Steemit Crypto Academy Season 2 Assignment: Privacy Coins || Zcash

Introduction

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Zcash, a cryptocurrency built on a blockchain network, similar to Bitcoin but provides anonymity and privacy for its users. Zcash was launched on October 28, 2016, as a fork of Bitcoin when its founder, Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn found flaws in the Bitcoin network which was mainly privacy. The launching and use of Zcash have ensured private and anonymous transactions which are not visible to third parties (including government officials), unlike Bitcoin where a third party who has access to a laptop/mobile device and internet connection can see every transaction on a blockchain, Zcash finds a solution to this flaw. Zcash formally known as Zerocoin is a project by Zerocoin Electric Company that runs the open-source network for the currency.

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Understanding Zcash

Zcash is a digital currency that can be used to purchase daily individual needs and also used for wealth storage. Zcash can be traded and earned. Zcash has made a constant effort to improve the coin and still hasn’t given up on improving privacy.

Zcash doesn’t really work like other cryptocurrencies whose users details are known by third parties due to the fact that they somehow make their details known and tied to their transactions when using the wallet addresses for transaction due to its public address, Zcash makes sure it’s got a strong privacy setting and make use of a private address for its transaction. Zcash makes use of a shielded address that is interoperable and allows transparent transactions when making a transaction. Zcash makes sure its users have confidential transactions and these are made to happen because of its shielded addresses. Zcash uses "Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge" to make transactions private.

Mining Zcash

Mining Zcash is possible with CPU and GPU but it very difficult to mine with ASIC miner. This helps for healthy competition instead of monopolizing the mining process to the rich and large companies and allowing anyone to mine the coin on their own. Zcash network functions using an altered Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism.

Zcash Market Index

Zcash as at time of writing is traded at $151.95, with a Market Cap of $1,807,187,846 with a 24 hours Volume of $465,207,922, a Circulating Supply of 11,924,081.25 ZEC, and a Max Supply of 21,000,000 ZEC. It is ranked 55 on coinmarketcap.

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Creating a Zcash Wallet

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• To create a Zcash wallet, visit https://z.cash/

• Click on "get a wallet" on the page

• On the wallet page https://z.cash/wallets/, there are a variety of wallets to choose from. There are full node wallets, third-party wallets that support web, mobile, and desktops, Zcash official wallets. I will be choosing ZecWallet Lite for desktops. Click on Visit site.

• On https://www.zecwallet.co/, click on download for desktop

• Pick a window option of your choice. I will be downloading the Window Binaries

• The wallet is launched, I clicked on create a new wallet.

• Click on start wallet, after saving the seed phrase in a safe place.

• Wallet is setting up

• Wallet is created

Reason For Choosing Zcash

Because of its privacy for users, while transacting, there is a strong competition will among other cryptocurrencies thereby causing a price surge and adoption. Demand increase will also drive the Zcash price upward and this leads to the perception in investors' minds. After several analyses by the investor, Zcash is the currency to use giving encouragement to industries making use of it for transactions due to its value privacy, and due to its transparency and anonymity, there is trust in it.

Advantages of investing in Zcash

• Zcash is made accessible to all to mine, as it doesn’t need the use of hardware when mining
• There is transparency in its transactions and all transactions are made private.
• It gives users the ability to view through transaction details with the help of a view key
• There is anonymity in Zcash’s transaction with the help of its zk-SNARK technology
• It is based on a very reliable and fast network
• Transaction charges are low

Disadvantages of investing in zcash

• There are scalability issues with Zcash making it process only 26 transactions in a second
• It ican be used for illegal transactions by criminals
• Investors can only get a percentage of its mining reward

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cc: @levycore