Zcash Ceremony

This is the story of of the Zcash Multi-Party Computation Ceremony. 

Zcash's zero-knowledge proofs rely on a set of public parameters which allow users to construct and verify private transactions. Due to cryptographic limitations, these parameters must be generated in a setup phase: some random numbers are sampled (which we refer to as the "toxic waste") which are then used to construct the parameters.

After the setup phase (aka "The Ceremony"), the toxic waste must be destroyed to prevent counterfeiting of Zcash.