Few are aware that both @Zcash and @StarkWareLtd started as academic whitepapers.
I co-authored both and they're my two most-quoted papers: Zcash ("Zerocash") published in 2014 has 3k+ citations, and the STARKs one from 2018 has 1k+ citations.
I still remember the thrill, joy and work of writing each of them with my brilliant co-authors. But the process for each of them was very different.
The Zcash paper took a very short time to be written, submitted and accepted. First shot. It was immediately recognized as interesting.
The STARKs paper got rejected 4 times till it found its way to acceptance. Along the way it was rewritten and rewritten, to appease the never-ending referees.
I often tell this story about that paper and the accompanying paper on FRI. I heard it from a colleague.
He said "The way to know you have a real breakthrough is when it gets rejected, and referee #1 says its not correct, referee #2 says its not new and referee #3 says its not interesting."
A week later I forwarded him my latest rejection, showing him the referees indeed said the results are wrong, old and lame :-)
Which is why I had even more conviction it'll change the world (which, by the way, it has)
I’m happy to see my old friends from Bootstrap—renamed to “Sovright”, but it’s the same people in the same nonprofit with the same treasury—contributing to Zcash again! Decentralizing transaction selection and Zcash mining is a good idea.
These are the people that acted unethically,
tried to steal Zashi, forced the entire team out, and that you publicly sided with over your old team at ECC.
This is the team that refused to give the treasury, provided by Zcashers via the dev fund, back to the Zcash community, and instead keep it for personal gain for them and their “friends.”
No Monero folks should be looking to dunk on Zcash because of Zooko's post. He did the right thing and was honest about exploitation being undetectable.
We (Monero) have had our own inflation bugs that have thankfully also been resolved, it's a natural downside to building out privacy as the default in these systems.
The important things are:
1. Fixing them quickly
2. Working with stakeholders quickly
3. Being honest and transparent about them so the ecosystem as a whole can learn and improve
@elkouaris@_tm3k I don’t expect notification if they have proper time to update.
But giving less than 2h warning before they disable the entire ecosystem is insanity and centralizing.