Firo (formerly Zcoin) - Reading Assignment

Privacy Coins - Ultimate Course
#121

  1. What was Matthew Green’s involvement in Zcoin (not Zerocoin)?
    Zcoin was developed under the supervision of Matthew Green.

  2. What was Poramin’s solution to the ‘trusted setup’ problem?
    “picking the parameter used in the RSA factoring challenge which took special care to destroy the key” and had a sizeable bounty to break it.

  3. Is Zcoin direct implementation of the protocol described in the Zerocoin whitepaper? Why / why not?
    No. “Performance is the main problem in the Zerocoin protocol”

  4. Why did he abandon Zerovert for Zerocoin?
    Lack of community interest and funding.

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#122

1.- He was one of the inventors of the Zerocoin protocol.

2.- Switching protocols and destroying keys.

3.- No, it was inefficient.

4.- Lack of funding.

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#123
  1. suggesting to use RSA UFOs
  2. picking parameters for RSA factoring
  3. no, performance issues in the implementation of Zerocoin
  4. Vertcoin community did not like the idea
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#124

Unable to read the interview with the founder original lead developer of Zcoin, Poramin Insom, following the link to Firo’s website.

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#125

Hey, sorry about that. Since they renamed the coin they seem to remove the interview, you can still read it here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20191106140112/https://zcoin.io/interview-poramin-insom-zcoins-lead-developer-founder/

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#126

Thank you for the interview link.

#127
  1. Matthew Green’s involvement in Zcoin (not Zerocoin) was rather limited, because even though he was Poramin’s faculty mentor at John Hopkins University, due to his research, teaching and speaking commitments he was quite busy. He did however have some recommendations on RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman algorithm) UFOs (unknown complete factorization) when Poroamin was stuck at that point.
  2. Poramin’s solution to the ‘trusted setup’ problem was that he realised he could generate his own RSA parameters, but that this would raise endless questions about whether the p and q were destroyed which would have allowed forged Zerocoin spends. So his idea was to mitigate this risk to a third party by picking the parameter used in the RSA factoring challenge which took special care to destroy the keys, had a sizable bounty to break it and was done back when the RSA was an organization that strongly valued privacy.
  3. Zcoin was not a direct implementation of the protocol described in the Zerocoin whitepaper, this is because performance is the main problem in the Zerocoin protocol. When Poramin tried to follow the Zerocoin paper exactly as it was stated, he found it really slow and there were tons of performance issues, e.g. very slow loading times for the Zcoin wallet.
  4. Poramin abandoned Zerovert for Zerocoin as he initially wanted to tie it with Vertcoin via merged mining, but the Vertcoin community did not like the idea. At the same time, as he had put in a lot of effort in making it the first cryptocurrency to implement Zcoin without any ICO, he could not opensource it until he could be ensured that his work was rewarded. Without investors this was impossible. This was why he had to discontinue the project at that point.
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#128
  1. What was Matthew Green’s involvement in Zcoin (not Zerocoin)?
    According to Poramin Insom, the lead developer of Zcoin, he rarely had the opportunity to talk to Matthew Green because he was so busy. But he received some help on an experimental idea called RSA UFOs, which was ultimately not implemented in Zcoin.
  2. What was Poramin’s solution to the ‘trusted setup’ problem?
    He used the “RSA factoring challenge” to avoid people questioning whether or not he had the “p and q” which would have allowed him to “forge Zerocoin spends”. He wanted to mitigate the risk to a third party, by using a problem where special care was taken to destroy the p and q.
  3. Is Zcoin direct implementation of the protocol described in the Zerocoin whitepaper? Why / why not?
    Poramin says that he tried to go directly from the Zerocoin whitepaper with his coin Zerovert, but there were a lot of performance issues. So he tried again with Zcoin, which implies he made some modifications.
  4. Why did he abandon Zerovert for Zerocoin?
    Actually, Zerovert is Zerocoin. He abandoned Zerovert for Zcoin because Zerovert suffered from performance issues.
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#129
  1. Poramin only occasionally spoke with Matthew Green, and consequently Green didn’t have much involvement in Zcoin. He did, however, have some recommendations regarding RSA UFOs when Poramin was stuck on that issue.
  2. His idea was to mitigate the risk of forged Zerocoin spends by transferring the responsibility to a third party. This solved the problem of endless asking of whether “p” and “q” were destroyed.
  3. No, because it has trusted parameters. It isn’t a direct implementation, but Poramin notes that he may need a PhD in cryptography to code something this complex. He also notes that anyone who would like to create a practical implementation of Zerocoin without any trusted parameters is welcome to join them.
  4. Zerovert is an implementation of Zerocoin. He abandoned Zerovert for Zcoin because Zerovert had performance issues.
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#130
  1. He was one of the inventors of the Zerocoin Protocol which Zcoin uses.
  2. RSA factoring challenge.
  3. No, performance issues.
  4. Vertcoin community was not supportive. No investors
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#131

Mathew Green invented Zerocoin, which was the base for Zcoin.

RSA UFO was initially chosen by Poramin as the solution to the trusted setup problem. He had to solve the coin forging problem.

Poranim found that it was slow and a lot of performance issue by following the white paper.

The community didn’t like the idea of merge mining.

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#132

  1. Matthew Green was Poramin Insom’s faculty mentor - he had some recommendations on RSA UFOs (the author of the RSA-UFO paper was also at the time uncommunicative).

  2. Poramin’s solution to the ‘trusted setup’ problem was to mitigate this risk to a third party by picking the parameter used in the RSA factoring challenge which took special care to destroy the keys, had a sizeable bounty to break it and was done back when the RSA was an organization that strongly valued privacy, even exposing the government’s attempts to install the Clipper chip.

  3. No. Zerocash was designed to solve the proof size of Zerocoin and the technology also allow you to hide transaction amounts. In Poramin’s own personal opinion, especially with such new technology, it was not a good idea to do this especially in Zcash’s setup since you cannot track the total supply of money. (e.g. there was the buffer overflow bug in Bitcoin which was detected easily and fixed, but with Zerocash technology, you may not be able to detect such flaws.) Zerocash’s computational requirements are also much higher than Zerocoin with a Zcash private transaction taking several minutes on a powerful desktop computer while with Zcoin, it only takes a few seconds. In a way it’s a tradeoff between disk space and computing power.

  4. He wanted to tie it with Vertcoin via merged mining. but the Vertcoin community did not like the idea. At the same time, as he had put in a lot of effort in making it the first cryptocurrency to implement Zcoin without any ICO, he could not opensource it until he could be ensured that his work was rewarded. Without investors this was impossible.
    The initial load of the Zerovert wallet was also too slow.

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#133
  1. What was Matthew Green’s involvement in Zcoin (not Zerocoin)?

He was one of the investors of the protocol.

  1. What was Poramin’s solution to the ‘trusted setup’ problem?

Used RSA in the trusted setup parameter picking

  1. Is Zcoin direct implementation of the protocol described in the Zerocoin whitepaper? Why / why not?

No, direct implementation had performance issues and was very slow.

  1. Why did he abandon Zerovert for Zerocoin?

Poramin wanted to integrate Zerocoin protocol Into Vertcoin via merged mining, but the Vertcoin community didn’t like the idea & he had no investors so he discontinued the project.

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#134

1.) No direct involvement. Was his faculty mentor
2.) The risk was mitigated to RSA
3.) it uses Zerocoin protocol but he modified it, so No.
4.) Community didn’t like the ideas and there were no investors

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#135

  1. Matthew Green was one of the inventors of the Zerocoin protocol which inspired Zcoin.

  2. He chose one of the parameters from the RSA Factoring Challenge which hadn’t been factored yet. Advantages of this choice include a definite knowledge that the solutions had been destroyed, and that the parameters had been tested because there were bounties posted for their solution.

  3. No, not directly, because of performance issues.

  4. Zerovert was originally planned with the idea of merge-mining into Vertcoin, but the vertcoin community did not like this idea, and so it didn’t proceed.

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#136
  1. He had some recommendations on RSA UFOs.
  2. His idea was to mitigate this risk to a third party by picking the parameter used in the RSA factoring challenge which took special care to destroy the keys, had a sizeable bounty to break it and was done back when the RSA was an organization that strongly valued privacy, even exposing the government’s attempts to install the Clipper chip.
  3. No, because it was too slow and had performance issues.
  4. He wanted to tie it with Vertcoin via merged mining. but the Vertcoin community did not like the idea. Zerovert did not have any ICO, he could not opensource it until he could be ensured that his work was rewarded. Without investors this was impossible.
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#137
  1. He was an investor in Zercoin protocol that is used by Zcoin
  2. Used a the parameter from the RSA factoring challenge witch is a method to destroy de private keys
  3. No, because when it was implementation time it had performance issues
  4. Lack of community support because of the merged minning plan and not having enough funding
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#138
  1. What was Matthew Green’s involvement in Zcoin (not Zerocoin)?

He was one of the inventors of the Zerocoin protocol, which is used by Zoin.

  1. What was Poramin’s solution to the ‘trusted setup’ problem?

He decided to apply the parameter used in the RSA factoring challenge which took special care to destroy the keys, had a sizeable bounty to break it and was done back when the RSA was an organization that strongly valued privacy.

  1. Is Zcoin direct implementation of the protocol described in the Zerocoin whitepaper? Why / why not?

Direct implementation had performance issues and was very slow.

  1. Why did he abandon Zerovert for Zerocoin?

He couldn’t tie Zerocoin with Vertcoin via merged mining, because the Vertcoin community rejected the idea. Additionally, the project was without funds as he didn’t want to make and ICO and couldn’t open source it because he was not going to be rewarded for his work.

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#139

  1. Matthew green was a faculty mentor for the inventor of Zcoin.

  2. Poramins solution was to use the RSA Factoring challenge which destroyed keys

  3. No, He made changes that improved security and performance as he was not happy with the zerocoin performance.

  4. Zerovert was abandoned as there was no support or financial incentive to continue

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#140

  1. He helped Poramin with occasional technical issues, such as the RSA UFO implementation.

  2. His idea was to mitigate this risk to a third party by picking the parameter used in the RSA factoring challenge which took special care to destroy the keys.

  3. No, because he found it really slow and there were tons of performance issues.

  4. Without investors he couldn’t implement Zcoin without any ICO.

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