Official History of Hush

Winners write the history books.
  -- my 6th grade history teacher

There is a lot of garbage "information" about cryptocoins in general, and Hush in particular, spread out across years of blog posts with incorrect/broken links and out of date info. This repo takes on the burden of documenting the history of the Hush community, from the earliest beginnings, until right now.

Please do not help blockchain analysts, and redact information as needed.

This repo should not contain:

• zaddrs
• transaction ids

Earliest Pre-History

Hush was originally called "Zdash" and an online contest for a new name is how we got the name "Hush", which also could have been called "Hash" 😂

The "Zdash" Genesis Block was mined November 17 2016 and the name was changed to Hush shortly after. HUSH was the 4th Zcash Protocol blockchain to be launched, shortly after KMD, ZEC and ZCL.

The first Hush source code was fork of Zcash 1.0.8 (itself a fork of Bitcoin 0.11.2). The original version of HUSH used a Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm of Digishield V3, inherited from Zcash. It also inherited optional privacy (zaddrs were not mandatory to use) from Zcash.

When the Sprout CVE took a shit on the industry, Duke Leto decided to migrate to a Komodo (KMD) source code fork, which was based on Zcash 2.0. This was the least amount of work to switch to Sapling zaddrs and still have Delayed-Proof-of-Work and various other improvements. A major reason for this is that Duke Leto was also a KMD core developer and had written thousands of lines of code and added new features to KMD, which the community wanted to also have in the new version of HUSH.

A very nice history of Hush releases can be found here: https://en.everybodywiki.com/Hush_(cryptocurrency) . Click "Expand" to see the full release history.

Cryptopia Double Spend Attack

Hush was one of the many coins which were attacked on Cryptopia. Delayed-Proof-of-Work had already been written by Duke Leto (Hush was the first Zcash Protocol coin to add DPoW), but had not been deployed to exchanges. Exchanges rarely updated software and there was no communication line between developers and exchange operators, just like always.

New Blockchain Feeling

The Hush v3 mainnet (a KMD source code fork) launched in April 2019, and will always be known as the world's first Pure Sapling Zcash Protocol coin. The importance of this is that Sprout zaddrs were painfully and unusably slow, except for research+development, then had a horrible inflation bug. Hush avoids the entire attack surface of Sprout by not having a single Sprout transactions in our blockchain. This leads to Hush being much faster than Zcash or other coins to sync a full node. Current reports say that on fast internet the full HUSH v3 blockchain can be synced in about 2 hours (Feb 2021).

Enforced Privacy: Consensus

Hush enabled enforced privacy (z2z) at Block 340K in November 2020, directly competing with Monero. This is enforced privacy at the blockchain level. Hush also has network-level privacy: Hush nodes use TLS 1.3 to talk with eachother, not plaintext, like Bitcoin and Zcash.

Enforced Privacy: P2P

The original Hush source code had TLS implemented, and then when we migrated to KMD, that was lost. Finally, the developer miodrag wrote a new TLS 1.3 implementation and Hush now requires all nodes to use encrypted p2p connections as of Hush 3.6.1. This used to be called -tls=only (when TLS was optional) but now that option has no effect and the internals always enforce privacy.

Additionally, Hush converted from the elderly and CVE-ridden OpenSSL to the modern WolfSSL library to implement P2P privacy, which reduces our attack surface and supports low-memory devices.

Reduced Metadata Leakage

Hush has a unique set of features called Sietch which reduces many types of metadata leakage in public blockchain data which plague Zcash Protocol blockchains. Hush is the only blockchain to currently have this feature and all Hush Smart Chains launched with Hush source code will also inherit this feature.

New Domain: hush.is

Hush switched from myhush(.)org to hush.is because some ex-community members stole and sold the domain in some good old-fashioned Internet Drama, documented here