorithm, mineable coin that uses Zero-knowledge proofs from the zerocoin extension. How To Build A Siacoin SC Mining Rig. ZeroVert (ZER) [ ] ZeroVert (ZER) is a Scrypt-N algorithm coin, merge-mineable on the VTC chain with a total circulation of 8.4 million ZER. Zerocash protocol [ ]. The of this section is.

Relevant discussion may be found on the. Please do not remove this message until. (April 2017) () The improved version of the protocol 'that reduces proof sizes by 98% and allows for direct anonymous payments that hide payment amount' was announced on 16 November 2013. The developers presented their technical paper at the 2014 IEEE Security & Privacy Symposium along with launching the site. The new protocol was called Zerocash. It is now not an extension to the bitcoin, but rather an independent technology with the same basic principles as blockchain and transactions, which was planned to implement in alt-coin. Zerocash utilizes succinct non-interactive zero-knowledge arguments of knowledge (also known as ), a special kind of method for proving the integrity of computations.

Such proofs are less than 300 bytes long and can be verified in only a few milliseconds. However, zk-SNARKs require a large initial database for verifying (about 1.2 GB) and long time for producing a proof (spending the coin): 87 seconds to 178 seconds. Zcash (ZEC) [ ] Between 5 October 2015 and 11 January 2016, the Zerocash website started noting that 'The Zerocash protocol is being developed into a full-fledged digital currency,.' Reception [ ] One criticism of zerocoin is the added computation time required by the process, which would need to have been performed primarily by bitcoin miners. If the proofs were posted to the blockchain, this would also dramatically increase the size of the blockchain. Nevertheless, as stated by the original author, the proofs could be stored outside of the blockchain.

To counter criticisms that the anonymity offered by zerocoin would facilitate illegal activity, it has been suggested that a, or other features, could be added to the zerocoin protocol to allow police to track money laundering, but this was not advocated in the original paper. Since a zerocoin will have the same denomination as the bitcoin used to mint the zerocoin, anonymity would be compromised if no other zerocoins (or few zerocoins) with the same denomination are currently minted but unspent. A potential solution to this problem would be to only allow zerocoins of specific set denominations, however this would increase the needed computation time since multiple zerocoins could be needed for one transaction.

Depending on the specific implementation, the zerocoin protocol would rely on one or more trusted parties to generate two large prime numbers, p and q, so n = p q. Since n has to be hard to factor, p and q must be unknown to normal users for zerocoin to be secure. The protocol could rely on RSA unfactorable objects to avoid having to have a trusted party for the setup process. Such a setup, however, is not possible with the new Zerocash protocol. History [ ] In February 2017 a malicious coding attack on Zerocoin created 370,000 fake tokens which perpetrators sold for over 400 Bitcoins ($444,000). Zerocoin team anounced that a single-symbol error in a piece of code “allowed an attacker to create Zerocoin spend transactions without a corresponding mint.” In an uncommon move, developers have opted not to destroy any coins or attempt to reverse what happened with the newly generated ones. On April 28, Zcash surpassed $100 mln in market cap.

References [ ]. Retrieved 2017-03-16. • Bradbury, Danny (7 June 2013).. CoinDesk Ltd. Retrieved 8 February 2014.

• ^ Miers, Ian; Garman, Christina; Green, Matthew; Rubin, Aviel D. 2013 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. IEEE Computer Society Conference Publishing Services. Retrieved 16 September 2017. 9 August 2017. • (November 16, 2013).

Retrieved September 16, 2015 – via. Retrieved 2017-09-16. Retrieved 2016-06-17. • Team, The Zerocash.. Retrieved 16 September 2017. • Matthew Green [@matthew_d_green] (16 November 2013). (Tweet) – via.

• Ben-Sasson, Eli; Chiesa, Alessandro; Tromer, Eran; Virza, Madars (2014).. USENIX Security. 16 January 2014.

Retrieved 16 September 2017. Retrieved 16 September 2017. • Peck, Morgan E. (24 October 2013).. IEEE Spectrum... Retrieved 31 January 2014. • Hodson, Hal (13 March 2013)..

Retrieved 8 February 2014. • Suberg, William (21 February 2017).. Retrieved 21 December 2017. External links [ ] •.

Hello, Zcoin's top1 marketing feature is the zero-knowledge coin-history-nullifier. That is cool, but other coins had history obfuscation before in form of mixers - let's not argue about technical superiority of either solution, lets look at the similarities first. Most notably, the obviousness of intentional coin history hindering.

I'm not very experienced with all this, but I've heard that (unless privacy is by default) possesion of coins with mixed or 'invisible' history might be frowned upon. Like 'Hey, you paid extra to get your nasty stuff clean. What are you trying to hide, fella?' I've heard that markets wouldn't buy such suspisious coins in order to avoid government sniffing around their business. How can we be sure that zcoin-spent XZC wouldn't be assumed to be all darknet-drug-money-dirty? Practically, in day to day use, most people dont need to hide their transactions.

Let's not argue about the human rights to privacy, etc. - no one would bother wearing invisibility cloak without having creepy intentions.

In my opinion, unless more than 50% transactions are leading to a recently zcoin-spent coin, it's no different than mixers. And it seems that to achieve such proportions, the zcoin mint/spend fee must be 0 XZC. Can we ever achieve that? Or am I missing out on something?

So this is an interesting discussion and one that is often put forward by Monero which does have some merit. However here is the counter argument. I could also argue that.hey why are you using a coin like Monero wthat actively promotes dark markets and illegal use when you can use other currencies like Bitcoin? What are you trying to hide fella? Of course perhaps there's a distinction between banning a coin and banning certain transactions but let's see if there's in actuality a difference.

Now with Zcoin, note that with Zerocoin transactions they are not dependent on mixing. Your anonymity set is with everyone else that has ever minted that denomination before so it's an ever increasing set.

So unlike in cases like Dash or Monero where you have to mix with other It is DIFFERENT than mixing which is history obfuscation.not history wiping. The difference is that with history obfuscation, the real link is still somewhere in there and your anonymity set for that transaction is limited to the number of other members in that mix. This means that with Zerocoin, having a large number of transactions anonymized is not as critical since the anonymity set increases all the time with every single Zerocoin use. Also unlike Zcash which allows transactions between shielded balances, all Zcoins need to come back to the base layer.

It would be very hard to censor coins that have been 'spent' before since those coins could subsequently acquire history and end up in your hands. To prevent acceptance of coins that ever have gone through a Zerocoin spend transaction.you might as well just ban the entire currency. Of course, the more Zerocoin spends there are on the network this is healthier and there are several approaches to this. One which has been tried before by others is to have a certain proportion of balance 'auto minted' by the wallet by default.

This has some merit but doing it without it being cumbersome and inefficient needs some thought. It will not be a problem at this scale now, but we need to think through this carefully. As for the fee of Zerocoin mints, this is something that we are discussing and it is something that we need to think about. Currently Zerocoin transactions are processed like every other transaction and can be excluded by mining pools. This is a real possibility since processing Zerocoin transactions can be quite computationally intensive. This is why there should be some fee for Zerocoin mints.

We are currently evaluating the best way to keep the Zerocoin fees low while encouraging miners to process them. Perhaps some sort of mandatory way to make those mints and spends processed through the Znodes and locked so that it has to be included in the block but this reduces Zerocoin security so again.thought needs to be put in. These are problems that have solutions but need serious thought put into it. Thank you for your feedback!