Is there a whitepaper or another technical description (other than the code itself)? (Apologies if it's at Github. That site is blocked at my office)
The zerocash paper exists which goes in-depth: http://zerocash-project.org/paper
We make some changes from this paper that we're working to formalize in a protocol description, but that isn't finished yet. (There are lots of further changes to make, so it could be irritating to update a spec consistently right now.)
How accurate is the Zerocash paper with respect to how Zcash works? Is it large strokes the same, or lots of changes?
I completely understand about not wanting to update a spec mid development.
It's mostly the same, but certain operations were merged together or simplified, and the semantics of integration with the outside consensus rules has changed somewhat.
Thank you. I will take a look at it, and look forward to learning more details about Zcash as they firm up.
By the way, a (very early) paper describing our implementation, which might be easier to understand than the zerocash paper, is here: https://github.com/Electric-Coin-Company/zips/blob/master/protocol/protocol.pdf
