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Comment by Jabanga | Hacker News Reader

Why is Zcash terrible for privacy?

It's run by a US company where its CEO said on Twitter that they think they can make it traceable. Its privacy is optional and wallet balances are public. And it used a trusted setup.

The trusted setup only requires that you trust that at least one of the participants in the setup ritual was honest and destroyed their key. If they all lied and kept their key, they can't compromise privacy either. They can only create new coins and devalue others' coins.

The wallet balances are not public if you use the private option. You're right that privacy is optional, and that is not good. But those who do use the private option do indeed get good privacy.

As for the CEO's statement, I haven't seen it. I also don't think one should be basing their decision on whether to trust a cryptocurrency's privacy claims on what their CEO says. It should be based on audits of the source code.

https://twitter.com/zooko/status/863202798883577856?lang=en "And by the way, I think we can successfully make Zcash too traceable for criminals like WannaCry, but still completely private & fungible. "

And aren't private transactions like 5% or so, making them very visible?

Looks like the private transactions make up 23% and 15% of number of transactions and volume of value transacted, respectively:

https://explorer.zcha.in/statistics/network

I agree that unenforced privacy is not good.

Creating a private transaction uses up a lot of computation and memory resources.

No mining pool, exchange or high throughput business is going to send secure transactions.

Although, maybe they could charge extra for it.

Zcash is backed by a US company, and required a trusted setup w/ pre-mine ("founders reward").

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