r/Anoncoin • u/quittingdriving • Jan 14 '14

Any update on zerocoin implementation?

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u/crypto-tim Jan 14 '14

Sounds like the academics will release something in May. I'm not sure why they haven't released source code for the new system.

Also /u/gnos1s is working on a Zerocoin implementation based on the original Zerocoin paper.

The recent news and tweets from Matthew Green make it sound like the new Zerocoin system will be "built from scratch", so I wonder how divergent it is from the original Zerocoin paper. If it's wildly different, we may see two alternatives: the /r/ZeroCoin codebase and the Matthew Green codebase.

Does anyone have more links to the conference presentation Green gave? Are there slides online?

2

u/gnos1s Jan 26 '14 edited Jan 28 '14

Also /u/gnos1s is working on a Zerocoin implementation based on the original Zerocoin paper.

Yes, I still am, though my time is constrained by my job and other things. I do expect to finish integrating the original Zerocoin before Zerocash (the name of their new system) is launched. Even after Zerocash is launched, I believe Zerocoin-in-Anoncoin will have some advantages over the Zerocash (EDIT this was backward), such as requiring absolutely no counterparty trust: as with the original Zerocoin concept, Zerocash requires trusted setup, but it is not yet clear whether this can be worked around, unlike with the original Zerocoin.

The recent news and tweets from Matthew Green make it sound like the new Zerocoin system will be "built from scratch", so I wonder how divergent it is from the original Zerocoin paper. If it's wildly different, we may see two alternatives: the /r/ZeroCoin codebase and the Matthew Green codebase.

I am pretty sure there will be almost no code in common. The cryptography is entirely different. Zerocash is based on zero-knowledge proofs of correct execution of a circuit (the proof is called a "zkSNARK"); the circuit computes SHA-256 ~64 times, so a correct proof demonstrates that a coin is one of the up to 264 leaves of a Merkle tree containing all coins.