Author: Adam Back 2013-07-05 14:01:40
Published on: 2013-07-05T14:01:40+00:00
The release of libzerocoin by Matthew Green and Ian Miers at JHU has raised the question of how people can experiment with zerocoin using real money. While there is resistance to merging it into bitcoin due to issues such as slowing validation, bloating the blockchain, and importing cryptographic privacy, an all-zerocoin alt-coin could be created for people interested in exploring bitcoin. The rule for mining this coin would be skipping the value/double-spend validation of blocks that are zerocoin mining blocks. These blocks can end up on forks that get resolved, but fork resolution can be shared. An all-zerocoin based alt-coin could be created that is either-or mined with bitcoin, allowing people to trade in and out of zerocoins by buying or selling them for bitcoin with an atomic transaction, probably p2p without some trusted exchange like mtgox. The mined coin sets would be either a set of 25 bitcoins or a set of 25 zerocoins. If it's a zerocoin set, then it's not a valid bitcoin set, and if it's a bitcoin set, then it's not a valid zerocoin. The two coins should have approximately the same cost and maybe therefore value, though the price would be subject to demand/supply and any taint discount for bitcoins; zerocoins are taint-free, or perfectly blended taint at least. An all-zerocoin alt-coin could allow people to experiment with zerocoin without bloating the blockchain, complicating bitcoin, and without slowing validation on the bitcoin network.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T19:49:42.433485+00:00