I came across Zcoin a little while and it was confusing to understand zcoin, zerocoin, zcash etc etc. In general the zero-starting ones are attempts by a team of researchers to give true anonymity to the bitcoin blockchain. They project started off as zerocoin.

The origin story can be shown as

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Zerocoin protocol ----> Zcoin

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The same authors (some of them) wanted to have different encryption algorithms & devised an alternate method.

Zerocoin: Anonymous Distributed E-Cash from Bitcoin
Ian Miers, Christina Garman, Matthew Green, Aviel D. Rubin
The Johns Hopkins University Department of Computer Science, Baltimore, USA

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(Zerocoin ---> ZeroCash) Protocols ----> ZCash currency

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so what is the difference ?

From a technical standpoint both the coins differs in

1. Encryption algorithms being used
2. Initial process of genesis block which is termed as "ceremony"

• Zcoin uses RSA and further uses zercoin protocol and a process called minting to create transactional anonymous coins.
• Zcash uses zk-SNARKs

author's earlier post outlines mining of Zcash & this one is to outline mining of zcoin.

mining

• Generic details of mining is available here : http://zcoin.io/guide-on-how-to-mine-zcoin-xzc/

• https://xzc.supernova.cc pool can be used for mining as solo-mining is not practical with CPUs.

• install necessary packages

apt-fast install git automake libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl-dev libgmp-dev screen

• create a directory to keep the code & get the code
  mkdir /home/zcoin; cd /home/zcoin/ ; git clone https://github.com/JayDDee/cpuminer-opt.git

cd /home/zcoin/cpuminer-opt/ ; sh build.sh ; make ; make install

• To start mining
  cpuminer -a lyra2z -o stratum+tcp://xzc.suprnova.cc:1599 -u username.workername -p password

• to make mining persistent / autostart after reboot you can add the following to /etc/rc.local:

screen -d -m /usr/local/bin/cpuminer -a lyra2z -o stratum+tcp://xzc.suprnova.cc:1599 -u username.workername -p password 1>/dev/null 2>/dev/null&

compiling the ZCoin miner on macOS

The mac os compliation is little tricky.

• install the necessary packages

brew install automake autoconf openssl gmp

``git clone https://github.com/Optiminer/cpuminer-xzc.git```

cd /home/zcoin/cpuminer-xzc

cd asm ; ../nomacro.pl ; cd ..

sh autogen.sh

• found the following after lot of search, though don't understand this one correctly.
  perl -p -i -e "s/#if \(WINDOWS\)/#define ASM 0\n#if (WINDOWS)/g" algo/neoscrypt.c

./configure --with-crypto=$PWD/ --with-curl

make ; make install