Zcash is in the same category as other so-called “privacy coins” such as Monero, PivX, and Verge. The creators of Zcash want to use the underlying technology of Bitcoin and improve it by giving their users the ability to make their transactions untraceable and thus maintain their privacy. The privacy coin market is highly competitive and Zcash sets itself apart with its focus on science-backed technology and a team that is dedicated to decentralization and privacy.
Who Is Behind Zcash?
As the origins of Zcash lie in academia it’s not particularly surprising that the team behind the cryptocurrency contains a number of experienced computer scientists and cryptographers. This highly experienced team used cryptography to design a way to “shield” ZEC transactions and thus protect user privacy. Zcash gives users the ability to engage in two types of transactions. The first is a transparent transaction, which works essentially the same way as a Bitcoin transaction. Users also have the option to store and send their currency from a shielded address. This allows users to hide the metadata behind their transactions and thus maintain control over their privacy. zcash shielded wallets. A user can send money to a shielded wallet from a transparent wallet and this will only reveal the funds sent and not the funds received, this also works in reverse.
What Is Zcash’s zk-SNARK?
These shields are created using zk-SNARKs (the acronym stands for Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge). This is an interesting form of zero-knowledge cryptography. They allow one party (the prover) to prove to another (the verifier) possession of data (e.g. a secret key) without ever revealing the information or directly interacting with each other. Zcash is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency. See our cryptocurrency guides on Monero, Dash, and Verge — these are also known as privacy-oriented coins. This means that rather than directly validating the sender and receiving addresses, Zcash is able to validate a transaction without revealing any of the underlying information.
What Proof Is Required To Validate A Zcash Transaction?
In order to validate the transaction, the sender of a ‘shielded transaction’ constructs a proof to demonstrate that: The input values sum to the output values for each shielded transfer. The sender proves that they have the private spending keys of the input notes, giving them the authority to spend. The private spending keys of the input notes are cryptographically linked to a signature over the whole transaction, in such a way that the transaction cannot be modified by a party who did not know these private keys. A shielded transaction is also able to verify that a user possesses enough ZEC in order to process the transaction by using “commitments” and a corresponding nullifier.
What Are Zcash’s Unique Identifiers?
These commitments are all given a unique identifier called an “rho”, which is used to verify the payments. When a shielded transaction is spent the sender publishes a nullifier, which is the rho’s hash from an unused commitment. This provides a zero-knowledge way to demonstrate that they are authorized to make the transaction. The team behind ZEC insist that their blockchain is truly independent and decentralized, despite accusations that it is a corporate coin. They argue that because the protocol behind Zcash is open-source, they don’t have any control over the mining and distribution of ZEC, nor have access to any special shielded features.
Bitcoin vs Zcash: Similarities And Differences
How does Zcash compare to the leading cryptocurrency Bitcoin? What are the key differences? See below for our head-to-head comparison:
The Brief History Of Zcash
The precursor to Zcash started its life in form of Zerocoin. This John Hopkins University (Baltimore, USA) project was designed to address one of the primary drawbacks of Bitcoin, its lack of privacy. This eventually led to collaboration with cryptographers from MIT and Tel Aviv University in 2014, who improved the underlying protocol of Zerocoin. In 2015 the first mentions of collaboration between the Zerocoin team and Zooko surfaced and the coin was rebranded Zcash and released on October 28th, 2016 by the Zcash company.
How Was Zcash’s Launch Welcomed?
The launch of the coin was met with a lot of hype that resulted in the cryptocurrency being worth more than 6 Bitcoins (over $5,000) on the day of launch. This speculation quickly died down and since then ZEC has grown at an organic rate. The original launch was met with some controversy. Zcash was created using a “Parameter generation ceremony”. This involved 6 individuals who each created a fragment of the eventual “master passkey” necessary for Zcash to work. These keys were described as toxic waste.
How Do Zcash Master Keys Work?
A master key requires all 6 shards. This requires a lot of trust in the 6 individuals involved and the ceremony has been described as little more than security theatre. If the passkeys were somehow leaked or the individuals involved had colluded then it is theoretically possible for somebody to acquire the master passkey, which would give them the ability to create their own ZEC. It is impossible to prove the process worked. That being said, the security surrounding the event was particularly tight and there were no reported problems, bar a journalist’s phone acting very strangely.
How Could Zcash Be Compromised?
Despite the potential problems, it is also worth keeping in mind that only a single participant needs to have successfully destroyed all traces of their shard in order to ensure the ceremony was a success. So in order for someone to gain access to the master key, it would require all six participants to either be dishonest or compromised. By May 2017 the Zcash foundation had launched as “A non-profit organization, serving the Zcash community and promoting financial privacy”. This was a major milestone for Zcash which had always maintained that the currency was decentralized to serve the public’s interests, despite claims to the contrary.
How Is Zcash Made?
Zcash is mined in a similar way to most other cryptocurrencies. Governments or banks are centralized institutions that physically print money. Instead, Zcash and other cryptocurrencies take a decentralized approach. ZEC is created by its community through mining. The principles of the basic technology behind Zcash are the same as the technology behind Bitcoin. Both coins are mined through solving algorithms using computing power. The blockchain is secured through a consensus mechanism called Proof-of-Work (POW).
How Does Zcash Mining Work?
A miner uses their computer in order to solve complicated equations. Once the equation is solved, a new block is added to the chain and the miner is rewarded with ZEC. This reward system serves two purposes. The first is to encourage miners to devote computing power in order to complete transactions on the Zcash blockchain. Ethereum is now moving from using a proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism to implementing a proof-of-stake (PoS) protocol. The second is to regulate the creation of new ZEC, which is then distributed by the miners.
What Is The Zcash Founders’ Reward?
Zcash differs significantly from other cryptocurrencies because until 2020 the founders will receive a “founders reward” of 20% of all ZEC created. They have agreed to set aside 10% of this in order to create the Zcash foundation. This means that until 2020 miners receive 80% of all coins produced, the founders receive 10% and the Zcash foundation receives the other 10%. After 2020 the reward will halve and miners will receive 100% of all ZEC produced.
What Do Experts Say About Zcash?
As with most cryptocurrencies, the short-term price outlook for Zcash can be described in one way — volatile. The cryptocurrency market is still young and therefore still unstable. You should expect fairly big peaks and troughs in the short term. In the medium, to long-term, you may see Zcash experience a slow and steady increase in value as it has in the past. You will see ups and downs and while some do buy low and sell high, this is a more risky approach than holding for the long term.
Edward Snowden’s Opinion On Zcash And Privacy Coins
Zcash has proven to be fairly divisive amongst experts. Some, such as Edward Snowden, have argued that Zcash is important because it is one of the few privacy coins developed by actual cryptographers. Snowden has argued that this makes Zcash safer to use than Monero which he has described as “amateur crypto” pointing to traceability issues and design errors with Monero. “Zcash’s privacy tech makes it the most interesting Bitcoin alternative. Bitcoin is great, but if it’s not private, it’s not safe.” Edward Snowden
Manfred Karrer On Zcash
Regulation And Competition Others have also come out in support of Zcash and privacy coins in general.
Manfred Karrer, Developer and Founder of Bitsquare said: “I expect three things. One, regulations on cryptocurrency exchanges will come. Two, the war on cash, gold, and cryptocurrencies will accelerate. And three, privacy-protecting technologies like Monero and Zcash will elevate in importance.”Manfred Karrer, Founder of Bitsquare Despite these positives, there are a number of experts who believe that Zcash is too centralized to be considered a true privacy coin.
社区认可还体现在精英的认可上。早在 17 年,莱特币创始人 Charlie Lee 就明确发表过推特说“Decred 基本上是正确版的 Dash,做到了 Dash 想做的,我真的相信 Decred。”,同时他后来也在推特公开恳求币安上线 Decred。另外,币圈著名的估值理论专家 Placeholder Capital 创始人 Chris Burniske,也是胖协议作者 Joel 的合伙人,他也是 Decred 的死忠。另外还有上文提到的 Coinbase 的 Max Bronstein 等一批币圈精英表达过对 Decred 的喜爱和认可。
The first thing to know is that Ripple is both a platform and a currency. The Ripple platform is an open source protocol which is designed to allow fast and cheap transactions.
Unlike Bitcoin that was never intended to be a simple payment machine, Ripple is definitely going to rule all the international transactions worldwide. Pretty ambitious, but who knows? Maybe currency exchanges will disappear in a few years like Blockbuster stores did.
The platform has its own currency (XRP) but also allows everybody to use the platform to create their own via RippleNet.
What is RippleNet?
RippleNet is a network of institutional payment-providers such as banks and money services businesses that use solutions developed by Ripple to provide a frictionless experience to send money globally.
Let’s give an example: Firstly, Mr. Jones lives in New York and has a chocolate box he doesn’t need. He is very interested to watch a baseball game, but doesn’t have a ticket. Secondly, Ms. Smith lives in Los Angeles and has a rare stamp she would like to give away for a chocolate box. Lastly, we have Mr. Brown who lives in Alaska and is looking very much for a rare stamp, and he a ticket for a baseball game in New York.
In our current system, these people would probably never find each other and remain with their ‘not valuable’ valuables.
But in Ripple world they could say: “Hey, I have chocolate, I want baseball” and the system will look for a shortest and cheapest combination to make it happen.
Moreover, the platform allows to make payments in any currency including Bitcoin and have a minimal internal transaction commission of $0.00001, yes that’s the right amount of zeros. The only reason it’s not free is to prevent DDos attacks.
What is XRP
XRP is a token used for representing the transfer of value across the Ripple Network. The main purpose of XRP is to be a mediator for other – both cryptocurrencies and fiat – exchanges. The best way to describe XRP is a ‘Joker’. Not the creepy Batman enemy, but the card that can be any other card. If you want to exchange dollars to euro, it can be dollar with dollars and euro with euros to minimize the commission. As highlighted above, the transaction cost on Ripple is $0.00001.
An interesting fact: after the transaction the amount of $0.00001 ‘disappears’ from the platform and can’t be replenished. So, with every transaction the world becomes $0.00001 poorer. It is designed that way to prevent spammers attacks.
Who created Ripple (XRP)
The protocol as a working prototype was created away back in 2004.
But the real history starts in 2013, when Jed McCaleb, the creator of the EDonkey network invited a bunch of world rank investors to invest in Ripple Labs.
Who are Ripple Labs founders
Chris Larsen is an angel investor, business executive and a privacy activist considered to be the richest person in cryptocurrency. He’s best known for co-founding several startups in the field of online financial services, starting with an online mortgage lender E-loan back in 1996.
Jed McCaleb is a well-known programmer and entrepreneur. He co-founded several crypto-startups, including Ripple, Stellar, eDonkey, Overnet as well as a cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox (he sold his share and the platform was re-coded way before the infamous hack), which at its prime was handling over 70% of all Bitcoin transactions worldwide.
What is the Ripple protocol consensus algorithm (RPCA)?
Unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, Ripple doesn’t have a blockchain. A cryptocurrency without a Blockchain may sound pretty strange – if it doesn’t have a Blockchain, how does it verify transactions and makes sure everything is ok? For that purpose Ripple has is own patented technology: the Ripple protocol consensus algorithm (RPCA).
The word ‘consensus’ in the name means that if every node is in agreement with all the rest, there is no issue. Imagine, there is an ancient arena with one hundred wise old men and a city needs agreement from all of them to make a decision. If everybody agree you can start a war, end a war, rise taxes, proclaim Olympic games and all other sorts of interesting stuff. But if one of them doesn’t – nothing will happen until we will figure out what’s his problem.
What is Ripple used for
Low commission currency exchange. There are many currencies that can’t be directly converted to each other. So, banks need to use the US dollar as a mediator. So, there is a double commission: converting currency A to USD and USD to currency B. Ripple is a mediator too, but much cheaper than USD.
Fast international transactions. Average transaction time is 4 seconds. Compare it to hour or more for Bitcoin and a few days for regular banking systems.
Payment ecosystem. User can basically issue his own currency for fast and cheap transaction. For example, one can create a currency to buy and see vintage vinyls or action figures between the collectors.
What are Ripple’s benefits?
– Ripple is originally designed as a day to day payment system, so it is much more powersafe than Bitcoin. As the results, the transactions are much quicker and cheaper.
– Ripple has started as an official organization, as its main focus is to be used by banks. So it is not a subject of multiple regulation checks as many other cryptocurrencies.
– Ripple has the ability to be exchanged to any currency or valuable (like gold) with a unified minimal commission.
Which banks support Ripple
Santander
Axis Bank
Yes Bank
Westpac
Union Credit
NBAD
UBS
Is Ripple a good investment?
Disclaimer: there is no such thing as a 100% safe investment, and each decision has its risks. In any case it is up to you to decide. However, below are some pros and cons to help you.
Pros:
As highlighted above, Ripple is an official organization with the trust of many banks – it’s not another Blockchain startup from a noname company.
No inflation. All the tokens are initially mined and already exist.
The more banks use it as their transaction platform, the higher the value of XRP. If one day, all the banks decide to start using it as a unified bank currency instead of processing redundant currency exchanges – it will make a nice fortune for all the early birds who invested in Ripple.
Cons:
It is highly centralized. The whole idea of cryptocurrency is to avoid centralized control. As the tokens are already mined, the Ripple developers can decide when and how much to release, or not to release. So, it is basically like investing in a bank.
In addition to centalization, today it is pretty much a monopoly as Ripple Labs owns 61 percent of the coins.
It is open source – very smart, but still once the code is accessible there is a good chance many people will try to hack it. Some of them even might succeed.
Why is Ripple criticized?
Although there is a long list of very respectable banks that are planning to use Ripple, according to the Financial Times most of them are still on the testing stage. The few who transact real money use the platform but not the token. So, perhaps banks “are not that into Ripple”.
It can freeze your transactions. The biggest example of this is when Jed McCaleb, founder of Ripple Labs, tried to sell more than a million dollars worth of Ripple. The transaction was reversed. There are rumors that Jed breached the contract, but even though, the very possibility of freezing a transaction is against basic cryptocurrency principles.
Ripple’s Future. What the experts are saying?
Roman Guelfi-Gibbs, the CEO and Lead Systems Designer for Pinnacle Brilliance Systems Inc.:
“Ripple certainly has the potential to move up a notch in 2018, but I think it will be more likely in 2019. As the market observes more projects being coded in other algorithms such as XRP, ETH will likely take a backseat to the next big coin/token. It will take some time for the markets to digest this, so I am projecting 2019 to be the likely time for it to take place. Of course, with crypto, anything can happen, so watch closely.”
Shidan Gouran, president of Global Blockchain Technologies:
“Ripple is unlikely to go up by one or two notches in the cryptocurrency world in 2018, and this is the case for three reasons. The first reason is the sheer dollar volume that separates each of the three currencies in the top positions, in terms of their market cap. Bitcoin is at over $191 billion, Ethereum is at over $84 billion, and Ripple is at over $35 billion. To displace Ethereum would require a deficit of about $49 billion to be closed (which is more than double Iceland’s entire national GDP). The second reason is that the use cases for Ripple are mostly for the trade of assets, not for day-to-day spending. As consumer awareness of cryptocurrencies will rise significantly in 2018 and beyond, the interest of the masses will be on cryptocurrencies that can be used as currencies, not just for investment transactions. Finally, the third reason is that because Ripple cannot be bought with fiat currencies, one must purchase existing cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum to purchase XRP. This goes on to feed demand for Bitcoin and Ethereum, and will only solidify their positions as the top two cryptocurrencies on the market. “
John-Paul McCaffrey, associate director at Long Island University:
“Although currently there isn’t a platform to exchange fiat currency for Ripple (XRP) this may change sooner than you think.”
Samson Williams, CSO of Ireland-based fintech firm SeedUps:
“Though not a cryptocurrency at all, it is the child of banks. So it’ll get the natural bump from [the] 2018 Recession.”
随着比特币等cryptocurrency的价格上升,以及更多机构持有比特币,SI将有更多的无息存款用来投资,以及网络效应产生更多的转账会带来大量的费用收入。而支出方面主要由员工的薪酬构成,预计不会有较大变动。接下里我们建个简单的模型来对SI进行估值。我们假设SI持有的cryptocurrency全为比特币,投资净利率,转账费率,支出和税率不变。根据Q3财报,我们可得到SI年化EPS为1.48,对应9/30当天股价14.4,PE ratio为9.7。12/24号当天的比特币价格为23736,通过计算得出年化EPS为5.92,如果采用相同的PE ratio 9.7来估值,SI股价为57.6,与实际的63.57很接近。传统银行例如JPM和BOA的PE ratio为15左右,我认为SI的估值有进一步上升的空间。