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A Twitter Bet May Highlight Zcash’s Privacy Flaws
Summary: Twitter user @MoneyKnowledge0 posted a tx-id to his donation on July 18 and announced a $100 bounty for friendly attackers who could backtrace to the Zcash address. Twitter user Byran Deep cracked the correct address in hours, highlighting Zcash’s privacy concerns. Zcash’s privacy concerns are not new: earlier in May, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University ...
Twitter user @MoneyKnowledge0 posted a tx-id to his donation on July 18 and announced a $100 bounty for friendly attackers who could backtrace to the Zcash address. Twitter user Byran Deep cracked the correct address in hours, highlighting Zcash’s privacy concerns.
Zcash’s privacy concerns are not new: earlier in May, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have already published a paper claiming Zcash’s privacy guarantees are flawed. Chainalysis also found they were able to trace Zcash’s private transactions.
However, Zooko, the founder of Zcash, noted that the twitter wager is only a lucky instance, so did @MoneyKnowledge0.
“It’s very important to say this was really a lucky guess…”
the initiator of the twitter bet posted later, “If I were to have my Shielded ZEC in my wallet for longer than a few minutes after the transition from T->Z, there would have been WAY more T->T and T->Z ax’s in between making it close to impossible to say it’s me.”
By Lily Yang
