#Zerocash
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vkspuntabau.nafoeverywhere.org
#ART7
#ZEROCASH
April 4, 2025 at 10:28 AM
daira.bsky.social
Thankyou, but I should point out that Zcash is the work of many people! zips.z.cash/protocol/pro...
9 Acknowledgements The inventors of Zerocash are Eli Ben-Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa, Christina Garman, Matthew Green, Ian Miers, Eran Tromer, and Madars Virza. The designers of the Zcash protocol are the Zerocash inventors and also Daira-Emma Hopwood, Sean Bowe, Jack Grigg, Simon Liu, Taylor Hornby, Nathan Wilcox, Zooko Wilcox, Jay Graber, Eirik Ogilvie-Wigley, Ariel Gabizon, George Tankersley, Ying Tong Lai, Kris Nuttycombe, Jack Gavigan, Steven Smith, and Greg Pfeil. The Equihash proof-of-work algorithm was designed by Alex Biryukov and Dmitry Khovratovich. The authors would like to thank everyone with whom they have discussed the Zerocash and Zcash protocol designs; in addition to the preceding, this includes Mike Perry, isis agora lovecruft, Leif Ryge, Andrew Miller, Ben Blaxill, Samantha Hulsey, Alex Balducci, Jake Tarren, Solar Designer, Ling Ren, John Tromp, Paige Peterson, jl777, Alison Stevenson, Maureen Walsh, Filippo Valsorda, Zaki Manian, Kexin Hu, Brian Warner, Mary Maller, Michael Dixon, Andrew Poelstra, Benjamin Winston, Josh Cincinnati, Kobi Gurkan, Weikeng Chen, Henry de Valence, Deirdre Connolly, Chelsea Komlo, Zancas Wilcox, Jane Lusby, teor, Izaak Meckler, Zac Williamson, Vitalik Buterin, Jakub Zalewski, Oana Ciobotaru, Andre Serrano, Brad Miller, Charlie O’Keefe, David Campbell, Elena Giralt, Francisco Gindre, Joseph Van Geffen, Josh Swihart, Kevin Gorham, Larry Ruane, Marshall Gaucher, Ryan Taylor, Sasha Meyer, Conrado Gouvêa, Aditya Bharadwaj, Andrew Arnott, Arya, Andrea Kobrlova, Lukas Korba, Honza Rychnovský, and no doubt others. We would also like to thank the designers and developers of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Core. Zcash has benefited from security audits performed by NCC Group, Coinspect, Least Authority, Mary Maller, Kudelski Security, QEDIT, and Trail of Bits. We also thank Mary Maller for her work on reviewing the security proofs for Halo 2 (any remaining errors are ours). [this is about a quarter of the acknowledgements]
December 11, 2024 at 4:11 AM
zcashmedia.bsky.social
The Journey from Zerocash to Zcash: Finding Leadership and Building a Team

Ian Miers CS Professor for Security and Applied Cryptography

#zcash #crypto #blockchain

www.youtube.com/shorts/HKMTJ...
The Journey from Zerocash to Zcash: Finding Leadership and Building a Team
YouTube video by Zcash Media
www.youtube.com
December 2, 2024 at 11:01 PM
quint-lang.org
St. Patrick's Day may be over but we're still thinking about fake gold 🍀

New post: we spec'd the Zerocash faerie-gold vulnerability in Quint and could clearly see the scenario where it gets exploited. Then we saw how a Zcash-like fix solves it.
March 20, 2026 at 3:25 PM
eprint.ing.bot
A Note on Notes: Towards Scalable Anonymous Payments via Evolving Nullifiers and Oblivious Synchronization (Sean Bowe, Ian Miers) ia.cr/2025/2031
Abstract. Anonymous payment protocols based on Zerocash (IEEE S&P 2014) have seen widespread deployment in decentralized cryptocurrencies, as have derivative protocols for private smart contracts. Despite their strong privacy properties, these protocols have a fundamental scaling limitation in that they require every consensus participant to maintain a perpetually growing set of nullifiers— unlinkable revocation tokens used to detect double-spending—which must be stored, queried and updated by all validating nodes. This set grows linearly in the number of historic transactions and cannot be discarded without the undesirable effect of destroying unspent funds. In this short note, we introduce a new technique that enables continual, permanent pruning of nullifiers by validators, without imposing significant computation, bandwidth or latency overhead for users, and without compromising privacy. Our main contribution is a general model we call oblivious synchronization whereby users ask untrusted remote services (which ingest and process the public ledger) to create succinct proofs that coins are unspent and otherwise valid. Crucially, these services are fully oblivious to their clients’ transaction details and cannot link their clients to any transactions that ultimately appear on the public ledger. Moreover, these services only keep ephemeral state per client and users can freely switch between services without incurring redundant computational effort. Image showing part 2 of abstract.
November 3, 2025 at 4:09 PM
eprint.ing.bot
Provenance Graphs for AML/CFT: Asset Tracing and Freezing in Private Payments (Maxence Brugeres, Petr Kuznetsov) ia.cr/2026/1933
Abstract. Anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing (AML/CFT) rules require payment service providers to assess incoming funds’ provenance: for a target account, which earlier transfers contributed to it, how closely, and through which intermediaries? On transparent ledgers such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, this reduces to a graph traversal over the public transaction history. In private payment systems such as Zerocash or Tornado Cash Nova coins are burnt and created at each payment, while the sender, receiver, and amount are hidden. Provenance analysis is then impossible: the cryptography protects ordinary and illicit users alike. This creates an apparent deadlock, not merely a trade-off. We avoid this deadlock by giving a regulator a specific and bounded investigative capability rather than full visibility or none. Our construction extends Zerocash but applies naturally to most private systems with the same spend-and-create coin model (Tornado Cash, Railgun, Lelantus, etc.) The capability is backward provenance within a bounded neighbourhood of a transfer, together with the power to freeze funds derived from a designated illicit source, and to reconstruct a full clear-text provenance graph when a holder chooses to disclose. Everything outside that capability remains hidden from the supervisor and from every other party: receivers, amounts, the link from an output to its later spend, and the provenance of any coin that has not been disclosed. Image showing part 2 of abstract.
September 12, 2026 at 11:01 PM
cryptadamist.universeodon.com.ap.brid.gy
#epsteinfiles: not only did Jeffrey #epstein fund the entire bitcoin development team at #mit Media Lab, he took a special interest in Madars Virza, co-founder of the "privacy coin" ZCash (#zec).

#zcash “fixes” the main issue with bitcoin, at least for […]

[Original post on universeodon.com]
Madars Virza / About me / Publications / Madars Virza I am a Research Scientist at MIT Media Lab where I work with Joi Ito on cryptocurrencies (at the Digital Currency Initiative) and Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (at the Ethics Initiative). I co-invented Zerocash and co-founded Zcash. Both of these rely on libsnark, the efficient C++ library for zero-knowledge proofs, that I am an author of. I recently graduated with Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT, where I was fortunate to be advised by incomparable Ron Rivest. My Ph.D. thesis, also on libsnark, won the George M. Sprowls Award for Best MIT Ph.D. Thesis in Computer Science. Before coming to MIT I did my undergraduate work at University of Latvia under the excellent guidance of Andris Ambainis. The best way to reach me is: madars@mit.edu. You can also send me physical mail but due to COVID-19 I am not checking my mailbox too regularly. From: Joi Ito Sent: 11/22/2017 6:14:38 PM To: jeffrey E. [jeeyacation@gmail.com] Subject: Re: Importance: High Lots of stuff going on that week but I'm in town. #metoo is quite amazing... Madars is doing well. His PhD paper won an award and he found a vulnerability in ING's new crypto currency. Sent from my iPhone Date: Monday, May 6 2019 10:52 AM Subject: Re: $25K from ASU From: Joichi Ito < To: Jeffrey Epstein <jeevacation@gmail.com>; That would be great. I've been busy, but good. How are you? Heard you saw Madars. > On May 6, 2019, at 06:48, J <jeevacation@gmail.com> wrote: > i can have andrew farkas , he gave a building to the hasty pudding harvard. fund plant guys. how are you >? @Cryptadamist Nov 13 1. blame the collapse of bitcoin on "muh the government" 2. "true crypto has never been tried", sorry about all the money you lost 3. time to buy into our new ponzi Zcash / $ZEC
December 10, 2025 at 7:37 PM
web3privacy.info
@z.cash influence reaches far beyond ZEC.

Its history runs through Zerocash, Sprout, Sapling, Halo, Halo 2 and Orchard, work that helped push zero-knowledge proofs from academic research toward practical, private and trust-minimized systems.
August 7, 2026 at 1:55 PM
nova-anglia.bsky.social
a design for an anonymous cryptocurrency also backed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

In emails released by the Justice Department last month, Epstein discussed the cryptographic theory behind Zerocash with Italian hacker Vincenzo Iozzo:

“ZeroCash…
February 14, 2026 at 7:04 PM
nova-anglia.bsky.social
**whose research Epstein had personally backed.**

Epstein was also supporting the work of Madars Virza, a Latvian research scientist working on cryptocurrency at the Media Lab.

In 2011, the Skolkovo Foundation funded Virza and Israeli scientist Eli Ben-Sasson’s research on Zerocash,
February 14, 2026 at 7:04 PM
rurapente.bsky.social
Για τα papers δες αυτά πχ. zerocash-project.org/paper και dl.acm.org/doi/full/10..... Το δεύτερο και από Έλληνες. Δεν είναι κακό να μην μιλάς για κάτι που δεν ξέρεις.
Paper | Zerocash
zerocash-project.org
December 6, 2024 at 7:25 PM
petrikajander.bsky.social
Bitcoin 2.0: Sidechains And Ethereum And Zerocash, Oh My! http://tcrn.ch/1DblJpu
Bitcoin 2.0: Sidechains And Ethereum And Zerocash, Oh My! | TechCrunch
Strange, interesting, and wildly ambitious things are afoot in the world of Bitcoin and blockchains. I give you Zerocash, a completely anonymous currency; Ethereum, a blockchain platform designed to decentralize much of the Internet; and Sidechains, a proposal to accelerate the evolution of Bitcoin itself. Any one of these could conceivably become a very big deal. All three? Prick up your ears.
tcrn.ch
November 20, 2024 at 4:22 PM
epsteinweb.bsky.social
Parts 1-2/2 — EFTA02587613.jpg
#epsteinweb #efta02587613
https://epsteinweb.org
Available in the iOS app store now!
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/epstein-web/id6758880661
EFTA02587613 | EFTA02587613 From: Sent: To: Cc: Subject: Vincenzo lozzo Tuesday, August 26, 2014 12:52 PM Jeffrey E. Joi Ito zero knowledge proof/SNARK One interesting thing I stumbled upon in my reading is ZeroCash, which =s essentially a 'privacy preserving' version of Bitcoin. Now besides the currency itself, what's interesting is that they use a =pecific kind of zero knowledge proof (ZKP) systems called zk-SNARK. I'll save you the full lengthly explanation, but the reason why this is =nteresting is that: 1) ZKP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof) can be used =o proof statistically/computationally that a user (A) knows something =ithout reveling the secret itself. eg: A can prove to user (B) that he =nows the password of a certain system without showing the password to B. Usually that requires some kind of interaction between the users (user B asks a round =f questions to user A, if A gets them right then it's statistically =ery unlikely that he got all of them right without knowing the secret) = 2) zk-SNARKs are interesting because: a) They are not interactive b) They are 'short' and easy to prove On top of that essentially you can prove in zero knowledge almost =nything that is 'computable'. What this means is that if we use zk-SNARKS/similar ZKP for our currency =e can enforce arbitrary rules on how the currency is spent ("this coin =s of type X and can only be spent with these following merchants", or =this coin can be spent because it was not obtained illegally and the =uy payed taxes"). I'm exaggerating a bit with expressiveness, but it's =lose. Also this allows us to tweak the privacy vs transparency bit. Generally speaking we have other easier options to do all these things =multi-party signatures, centralized black lists, etc etc), but this is =nteresting. Thoughts? Also Jeffrey, any updates on the govt side of the house? =?xml version=.0" encoding=TF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"> <plist version=.0"> <clict> <key>conversation-idgkey> <integer>299867</integer> <key>date-last-viewed</key> <integer>0</integer> <key>date-received</key> <integer>1409057525</integer> <key>flags</key> EFTA_R1_01768333 EFTA02587613 Epstein Web iOS app on the App Store.
April 14, 2026 at 9:07 PM
epsteinweb.bsky.social
EFTA01781741.jpg
#epsteinweb #efta01781741
https://epsteinweb.org
Available in the iOS app store now!
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/epstein-web/id6758880661
EFTA01781741 | EFTA01781741 From: Sent: To: Cc: Subject: > Jeremy Rubin < Wednesday, October 21, 2015 3:04 AM Jeffrey Epstein; Madars Virza Joichi Ito Skype with Madars: Hi Jeffrey, I wanted to introduce you to Madars,=one of the most brilliant cryptographers I know. Among other things, he wo=ks on the zerocash project, a cryptocurrency with anonymity over sender, r=cipient, and amount (and theoretically, any arbitrary invariant can be kep= without revealing the underlying data -- maybe you can help Madars think =f some compelling real world invariants). Hopefully you can find a =ime to chat! Madars is in the Bay area currently, if you find yourself out=that way you could meet in person. (Madars -- do you think Ale would want to join you?) Cheers, Jeremy =a href="https://twitter.com/JeremyRubin" target="_blank" =kW> <https://twitter.com/JeremyRubin> 1 EFTA_R1_00101013 EFTA01781741
March 10, 2026 at 2:44 AM
lukepatrick.dev
much #cryptographic learning ahead -> #Zerocash: Decentralized anonymous payments from #Bitcoin https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/02/21/zerocash-decentralized-anonymous-payments-from-bitcoin/ via @adriancolyer
Zerocash: Decentralized anonymous payments from Bitcoin |...
blog.acolyer.org
November 16, 2024 at 7:13 PM
lukepatrick.dev
@EconTalker how far down the rabbit hole do you want to go? making bitcoin truly
anonymous -> https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/02/21/zerocash-decentralized-anonymous-payments-from-bitcoin/
Zerocash: Decentralized anonymous payments from Bitcoin |...
blog.acolyer.org
November 16, 2024 at 7:13 PM
eprint.ing.bot
Unobservable Contracts from Zerocash and Trusted Execution Environments (Adrian Cinal) ia.cr/2025/1965
Abstract. Privacy-oriented cryptocurrencies like Zerocash only support direct payments and not the execution of more complex contracts. Bitcoin and Ethereum, on the other hand, cannot guarantee privacy, and using them for contract execution leaves open questions about fungibility of the proceeds and requires contract designers to take frontrunning countermeasures. This work reconciles the two worlds and develops a practical framework for decentralized execution of complex contracts that (1) is undetectable to the network at large, (2) maintains anonymity of the potentially mutually distrustful counterparties, (3) guarantees fair termination, and (4) is immediately resistant to frontrunning and miner bribery attacks. This is achieved by leveraging the confidentiality and anonymity guarantees of Zerocash and the verifiability and flexibility of trusted execution environments.
October 22, 2025 at 1:29 PM
eprint.ing.bot
Nopenena Untraceable Payments: Defeating Graph Analysis with Small Decoy Sets (Jayamine Alupotha, Mathieu Gestin, Christian Cachin) ia.cr/2024/903
Abstract. Decentralized payments have evolved from using pseudonymous identifiers to much more elaborate mechanisms to ensure privacy. They can shield the amounts in payments and achieve untraceability, e.g., decoy-based untraceable payments use decoys to obfuscate the actual asset sender or asset receiver. There are two types of decoy-based payments: full decoy set payments that use all other available users as decoys, e.g., Zerocoin, Zerocash, and ZCash, and user-defined decoy set payments where the users select small decoy sets from available users, e.g., Monero, Zether, and QuisQuis. Existing decoy-based payments face at least two of the following problems: (1) degrading untraceability due to the possibility of payment-graph analysis in user-defined decoy payments, (2) trusted setup, (3) availability issues due to expiring transactions in full decoy sets and epochs, and (4) an ever-growing set of unspent outputs since transactions keep generating outputs without saying which ones are spent. QuisQuis is the first one to solve all these problems; however, QuisQuis requires large cryptographic proofs for validity. We introduce Nopenena (means “cannot see”): account-based, confidential, and user-defined decoy set payment protocol, that has short proofs and also avoids these four issues. Additionally, Nopenena can be integrated with zero-knowledge contracts like Zether’s Σ−Bullets and Confidential Integer Processing (CIP) to build decentralized applications. Nopenena payments are about 80% smaller than QuisQuis payments due to Nopenena’s novel cryptographic protocol. Therefore, decentralized systems benefit from Nopenena’s untraceability and efficiency. Image showing part 2 of abstract.
June 6, 2024 at 7:05 PM
chrisb2024.bsky.social
Bitcoin just keeps getting more interesting: Bitcoin 2.0: Sidechains And Ethereum And Zerocash, Oh My! | TechCrunch
November 17, 2024 at 1:45 PM
dohnjaly.bsky.social
"Green is one of the creators of the Zerocash protocol, which is used by the Zcash cryptocurrency, and is a founder of an encryption startup Zeutro"

Oh him? Yeah, world famous in Salford.
July 25, 2025 at 5:54 PM