Shielded Labs

If you go down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and don't end up at Zcash, you took a wrong turn somewhere.

Shielded Zcash is following the same trend as wrench attacks. I wonder if the two are correlated?

You can’t have freedom without privacy.

See the link below for a detailed list of retroactive grant proposals. forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/review-perio…

Don’t forget to register your coins to participate in the Q1 round of the Coinholder-Directed Grants Program. The snapshot will occur on Tuesday, March 17 at 11:59pm UTC. See the link below for detailed instructions on how to participate. forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/registration…

Check out the Zcash Network Sustainability Mechanism issuance simulator! zooko.github.io/zcash-network-… Click on “ZIP 234” and “NSMalt” buttons to see two possible schedules for reissuing burned ZEC. ⤵️

🔧 Zcash Engineering Office Hours: Project Tachyon @ebfull joins us to break down the ground-up rethink of how Zcash scales: recursive proof-carrying data, oblivious synchronization, and the nullifier storage problem. Tues Mar 17 • 12pm EST / 16:00 UTC luma.com/42k14get

probably zodl

I saw this when I woke up this morning, and I've been thinking about it all day and I'm about to click "Post all" on this thread before falling asleep. x.com/zooko/status/2… I think this is a strong signal. And a signal beyond just the “crypto industry”. ⤵️

.@chamath casually saying "Zcash, not Bitcoin" without saying it Probably nothing

But it can be surveilled and stolen by force Zcash

Zcash

If they can see it, they can take it. There's no sovereignty without privacy.

Thanks for taking the time to write this up, @maxdesalle, and for raising your concerns. These are important questions, and ones we’ve been thinking about as well. First off, I want to clarify that Crosslink is not a proposal for activation, and there is no plan for deployment at this stage. What exists today is ongoing research, design work, and rapid prototyping intended to explore whether the idea is viable at all. As with any early-stage protocol research, the goal is to challenge the assumptions behind it and surface risks early. I’ve seen some concerns suggesting that our work is an attempt to steamroll consensus, but that isn’t the case. This phase of development exists so the idea can be examined, criticized, and improved. So again, thank you for the feedback! With regard to privacy, users who choose not to participate in staking would continue to have the same privacy guarantees they have today. Staking is opt-in, and those who do choose to stake disclose only the size of their stake so the network can verify total participation and monitor the finalizer set. The current design introduces quantization of both time and stake amounts, which helps reduce information leakage and preserve privacy. Based on what we understand today, we do not believe the current design materially impacts user privacy or the anonymity set. But the burden is on us to demonstrate that clearly, which is why we plan to commission an independent analysis to better understand Crosslink’s privacy implications and the associated trade-offs. On complexity and governance risk, it’s important to note that Crosslink is a security upgrade. As you acknowledge, PoW has downsides. One of those is that under certain conditions, chain reorganizations can occur, and users can lose funds. Zcash *cannot* be a reliable store of value or function as unstoppable private money if transactions depend on probabilistic finality. So, the question we’re currently assessing is what trade-offs in complexity or reduced availability, if any, are necessary to achieve stronger security guarantees. We plan to make the implications for security, privacy, availability, and complexity explicit, so the community can decide whether those trade-offs are acceptable based on a clear understanding of their impact. We likely agree on more than we disagree. My request to you and others is to view Crosslink as a research effort rather than a concrete implementation intended for activation. I think it’s also helpful to frame the discussion in terms of trade-offs, and to ask whether proposed changes materially improve Zcash’s long-term security without meaningfully impacting its other core properties. As I’ve said previously, any change to the protocol requires broad consensus across the community and coinholders, and that same standard applies here. Crosslink may or may not ultimately be adopted, but we believe the research we’re doing around security is valuable and may also help inform other efforts around scalability.

ZK is the sovereign individual.

Full transparency and true self-sovereignty are in fundamental opposition

@nikete has completed the first independent security and mechanism-design review of Shielded Labs’ implementation of Crosslink. Independent security reviews are an important part of building high-security software, and this review marks the start of a broader hardening process as Crosslink transitions out of the prototype phase. The goal is not to declare the design “finished,” but to stress-test assumptions, validate core properties, and iteratively improve the design. The review confirms that the current Crosslink design successfully introduces finality and that finality behaves as intended. This is an important validation and increases confidence in the core architecture. The review also identifies a number of critiques, proposed attacks, and potential improvements. We are actively using these results to refine and harden the design. Not every recommendation will necessarily be adopted. Some ideas may be better suited for later iterations, including post-mainnet improvements, and in other cases we may pursue alternative solutions to the issues raised. As with any protocol design, we are carefully weighing trade offs between time-to-market, complexity, and security, rather than trying to build a protocol that is perfect in every way. This review marks an important milestone in the development process. Before activation, we expect to carry out further security-focused analyses and independent reviews to evaluate Crosslink’s safety, production readiness, and its implications for user privacy. As the design evolves, we plan to re-engage Nikete and also seek additional independent assessments from established security audit firms. We’re sharing the report publicly to support transparency and encourage open discussion. Over the coming week, we also plan to announce a community discussion to walk through the findings, the trade offs they raise, and how we’re thinking about next steps. We see this kind of structured, independent review as a model for how significant protocol changes should be evaluated going forward, and we hope it becomes common practice across the ecosystem. You can read Nikete’s full report here: nikete.com/crosslink_zebr…