It’s here!!! Zcashd 5.0.0! If the Zcash users choose to run zcashd 5.0.0, then at the end of this month Zcash Network Upgrade 5 will activate on mainnet. This is an historic step forward for human society.
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Network Upgrade 5 moves Zcash onto the foundation of a completely new Zero-Knowledge Proof system: Zcash Halo, the first zero-knowledge proof system that is both (a) efficient and recursive, and (b) doesn't rely on Ceremonies ("trusted setups").
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Going forward, the soundness of the Zcash monetary base will no longer rely on the Ceremony (“trusted setup”) contributors. We are eternally grateful to those who helped bootstrap humanity into the age of zero-knowledge proofs, including Edward Snowden. youtu.be/8qSA29vWWds
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Zcash NU5 also puts Halo into production. Halo is the first Zero-Knowledge Proof system which is Ceremony-free, recursive—which means capable of protecting any amount of data or computation—and efficient enough that the prover can run in the palm of your hand on a smartphone.
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Halo is not only a scientific breakthrough (eprint.iacr.org/2019/1021) but also now a general-purpose, industrial-strength building block crafted by the legendary Electric Coin Co team, with years of diligent labor.
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Halo comes with a proof of security, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first full proof of a PLONK-based ZKP system and the first explicit proof written for the polynomial commitment scheme based on the inner product argument. zcash.github.io/halo2/design/p
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Zcash Network Upgrade 5 also supports the new Shielded By Default initiative, which provides a simpler and easier user experience for getting the best on-chain privacy, even when withdrawing ZEC from centralized KYC exchanges like Coinbase.
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All of this work was funded and supported by the Zcashers (ZEC coin holders), through something called the Dev Fund.
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Instead, we’ve released the new shielded money protocol (codenamed “Zcash Orchard”) under a “copyleft”-style open source licence that allows anyone to do anything with it under the condition that they open-source their codebase under the same licence.
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Like the Dev Fund before it, this strategy is highly controversial! Please see the Zcash Foundation’s discussion forums if you want to dig into the controversies and weigh in yourself.
forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/does-the-zca
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Here’s a thread I wrote recently about why permissionless money is critical for the safety and prosperity of our entire human society—and why Bitcoin cannot serve that role:
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Money is a technology.
Recent events—the protests in Canada and the war in Ukraine, and in cyberspace—have shown that our current monetary tech is an instrument for political power, and it has reminded us that politically neutral money is necessary for democratic societies. …
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