Trusted setup phase

hey guys,

congratulations on getting this up and running zooko and company! i’ve been following zerocash since the first paper was put out and find it very interesting. while the notion of a totally private cryptocurrency gives me the warm fuzzies, i was apprehensive about the presence of a trusted setup phase when the blockchain is started.

does the trusted setup phase still exist with zcash? i admit that i haven’t been keeping up with the latest articles, so i may well have missed one where you have fixed this issue.

regards,
jake

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There’s a paper by our researchers which explains a multiparty trusted setup approach.

The setup doesn’t necessarily occur “when the blockchain is started” and the parameters can be swapped at any time.

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can we get a free version of that paper? not all of us are members of ieee, although i will go bark at my electrical engineer buddies to try and grab this for me :wink:

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@x7A: Here’s a free copy of the paper: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bitcoin/snarks/Secure%20sampling%20of%20public%20parameters%20for%20succinct%20zero%20knowledge%20proofs.pdf

Here’s the blog post we just posted about this: How To Generate SNARK Parameters Securely - Electric Coin Company

After reading these texts I understand that this is still in development stage and that you’re looking at ways of reducing risk with methods such as with trusted multi party private key holders. A solution that is as close to a trustless network is the most advantageous. How do you ensure that there are enough multi party private key holders and that they can be trusted. Have you found a way to reduce the risk. What in your opinion would be a trusted party(s)?

The whole reason zerocash was not launched ages ago by the guys at MIT was because of this TTP issue. Just read this https://m.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/3p31lj/wait_so_with_zerocash_you_have_to_trust_a_third/ and I am very interested to find out how you solved it.

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This video summarises the TTP problem perfectly https://youtu.be/1GTRfZ0m7M8?t=32m50s

thx for that, valuable.

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