ZCash (ZEC) Opinions

I don't know a lot, i bought in the recent dip for around 140 and pretty much the next day it was over 200 so i was happy.

Ripple i'm more familar with. Nice 25% rise there too. From everything i've seen of Ripple if it can become an option for banking transactions it will do well. It doesn't need to take over from Swift, even if it is just got 10-20%.

Bitcoin is sucking the life out of all the other coins right now

Even ripple has had a slight correction in the past few hours.


Edit : Am I correct in saying that the Bitcoin Gold fork happens on 25th October?
Should be interesting to see how high BTC can go in the next 2 weeks....

ZeroThreat wrote: »

Edit : Am I correct in saying that the Bitcoin Gold fork happens on 25th October?
Should be interesting to see how high BTC can go in the next 2 weeks....

The Bitcoin Gold fork has already happened -- the dev(s) are already pre-mining the coins since Oct 1st. It will become "open" on Oct 25th.
Frankly, the Bitcoin Gold fork will very likely be a non-event; the coins will probably be worth next-to-nothing within a couple of days.

The really big event will be the Segwit2x hardfork in mid-Novenber. Be sure to keep your current Bitcoin (1X) off-exchange at that time to ensure you get the free Segwith2X airdrop on a one-to-one ratio.

I've been reading up recently on Zcash and it's one of the coins that seems to have the potential to act as true digital cash.

I've been pretty much 100% Bitcoin for the last 4 years but I'm thinking of diversifying some of my holdings into ZEC soon so I'm going to outline pros and cons of this to see if it helps me make my decision!

Potential Pros

Digital Cash
One issue I have with Bitcoin is that everything is visible in the shared ledger, this could hinder adoption from business, e.g. would I want my employees to be able to see what everyone is being paid, or my competitors to see how much I'm paying for X. Zcash fixes this because nobody knows who sent what to who and how much was sent!

I still believe there is a place for Bitcoin, but not as digital cash.

Privacy
Zcash is a privacy coin, a lot of people are touting this as the next big thing in cryptocurrencies and it's something I want exposure to.

Technology
Zcash is using zero knowledge proofs which is an advanced form of cryptography which it seems people have great difficulty explaining exactly what it is! It's also originally a fork of Bitcoin which is the daddy!

It has been mentioned by Vitalik Buterin, Edward Snowden and John McAfee (I don't hold each of these people in the same regard but there's no such thing as bad publicity right?!)
https://twitter.com/rhhackett/status/942799687844851713
https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/913544739542241282
https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/941003398215761922

Team
They look to be a world class team of cryptographers, scientists and developers, still researching.
https://z.cash/team.html

Hype
There doesn't seem to be as much hype for this coin as others, they seem to be developers/scientists first and are concentrating on the technology which I like, obviously they will need to improve their marketing at some point so this could turn into a Con but I like what I see at the moment. It's also good that it doesn't have a vertical spike in it's chart like so many other coins which indicates to me that there's plenty of scope for growth.

Adoption
The Zcash Investment Trust has recently been launched by Grayscale Investments, the only other 2 investment products they have are based on Bitcoin and Ethereum, this seems like a pretty good endorsement to me.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2017/11/09/zcash-investment-trust-launches-expanding-investor-options-for-cryptocurrency-exposure

They have a partnership with JPMorgan who have adopted their technology: https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2017/05/22/jpmorgan-chase-to-integrate-zcash-technology-to-its-enterprise-blockchain-platform

Potential Cons

Run by a company
Like Ripple and look where they are! But the plan here seems to be to hand this project over to the community at some point.

Also the code is open source and mining is decentralised which is good.

Founders Reward
My understanding is that they take 20% of the mining reward for the first 4 years which then drops to zero. I personally don't see this as a major issue as long as it allows them to attract the top talent to work on this project and build a solid foundation (it's only been around for a year so far).

Processing Time
It takes a lot of RAM to process private transactions due to the cryptography in place. They are working on performance enhancements and I understand a release later this year will drastically improve this opening up the possibility for mobile wallets.
https://z.cash/blog/cultivating-sapling-faster-zksnarks.html

No Privacy By Default
Most transations at the moment are not private, mainly due to the processing issue above. Once that is fixed I'd expect privacy by default will be the norm. I think having the option for both types of transaction is good though.

Parameter Generation
In order to generate the parameters for zero-knowledge proofs, parameters must be generated and then destroyed (referred to in places as "toxic waste"), I have more reading to do on this.
https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/zk-snarks-under-the-hood-b33151a013f6
https://z.cash/technology/paramgen.html



Apologies for the wall of text, if anyone else knows of pros/cons I should be aware of before I invest it would be great if you could let me know, for now I have more reading to do on what zk-SNARKs are and how they differ from zk-STARKs!

Just an update to this, I've been doing some more reading on this project and it still impresses me.

I read this article which allays some of the concerns mentioned in the Cons above: https://www.zcashcommunity.com/2017/07/31/zcash-separating-fact-fiction

And the following article makes some good points: https://www.neverstopmarketing.com/5-reasons-bullish-zcash

And here's a great podcast episode from Radiolab about Zcash: http://www.radiolab.org/story/ceremony

Also Zcash have released their roadmap for 2018: https://z.cash/blog/roadmap-update-2017-12.html

This seems achievable and they have regular monthly releases, including a new release yesterday, which they announce on their blog here: https://z.cash/blog

I have to say I'm still very interested, they seem to be on a mission, I think 2018 will be a good year for Zcash, so it's time to go and put my money where my mouth is!!

Zcash has been on the rise since I bought a couple of days ago, it has increased by 60% since then. It reached a high on Bitfinex today of $800 (it reached ~$1300 on one of the Korean exchanges!!).

It's currently consolidating in the $720-$760 range, but it broke some major resistance today so I anticipate that this will move up above $1000 fairly soon after this period of consolidation, we'll see!