all 4 comments

[–]WannabeWingsuitPilot 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Even if the one-time trusted setup is completely compromised, the privacy of individual transactions will not be at risk. The worst they could do is flood the market with coins minted in stealth.

That's certainly a economic risk; but not a privacy risk.

IIR, even a computationally unbounded attacker cannot pierce the veil of transaction privacy.

[–]itistoday 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That's certainly a economic risk; but not a privacy risk.

Seeing as people's livelihoods and political power are at stake when we're talking about "economic risk", that's still a major concern.

[–]Ar-Curunir 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just to point something out; most academic cryptography has really nothing to do with establishment intelligence community. This is the case in the US, and is most likely the case in Israel too.

Government funding just means government grants for research; what is most likely is that the the researchers (I presume you're talking about Eli Ben-Sasson and Eran Tromer) applied for research grants to work on zero knowledge proofs (the zkSNARKs underlying Zerocash), and when the research opportunity arose, they were able to apply their SNARK system to create Zerocash.