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Compared to the crypto used in Zerocash, Zerocoin's internals are fairly elementary.

Zerocoin used one-way accumulators and discrete log based ZKPs, which are fairly approachable to anyone who has taken an undergraduate course in cryptography. Zerocash, however, uses Ben-Sasson's highly efficient zk-SNARK construct [0], the details of which are probably fully understood by a handful of people in the world. There's a reason the people who geek out over this kind of thing (#bitcoin-wizards) call it 'Moon math'.

[0] - https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/507.pdf



Sorry, I confused Zerocoin and Zerocash (which even some of the paper's authors did when I talked to them at RWC).


It's easy to do so, considering that the new zerocash protocol's whitepaper references zerocoin and claims that its new coins will still be called zerocoins once implemented.




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