The central points of failure in both macro-economics and Privacy Tech: Hiding information vs Obscuring Information

I actually saw a decent enough economics related video from a popular YouTube channel. It was from the The Film Theorists. If you really need to dig into good economics, https://mises.org and http://www.internationalman.com would be far better options. MatPat carefully avoids calling names like socialism/communism etc. You can watch the full video and we'll continue after that.

The funny thing is a comment from a person from Venezuela got 10K likes that spelled out everything MatPat left out. The comment was so good it got pinned by the channel.

Hey! Venezuelan here. This made me cry for multiple reasons: 1.- The fact that someone is actually factually reporting on what happens to us and in some ways, this has been more through-rough than a lot of journalist.
2.- Because it reminded me of exactly how bad this is, with no end on sight. :(
Just to fact-check/expand on context: Venezuela did have a real, albeit imperfect democratic system from 58-98... The year we elected that asshole Hugo Chávez. And to be fair, plenty of people-both local and immigrants- profited: there was more social mobility and the opportunity to study, get good jobs, make a living, take care of your family, etc. Venezuela was much like the US, a migration magnet.
And food scarcity started in 2007: milk was one of the first things to go. The thing is that because of the high oil prices is like they could keep cooking in spite of a gas leak, but eventually you rub out of gas.
The thing about controlling of the 1 resource=control of the population is true. Is like how abusive partners will try to prevent their victims from having their own money or take away any income they generate so as to keep them subdued.
The Venezuelan government is responsible for people not finding food, but they will SELL you boxes of government selected food for you. So, also Maslow’s pyramid: you keep people from being able to protest because they’re relying on that food box you sell them. And government officials are the ones who import that food and make money off of it.

MCU won't really follow much of real world economics. They don't care that much about those things. So I don't think we'll see a fall of Wakanda in a MCU movie. But I ended up dragging privacy tech into the discussion. Especifically I'm talking about encryption.

Encryption/Hiding vs Fungibility

Zcash and many other coins use Zero Knowledge Proofs. They are amazing tech. But they also have a very powerful flaw. They have a single point of failure. It is always a "Trusted" setup. These coins always need an elaborate ceremony which had reporters, videos, and many first hand accounts when they launch the coin. If the setup was compromised, coins can be forged. Different coins use different implementations of Zero Knowledge Proofs. Many coins keep the coin supply "Hidden". This makes forging easy.

The tricky thing about these SNARKS is that (like many algorithms) they need to have a one time setup. And the reason that this setup is called the “Trusted Setup” is because you have to trust that whoever generated those keys destroyed them when they were done.

The initial parameter generation for the zk-SNARKS creates the keys that are used to create proofs for private transactions, and to verify those proofs. These keys are the single way for transactions to be proven as good and not forgeries on the global encrypted blockchain. When the keys are first created there is a hidden parameter that links the two keys. It is the secrets used to generate these keys that if not destroyed could be used to forge transactions by false verification thereby giving that person the ability to create unlimited Zcash undetected. Although some people fear backdoors, this won't really happen because of the open source code and auditable.
https://minezcash.com/zcash-trusted-setup/

Dash - A different approach

For a simplified analogy, imagine 100 people each throwing 100 dollar bills into a pile, then the pile is mixed up a bunch of times, and then each person takes out 100 dollars. There is no way to know who threw in which bills initially, nor which ones were taken out by each individual.
https://www.dashforcenews.com/privacy-or-transparency-how-about-both

This approach doesn't seem too different from other zero knowledge versions. For an example, take a look at PIVX.

All the fancy tech ends up creating a similar effect. As for my knowledge the only popular coin that got its privacy broken was Monero. Here is a paper on the subject you can read: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B59AisMv54waZXRhbE9GV2NDQUE/view As for a TL;DR you can check out this site: http://www.monerolink.com

Here is someone from steemit talking about this: https://steemit.com/cryptonote/@macrochip/warning-every-cryptonote-monero-transaction-in-history-will-be-retroactively-exposed

The problem with hiding information is that if somebody figure out the way you hide it, it's pretty much like somebody figuring out where you hide your piggy bank or porn. If you used Monero before Februar 2017 your Tx could have been traced all because of a single vulnerability. After the mess Monero has made their tech better. But they've also made it more expensive. Monero had an average Tx fee of 3.56 USD and only did 4,123 Tx according to http://www.blocktivity.info/ and https://bitinfocharts.com You can compare that with 2.84 USD of Bitcoin with 190,972 Tx.

Monero was not only retroactively de-annonimized it is also unusable

Luckily the ZeroCoin implementations still keeps the anonymity of your previous transactions in a case of compromise. The same goes for Dash. It has unbroken privacy despite most people hating the coin's PrivateSend feature and all the while having massive bounties to break the privacy, PrivateSend remains unbroken.

All these things may make Dash look like the holy grail. But it has its problems too. PrivateSend Tx can be a little slow and obviously more expensive. Also there is this:

I still think this is better than a single point of failure. Breaking Dash's privacy is pretty much an attack on a PoS network. Dash masternodes can vote to fork away from the malicious actors much faster due to the DAO governance (as long as the attacker doesn't own 51% of the masternodes). Dash doesn't hide any information. It simply makes information less and less valuable with each mixing round. Over time data mining the blockchain will have less and less value. This is Fungibility. It may not be the coolest, smoothest or most mysterious. It's just a working solution with the highest amount of decentralized privacy that cannot be retroactively de-annonimized.

Personally I love both Dash and PIVX and I do think more methods are better as they give more options. It's just I have a special place for the simple elegance of Dash. There is no code to be compromised. There is no hiding info (which will be treated as a con by some). Overall, it just works.

Hope you had a good time educating Yourselves. Until next time, Happy steeming!