Top all-time · #2996
Electric Coin Company
Company blog · electriccoin.co/blogsecurityprogramming
Electric Coin Company is the company blog at electriccoin.co, writing about security and programming. Since 2019, 26 different Hacker News readers have linked it 31 times, most often “Lessons from the history of attacks on secure hash functions (2019)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-12-04, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (21) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link the Electric Coin Company blog, the team behind Zcash, for explanations of zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs, Halo), Zcash privacy and shielded transactions, and the history of hash functions.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 21 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Latest posts: Electric Coin Company…
Most-linked posts?
- Lessons from the history of attacks on secure hash functions (2019)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-12-31
- Halo: Recursive Proof Composition Without a Trusted Setup3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-09-10
- Tgppl, a new type of open-source license2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-09-03
- /blog/explaining-halo-2/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-10-12
- /blog/zcash-counterfeiting-vulnerability-successfully-remediated/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-10-18
What Hacker News says?
I'm not up on the math, but https://electriccoin.co/blog/halo-recursive-proof-compositio... sounded like that sort of thing.
Comment linking /blog/halo-recursive-proof-composition-without-a-trusted-setup/
on “Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?”Submitted Lessons from the history of attacks on secure hash functions (2019) as a story · 91 points
HN discussionNot to mention this one, which covers more hash algorithms: https://electriccoin.co/blog/lessons-from-the-history-of-att...
Comment linking /blog/lessons-from-the-history-of-attacks-on-secure-hash-functions/
on “A new hash algorithm for Git”Submitted Tgppl, a new type of open-source license as a story · 76 points
HN discussionThere are a lot of variations, but in Zerocash-style schemes (which can be viewed as massive ring signatures), each note has an associated 'nullifier'. Spending a note involves revealing its nullifier, and for the transaction to be valid, the nullifier must not have been used before. A nullifier is derived deterministically from private account data, and zero-knowledge proofs are used to show that a nullifier was de…
Comment linking /blog/zcash-private-transactions/
on “Web3 is centralized”Submitted Halo: Recursive Proof Composition Without a Trusted Setup as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSure. Starting from the academic beginning and then going to commercial usage: Zerocash[0], a paper from 2014 (I'm an author on it), proposes using zksnarks to get a public ledger + privacy with no centralized parties. Instead of identifying the origin of your money on the blockchain and moving it to someone, you just prove in zero-knowledge your payment is correct. This showed strong privacy on a public blockchain…
Comment linking /blog/technical-explainer-halo-on-zcash/
on “Bitcoin is a ‘boon for surveillance’, says former CIA director”Submitted Tgppl, a radically new type of open-source license as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIf interested in playing around with zero-knowledge proofs, recently was at a workshop with Ying Tong who has an exercise (and long associated slide deck) to walk through them using halo2 ( https://electriccoin.co/blog/explaining-halo-2/ ) to build your own zero knowledge proof https://github.com/therealyingtong/halo2-hope
Comment linking /blog/explaining-halo-2/
on “How to prove you know a secret without giving it away”Submitted Lessons from the History of Attacks on Secure Hash Functions as a story · 2 points
HN discussionZcash's privacy perspective seems to be highly flawed because of the way it was implemented though (optional opt-in privacy): https://news.bitcoin.com/not-so-private-99-of-zcash-and-dash... and https://electriccoin.co/blog/new-research-on-shielded-ecosys...
Comment linking /blog/new-research-on-shielded-ecosystem/
on “Why Monero”Submitted Halo: Recursive Proof Composition Without a Trusted Setup as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> To expand on this a little bit, non-default privacy means that use of privacy features becomes de facto suspicious activity, thus rendering them useless. That's not a true statement as far as I understand how Zcash works. Right now there are >742K ZEC in the shielded Sapling pool, so there are quite a few people using it and you can not tell their shielded transactions apart. https://electriccoin.co/zcash-metrics/…
Comment linking /zcash-metrics/
on “Why Monero”Submitted Goodbye, Zcash Company. Hello, Electric Coin Company (2019) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionhttps://electriccoin.co/blog/ecc-timeline-updates-and-planni... Halo Arc removes the trusted setup and also sets shielded transactions by default. ECC also has announced that they intend to work on implementing shielded assests which seem compelling: https://electriccoin.co/blog/zsas-ecc-progress-and-next-step... One glaring issue is that there seems to be lots of tension between the community and the Zcash foundati…
Comment linking /blog/zsas-ecc-progress-and-next-steps/
on “Why Monero”Submitted Welcoming a new season at ECC: A message from the Bootstrap Board of Directors as a story · 1 points
HN discussionZerocash is now shielded by default ( https://electriccoin.co/blog/new-releases-to-help-enable-zca... ), does that count?
Comment linking /blog/new-releases-to-help-enable-zcash-shielded-by-default/
on “Dusting “Attack” via Tornado Cash to Public Wallets”Submitted Security Assessments: NU3 Specifications, Blossom Implementation and Sapling Doc as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> I don't have the same good feelings about the hashes or the asymmetric crypto yet. You might be interested in https://electriccoin.co/blog/lessons-from-the-history-of-att... (caveat: it’s a few years old, and it might have mistakes). It’s an empirical view on the history of hash functions. The results were very interesting to me. Against collision attacks, it kind of seems like we figured out how to make hash func…
Comment linking /blog/lessons-from-the-history-of-attacks-on-secure-hash-functions/
on “Too Much Crypto [pdf]”There's also this more recent post: https://electriccoin.co/blog/turnstile-enforcement-against-c... It sounds like that plan has been codified in recent clients, so they should automatically reject transactions that would cause a pool's balance to go negative.
Comment linking /blog/turnstile-enforcement-against-counterfeiting/
on “Why and How zk-Snark Works (2019)”Even stranger are comments made in this link: https://electriccoin.co/blog/defense-against-counterfeiting-... Especially this part: >Upon detecting this condition, the Zcash Company would begin its investigation into the possible source of the vulnerability as well as which pool, or pools, are affected. If we are able to identify that the bug affects only a single shielded pool, we might choose to effectively deacti…
Comment linking /blog/defense-against-counterfeiting-in-shielded-pools/
on “Why and How zk-Snark Works (2019)”Not the parent, but I think he was referring to https://electriccoin.co/blog/zcash-counterfeiting-vulnerabil...
Comment linking /blog/zcash-counterfeiting-vulnerability-successfully-remediated/
on “Why and How zk-Snark Works (2019)”The encrypted memo field of Zcash could lend itself to some interesting use-cases outside of transaction processing. https://electriccoin.co/blog/encrypted-memo-field/ It looks like this capability is being expanded with in-band secret distribution: https://zips.z.cash/protocol/canopy.pdf
Comment linking /blog/encrypted-memo-field/
on “Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?”Grin and Beam use Mimblewimble, but Monero uses ring signatures to obscure the transaction graph (with every real input hiding among 16 decoys), and Zcash uses ZK-SNARK zero knowledge proofs [1]. This makes the latter two chains grow at a much faster rate [2] and makes nodes unable to identify the UTXO set of unspent outputs, making nodes much more resource intensive. [1] https://electriccoin.co/blog/explaining-halo…
Comment linking /blog/explaining-halo-2/
on “Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf]”> * the fact that 20% of the block reward is given to the founders as a "fee". i.e. 6 people will end up with 20% of a "global currency". This applied to the first 4 years of issuance, so it's actually only 10% of the total supply, and it went to not just founders but also advisors, investors, etc, and some was donated to the Zcash foundation, so the portion that was personal profit for 6 people was much smaller! Th…
Comment linking /reaching-consensus/
on “Zcash Open Major Grants”There are a few reasons. 1. Audibility. I know for certain that my BTC is safe, sitting in a UTXO that everyone in the universe can see. Counterparties can verify the provenance of the coin. With Zcash and Monero, you face the risk of (invisible/unknown) inflation (a property of an unauditable supply), protocol bugs (such as failures in the zkp) and counterparty rejection due to lack of coin provenance. This risk af…
Comment linking /blog/zcash-counterfeiting-vulnerability-successfully-remediated/
on “IRS offered $625,000 bounty to anyone who could “crack” Monero; no one succeeded”One of the applications are ZK-Rollups [1] which allow developers to move heavy computation off a blockchain. The blockchain receives the results and only validates proofs that they are valid. This is especially useful on Ethereum because its computational throughput is pretty low. There's also ZCash [2], which is a cryptocurrency that lets you make untraceable transactions. This is in stark contrast to Bitcoin or E…
Comment linking /blog/snark-explain/
on “Cryptographers Solve Decades-Old Privacy Problem”Zcash plans to switch to proof of stake by 2024: https://electriccoin.co/blog/ecc-roadmap-calls-for-focus-on-...
Comment linking /blog/ecc-roadmap-calls-for-focus-on-wallet-proof-of-stake-and-interoperability/
on “EU should ban energy-intensive mode of crypto mining, regulator says”Git isn't relying on collision-resistance, it's relying on second-preimage[0] resistance, which is to say: in order to sneak a hash collision in to a git repository, you have to sneak _something else_ that's already trusted (e.g. via code review) into the repository; collisions can't (yet) be generated for arbitrary hashes. I haven't heard of any second-preimage attacks against MD5, much less SHA-1, so mlindner was…
Comment linking /blog/lessons-from-the-history-of-attacks-on-secure-hash-functions/
on “Whatever happened to SHA-256 support in Git”"CYPHERPUNK ZERO Inspired by Zcash and Halo cryptography, the Cypherpunk Zero Creative Universe is a collaborative effort between ECC [2], illustrator Stranger Wolf [3] and select ecosystem partners. Consisting of a forthcoming series of webcomics, NFTs [1] and physical collectibles, the project explores the relationship between privacy, self-sovereignty and creative freedom." [1]: https://halo.electriccoin.co/nft/…
Comment linking /
on “Bitcoin and the Rise of the Cypherpunks (2016)”
