Crypto Academy Week 16 - Homework Post for @levycore || Privacy Coin – ZCASH

Thank you @levycore, for your lecture on privacy coins this week. I am glad to be here and I’m presenting my homework on ZCASH, a privacy coin I found interesting to explore.

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For this homework, I will be looking at the following in details:

All About Zcash
Steps In Creating a Zcash Wallet (Zecwallet Lite)
Why Zcash – Advantages and Disadvantages
Conclusion

All About Zcash
Zcash is an independent privacy coin built on a very strong blockchain geared at providing maximum privacy to users in terms of transactions. This is backed with efficient transaction and low fees for all users.

Although shielded Zcash provides confidential transactions, it also gives room for users to select the option of sharing addresses and transaction information for the purpose of government regulatory compliance and audit.

Zcash has multiple transaction types, which include: Private transactions, Deshielding transactions, Shielding transactions and Public transactions.

It should be noted that a Zcash address is either a private address (z-address) or transparent address (t-address). For quick recognition of these types of addresses, a z-address starts with a z and a transparent address starts with a t. The four transaction types mentioned above falls within this two types of addresses.

On the blockchain, a Z to Z is made to appear to the entire users in order to ascertain that the transaction was completed and fees were paid. Besides, the addresses that sent and received the transaction, amount transferred and memo are encrypted, thus not publicly available. This encryption is made possible through the use of zero-knowledge proofs.

It is important to note that the owner of the Z-addresses can choose to disclose all transaction information to a third party for the purpose of regulation compliance or auditing.

A T to T transaction works just like in Bitcoin transaction. Here, the sender, receiver and transaction amount are publicly available for view by the public. In our research today, we focus more on the Z to Z transactions, as it meets the criteria of this course.

Steps In Creating a Zcash Wallet (Zecwallet Lite)
Here wewill be looking at how to create a Zcash wallet called Zecwallet Lite, starting from installation to creating the wallet, using an android smart phone.

1.Open your Google Play store and type the name Zecwallet Lite. When it pops up, click on the name and it will open a page where you will be asked to install. Click the install icon and it will start installing immediately.

2.Now your Application is on your phone. Click on it and you will see create new wallet and restore seed. Click on **create new wallet. This will open the seed phrase page.

3.Write down the seed phrase and store in a save place. This can be used to recover your funds if your device gets damaged or stolen. So keep it save. Then click on I HAVE SAVED THE SEED.

4.Now your wallet is ready for transactions. You can still get your wallet seed under menu.

Why Zcash – Advantages and Disadvantages
The choice Zcash for this research work is back by the availability of more advantages than disadvantages.

Advantages of Using Zcash
1.Low Fees Transactions: Zcash supports a low fees transaction of 0.0001Zcash per transaction, coupled with fast speed.
2.It is supported by large number of wallets and top exchanges.
3.Address and transaction privacy: Zcash provides two types of addresses; shielded and transparent. This gives users a wide gap of choices for their transactions.
4.Encripted Memos: This allows a sender to include useful information to the receiver and it is made in such a way that only the receiver gets to see the information, thus promoting more privacy.
5.Viewing of keys: The owner of the wallet have the option of disclosing all information for audit or regulation. This improves transparency.

Disadvantages of Using Zcash
1.Owner’s information is limited to that included in the memo by the sender. Thus, a sender can decide to hide some information from the receiver and that can cause problems when audit and regulatory agents comes in for the information.

2.Zcash supports multisignature transactions. Thus, in this case if one party is not available to approve the transaction, funds cannot be sent.

Conclusion
Zcash is a huge private coin with a robust blockchain to explore. Their services meets both privacy and transparency needs of users. Thus, her offers is a great attraction to the growing need of privacy and transparency of blockchain users around the world.

Thank you for reading.

Reference

Cc:
@levycore
@steemitblog
@steemcurator01
@steemcurator02