Hi,
It might be noob question:
Is zcash scalable - can there be ~10k/sec transactions in any close future.
Can it be realisticaly used as payment system, one that could be used by small country 5-8m ppl daily (~5-10m transactions daily). If not currently, than when?
Is it any better than LTC, or BTC or Dash - better i mean useful.
Is there any real reason for Zcash to exist, is it somehow unique or just some btc clone?
I mean it seems a bit like bitcoin wannabe. Almost same as bitcoin, but with some changes.
But generally it is nothing original, just modified bitcoin, right?
Please donāt ban me (or delete post), i would really like to get answers to those questions.
Because i am guessing atm, i would like to know if i am wrong.
Glanced at whitepaper, but whitepaper looks kinda pessimistic about future real life implementation.
" Is it any better than LTC, or BTC or Dash - better i mean useful. "
In my opinion the first thing you need to do is think a bit differently. Each blockchain has its own use case in some way. In my view : BTC is the digital gold of this eco system. Satoshi brought it to us, he gave us something amazing. Because of BTC all of these other projects came to life. LTC I view as another store of value coin. LTC was started by Charlie Lee and he was one of the very early Bitcoiners. In my eyes LTC holds a special place in the crypto world being the first alt based off of Bitcoin Core. It is the āsilverā to Bitcoins āgoldā.
DASH is an interesting project. In my opinion the only good thing DASH has going for it is marketing. I do not see people adopting it as a Digital Cash system for the world for many reasons. One being it uses an inferior method of cryptography when comparing it with Zcash. DASH uses a modified version of CoinJoin known as Darksend to mix its transactions. Where as Zcash uses tip of the spear crypt0 being developed by some of the brightest minds on our planet. Coinjoin is dated and has many points of failure.
Is there any real reason for Zcash to exist, is it somehow unique or just some btc clone?
Zcash is the only truly private coin that exists right now. It is unique because it was the first coin to implement zk snarks. Zcash is the first open, permissionless cryptocurrency that can fully protect the privacy of transactions using zero-knowledge cryptographyā¦ I suggest you look into zk Snarks and do some research there.
If you value privacy and believe people on earth have a right to it then you need to realize that this technology is amazing and can potentially do great things for the human race.
There are other coins with meaningful privacy. For eg: Pivx just switched from their Dash-inherited obfuscation to the Zerocoin protocol - which was the forerunner to Zcash that was submitted (but rejected) as a Bitcoin Improvment Proposal. While the Zerocoin techniques may not be as refined as those in Zcash, itās interesting to note that they donāt require a trusted setup.
Is it any better than LTC, or BTC or Dash - better i mean useful.
āBetterā depends on your use-case. as with all coins, they have their benefits and trade-offs. Zcash is first and foremost concerned with privacy and currently that comes with tradeoffs such as performance and the trusted setup (both of which are being actively addressed)
Is there any real reason for Zcash to exist, is it somehow unique or just some btc clone?
Glanced at whitepaper, but whitepaper looks kinda pessimistic about future real-life implementation.
Itās probably that is not full of hyperbolic marketing speak like some other whitepapers In my opinion, the future of this technology is very bright.
This is a great question, especially for people who are new to Zcash or cryptocurrency in general, as the task of comparing hundreds of different coins can seem quite daunting at first.
Firstly, as @garethtdavies noted in his reply, scalability is a general problem common to all cryptocurrencies, including both Bitcoin and Ethereum. At Devcon3 last month, Vitalik Buterin gave a talk about sharding and the future scalability of the Ethereum blockchain, which I encourage you to research if you want to learn more.
Now Iāll address the heart of your question, which is asking if Zcash is better/more useful than other cryptocurrencies, or just a Bitcoin clone with no real utility. The answer is that Zcash is extremely unique, and to date, the only cryptocurrency that solves the fungibility problem. Hereās a link to a previous reply I made which briefly explains how Zcash solves fungibility.
To be clear, there are still additional steps that users must take in order to properly wash your ZEC using z-addresses, such as not sending identical amounts in and out of your z-address (See this blog post for a more detailed explanation). However, when used correctly, Zcash is the only coin that is provably private and thus provably fungible.
Zerocoin requires either a trusted setup, or use of āRSA UFOsā which are very inefficient because they need large modulus sizes. Zcoin for example has a trusted setup (it uses moduli from an old RSA factoring challenge for which we have no guarantee the primes were deleted).
Thank you for pointing that out. I didnāt know how Zcoin did it but Pivx must have used the āRSA UFOā method. btw Did you mean efficient or inefficient when describing those large modulus sizes?
Generally is not meant to be used for general population, and canāt be implemented as solution if 500m ppl would like to use it daily for payment in shops. It is not meant to be common money.
It is meant to be specialistic money which provides privacy to sender of tx.
What is correct question?
If A sends zcash to B, than:
On the contrary, thereās plenty of scope for scaling to large transaction volumes. It will require substantial protocol changes but thatās okay.
Privacy isnāt only for the sender of a transaction, but also for the receiver. To answer your questions:
Correct, provided C does not have information held initially only by A and B.
Correct, as regards information visible on the blockchain. If A is concerned about network eavesdropping then they should also transmit the transaction over Tor.
Thank you again. Can you comment about whether or not a Zerocoin trusted setup would result in the need for proving key or similar data? btw Iām also trying to get clarification about this in the Pivx Discord chat now.
In my opinion, the future of this technology is very bright.