Firo (formerly Zcoin) - Reading Assignment

Privacy Coins - Ultimate Course
#141
  1. What was Matthew Green’s involvement in Zcoin (not Zerocoin)?
    Matthew Green was one of the inventors of the Zerocoin protocol. He was the mentor on John Hopkins University to Poramin Insom, Zcoin’s lead developer and founder.
  2. What was Poramin’s solution to the ‘trusted setup’ problem?
    He choosed the trusted parameter used in the RSA factoring challenge.
  3. Is Zcoin direct implementation of the protocol described in the Zerocoin whitepaper? Why / why not?
    No, direct implementation had perfomance issued and was very slow.
  4. Why did he abandon Zerovert for Zerocoin?
    The Vertcoin community did not like the idea of tieing Zerovert with Vertcoin + lack of funding.
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#142
  1. He was gave Poram some advice when it came to RSA UFO’s
    2.RSA Factoring Challenge
  2. No, it was really slow and there were performance issues
    4.He was not able to do and ICO and there was lack of funding and community support.
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#143

Where’s such interview?

The link sends me here: https://firo.org/

#144

BINGO: https://web.archive.org/web/20191106140112/https://zcoin.io/interview-poramin-insom-zcoins-lead-developer-founder/

The link should be updated on the course lesson!

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#145

1. What was Matthew Green’s involvement in Zcoin (not Zerocoin)?
He was “mentor” to Poramin Insom, Zcoin’s founder and lead developer.

2. What was Poramin’s solution to the ‘trusted setup’ problem?
To use the parameter used in the RSA factoring challenge.

3. Is Zcoin direct implementation of the protocol described in the Zerocoin whitepaper? Why / why not?
No, as Zcoin is extremely slow and far from the performance the Zerocoin whitepaper expects on its implementation.

4. Why did he abandon Zerovert for Zerocoin?
He lacked of investors backing Zerovert and the Vertcoin community did not like the idea of Zerocoin to be tied to Vertcoin via merge mining.

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#146

1.) Matthew Green’s involvement in Zcoin was as a faculty member in the implementation of Zcoin as a protocol into a cryptocurrency.
2.) Poramin’s solution to the ‘trusted setup’ problem was to use a parameter derived from the RSA factoring challenge. By using this parameter, private keys could be destroyed from transaction accumulators and maintain better anonymity.
3.) Zcoin was not a direct implementation of the protocol described in the Zerocoin whitepaper because Zcoin had too many performance issues (i.e. too slow).
4.) Poramin abandoned Zerovert for Zerocoin because his attempt to merge-mine the two was unwanted by the Vertcoin community. Therefore, he couldn’t get funding or enough support to push the protocol further.

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#147

  1. What was Matthew Green’s involvement in Zcoin (not Zerocoin)? : Matthew Green was one of the inventors of the Zerocoin protocol and inspired to improve it with Zcoin.

  2. What was Poramin’s solution to the ‘trusted setup’ problem? : RSA refactoring challange, which destroys private keys requiring a large cost to break.

  3. Is Zcoin direct implementation of the protocol described in the Zerocoin whitepaper? Why / why not? : The Zcoin trusted setup solution was not part of the whitepaper ; The original Zerocoin protocol had performance issues.

  4. Why did he abandon Zerovert for Zerocoin? : Zerovert was abandoned due to lack of funding and lack of support by the Vertcoin community for tying in the Zerocoin protocol with Vertcoin through merged mining.

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#149

:one: What was Matthew Green’s involvement in Zcoin (not Zerocoin)?

Matthew Green occasionally assisted Poramin with tech issues in building Zcoin - including the RSA UFO implementation. Matthrew Green was a faculty member for cryptography at John Hopkins University, whilst Poramin was there studying Security Informatics.

:two: What was Poramin’s solution to the ‘trusted setup’ problem?

Poramin’s solution to the trusted setup problem was to use the RSA Factoring challenge - which practically destroyed keys.

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

No Zcoin is not the direct implementation described in the Zerocoin whitepaper. Poramin said that it was incredibly slow with the implementation suggested exactly in the Zerocoin whitepaper.

:four: Why did he abandon Zerovert for Zerocoin?

He abandoned Zerovert because the community did not like the idea and there was a lack of funding and general community support for the project.

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#150

  1. Matthew Green is a cryptography researcher and professor at Johns Hopkins University who was one of the co-authors of the Zerocoin whitepaper, which introduced the concept of a decentralized anonymity-preserving cryptocurrency. Zerocoin was later implemented as Zcoin (XZC), a cryptocurrency that aims to provide privacy and anonymity for its users.

  2. Refers to the need for a trusted third party to generate and distribute the cryptographic “parameters” used to create Zerocoins. These parameters must be generated in a secure and verifiable way, but the process of generating them requires a certain level of trust in the third party. Poramin’s solution to this problem was to use a multi-party computation (MPC) protocol to generate the parameters in a way that does not rely on a single trusted party.

  3. Zcoin is a direct implementation of the Zerocoin protocol as described in the whitepaper, but it has undergone several updates and improvements since its initial release. One significant change was the adoption of a new proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm called MTP, which was designed to be more resistant to ASIC mining hardware.

  4. It is not clear why Matthew Green abandoned Zerovert, as this information is not widely available. Zerocoin and Zerovert are two different projects, and it is possible that Green was involved in the development of Zerovert in some capacity, but later decided to focus on Zerocoin instead. Zerocoin was eventually implemented as Zcoin, while it is not clear what happened to the Zerovert project.

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#151
  1. What was Matthew Green’s involvement in Zcoin (not Zerocoin)?
    In late 2014, Poramin Insom, a student in Masters in Security Informatics from Johns Hopkins University wrote a paper on implementing the Zerocoin protocol into a cryptocurrency with Matthew Green as faculty member.

On 28 September 2016, Zcoin, the first cryptocurrency to implement the zerocoin protocol, was launched by Poramin Insom and team.

  1. What was Poramin’s solution to the ‘trusted setup’ problem?
    Zcoin’s trusted setup uses parameters from the RSA Factoring Challenge in 1991, where special care was taken to destroy the initial parameters. Zcoin plans to eliminate trusted setup with the implementation of the Sigma protocol of which a proof of concept library is already functional while coding continues.

  2. Is Zcoin direct implementation of the protocol described in the Zerocoin whitepaper? Why / why not?
    It’s not a direct implementation of the protocol described in the Zerocoin whitepaper as it’s very slow.

  3. Why did he abandon Zerovert for Zerocoin?
    There was a lack of funding for Zerovert.

#152

What was Matthew Green’s involvement in Zcoin (not Zerocoin)?

Matthew Green was one of the inventors of the Zerocoin protocol. Zerocoin had a feature that could make anonymous transactions that required there to be trusted parameters.

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

Poramin’s solution was to mitigate risk to a third party by picking the parameter used in the RSA factoring challenge.

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

Zcoin is not a direct implementation for the protocol because it was found to be really slow and had tons of performance issues.

Why did he abandon Zerovert for Zerocoin?

He abandoned Zerovert for Zerocoin because he did not want to opensource it until he could be rewarded for his work. A lack of investors made this a big problem.