Zcash Engineering Office Hours picking up where we left off last week:
Notes, Commitments, and Nullifiers, pt 2: Trees, Anchors, and the Nullifier Set
Zcash Global Discord, Tuesday, June 2, 3PM UTC
RSVP: https://t.co/dQfBaNy9UO
@OrangeFren This was done with far more than 3 miners. f2pool was one of the last miners to update, and they made many uncles.
Notably, you can't reliably soft-fork with out much larger hashpower than 51%. (Unless you apply feather forking logic, but that is ultimately miners agreeing)
How did Zcash stop Orchard transactions without violating decentralization?
Since the announcement of a halt in Orchard transactions, I saw a lot of justified concern about "How is it possible to stop these transactions if Zcash is decentralized?"
The answer is really cool!
Proof of work networks like Zcash depend on mining to produce new blocks. Miners are organized around mining pools, which aggregate mining hash power.
In order to stop the Orchard pool, Zcash shipped a binary to miners, who have an interest in the viability of the network, which disabled Orchard transactions. There's no magic switch in the code, but instead, the transactions were disabled in a decentralized manner, relying on the miners self-interest in ensuring that Zcash isn't compromised.
What didn't happen:
* Miners were not forced to run new binaries, each one had to make their own decision for what software to run, and they got to evaluate the new release and choose voluntarily to run software that disabled Orchard transactions.
* The orchard pool wasn't remotely deactivated with a transaction or network feature that would mess up decentralization.
The orchard tx pause was an elegant solution to a very difficult problem on a live, decentralized network executed entirely by voluntary coordination between network participants.
My first interview with Zooko Wilcox (@zooko), co-founder of Zcash.
00:00 Intro
00:40 Why Zooko joined Cypherpunk as advisor
01:42 Quantum computing & Zcash's position
05:09 Bitcoin vs Zcash culture
07:18 What is Crosslink?
09:35 Crosslink benefits: irreversible finality & security budget
14:24 Bitcoin's security budget problem & NSM
18:20 The complexity critique of Crosslink
21:23 NSM, dynamic fees & voting confusion
25:14 Coin-weighted voting
27:55 Tachyon: scalability and post-quantum
32:35 Shielded Labs' enterprise support services
33:38 The T-addresses debate
38:30 The political path forward for Crosslink
43:25 Turnstiles & canary networks
45:28 Zooko's 10-year vision for Zcash
Shielded Labs has now funded efforts that helped to discover and remediate at least two major vulnerabilities in Zcash before they could be used by the bad guys!
@lukaskorba@BostonZcash After the AI Cyberpocalypse is over, we should give Lifetime Achievement Awards to these Zcash engineers who've been working super hard, day after day, week after week, month after month to protect all Zcash users through this historic transition from before AI to after AI.
The shielded and transparent pools in Zcash are mathematically independent.
Even if 99% of ZEC were transparent, the privacy of the shielded 1% would be determined only by the shielded pool itself.
Transparency doesn't dilute encryption.
Very few *actually* understand this.