The anonymous blockchain project Zcash will be launched at the end of October. Here are all the highlights!

In June this year, Babbitt reported on the anonymous digital currency project Zcash. At that time, Edward Snowden, the protagonist of the "Prism Gate" incident, commented on the project: "It can solve the surveillance risk problem of Bitcoin."

Zcash was formerly known as the Zerocoin project. Similar to the digital currency Bitcoin, the total amount of Zcash is also set at 21 million. Zcash did not follow the "ICO" rules that are popular in the current digital currency circle. It still uses the classic POW distribution method, which is a bit "retro". But if you expect it to achieve truly fair mining, you may be disappointed, because in the first four years, 20% of the miners' mining income will be automatically allocated to the Zcash team and its investors, which is 10% of the total amount.

The characteristic of the Zcash project is that its transactions automatically hide the sender, recipient and value of the blockchain transaction, and only those who have the correct view key key can access these contents. Of course, users can choose who can have this permission.

Since its inception, the Zcash project has attracted a lot of attention in the cryptocurrency community, including former Bitcoin Core chief developer Gavin Andresen
As well as Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin , they have become advisors to the project. In addition, Pantera Capital, an investment company focusing on digital currency and blockchain ecosystem, Digital Currency Group, and Distributed Capital under Wanxiang Group are all listed as investors in the project.

Now, the Zcash team has announced that it will release the source code of the Zcash project, and the birth of the genesis block of the Zcash blockchain is approaching.

“When the Zcash genesis block is created, anyone in the world will be able to mine Zcash, and users will be able to use the privacy benefits of zero-knowledge proofs to send Zcash to anyone around the world,” the announcement said. “The Zcash blockchain was created to launch the first open, permissionless, zero-knowledge proof financial system.”

It is reported that the launch time of Zcash blockchain is set on 2016年10月28日Before that, the Zcash team will cooperate with external audit companies and hackers to conduct relevant technical audits, review Zcash's code and correct possible vulnerabilities.

Zooko Wilcox, founder and CEO of Zcash, said in an interview with Bitcoin Magazine:

“We’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on the audit, and the final cost may be in the six figures, which is one of the reasons why we are raising funds to create Zcash.”

Zooko later confirmed that Zcash had spent six figures on the security audit.

“Honestly, the results so far make me feel uneasy about the security of Zcash,” Zooko admitted. “The auditors haven’t found any serious security vulnerabilities that could allow very harmful attacks (such as remote theft of Zcash), but they have found quite a few smaller ones (such as denial of service), and many of the bugs may be harmless or ‘maybe’ difficult to exploit, it’s hard to say. The number of bugs they have found so far makes me think that there must be more bugs in the Zcash code that we haven’t discovered yet. Maybe Zcash will follow the example of Bitcoin and still expose critical bugs after the blockchain is online and real money is flowing in, and then fix them in the software. This is one of the reasons why people should not invest more money than they can afford to invest in Zcash .”

Another point is that the first version of Zcash software, released on October 28, 2016, is just a后台程序和命令行工具running on Linux系统. "This means that there is no GUI (graphical user interface) for this software, which means that if you are not proficient in Linux, this software is temporarily out of your reach, and it cannot run on Mac or Windows systems," Zooko explained.

“After all, we are not GUI experts. Our team focuses on cryptography, information security, cryptocurrency, network technology, and distributed systems, and GUI design and implementation are exactly what we are not good at. I know that some wallet providers are already working on this. So please send a request to your favorite wallet provider and ask them to add support for Zcash!”

The transaction issue of Zcash coins is probably what investors are most concerned about.

The team said it does not plan to offer a Zcash exchange. Currently, there are some existing cryptocurrency exchanges that intend to add Zcash, but Zooko said it cannot disclose them for the time being.

About Zcash Mining

How difficult will Zcash mining be? In the early stages, can ordinary PC users participate? These questions are probably still unanswered at this point.

“Our goal is to make Zcash mining feasible on commodity hardware, such as your laptop,” Zooko explained. “That’s why we chose the PoW algorithm, however, it is not clear to what extent we can achieve this, or whether custom mining and large-scale mining operations will be more cost-effective. These are unknown at this time.”

“Solar Designer is an external security auditor we have hired who is looking at our PoW algorithm and will write a report on it. We will publish the full report, just like other projects.”

“I really want people to be able to mine Zcash on their laptops and servers, even if it’s unprofitable, because it’s a public service that supports the decentralized web and provides a private, censorship-resistant, permissionless blockchain.”

“Even if this PoW algorithm doesn’t close the gap between laptops and large-scale mining operations, we will certainly close it…”

According to Zooko, the team is still designing the mining algorithm for Zcash. He believes that the team may need to adopt some form to balance去中心化and 51％攻击抵抗性.

“We decided to focus on decentralization instead of 51% resistance, but if we lose decentralization and gain 51% resistance, that’s not too bad!”

Talk about the possible problems of privacy

Some people say that Zcash has such high privacy, what should we do if bad guys like "child pornography dealers" and "ISIS" use Zcash?

Zooko expressed strong opposition to this:

“I don’t even think that’s a valid question. It’s like ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’ I don’t think it’s inevitable that child pornographers and ISIS will use Zcash. ISIS is still using 8th century technology (paper money) and if they start using blockchain technology like Bitcoin and Zcash, it’s because it’s part of the fabric of society, just like the internet, so it’s not a problem for bad guys to use it.”

Zooko added that he remembers that in the early days of the internet, there were also a lot of reports about how it was used for crime. "I think that narrative started to fade away when the first digital generations started reading the news," he said. "Young people today don't seem to know that the internet also faced the choice of whether to regulate or ban it in order to prevent crime."