Leaked Recent Palm Beach Confedential Article on ZenCash

hfeldman23 (25)in #cryptocurrency • 7 years ago (edited)

Three Ex-Government Agents Just Created the Ultimate “Privacy Coin”

Here’s How We’ll Make 7,000% Gains Over the Next 12–24 Months Buying It

By Teeka Tiwari on October 19, 2017

In February 2017, I wrote to you about a tiny Chinese crypto project then valued at just $5 million.

Just a year earlier in 2016, the project’s value was $25 million.

That meant the coin had shed 80% of its value.

At the time, it was a difficult decision to recommend it. The chart looked ugly. But the idea was compelling. My research convinced me the coin had long-term value.

When I recommended it, I told you I thought it would become China’s preeminent blockchain development tool.

I said you could make 100 times your money on it.

And so, we bought it at 13 cents.

Eight days after recommending this crypto, the price collapsed to 8 cents. Its total market cap slumped to just $3 million.

To anyone looking at just the price, it looked like a disaster.

I never did find out what was behind that drop. But I am forever grateful to the shortsighted people who sold their coins to my subscribers for pennies.

Just six months later, Neo (then Antshares) rose 60,760% from its lows.

It would go on to hit a high of $50. That was a gain of 41,605% for Palm Beach Confidential readers who bought in at 13 cents.

This month, I’ve found a similar situation to Neo before it shot up.

Earlier this year, the coin was trading as much as 170% higher. It’s up off its lows… but the trading is still lackluster.

Volume and sentiment is low. And just like my original recommendation of Neo, the market cap is tiny at just $16 million.

On top of all of that, the price chart looks ugly.

But just like Neo, this idea is compelling. And my B.I.T.S. system is screaming “buy” (more on that below).

A Big Announcement

A dream team of ex-government agents have come together to create what I believe will become the world’s most widely used privacy coin.

But it’s more than that.

It’s a full-blown privacy platform.

The platform allows for globally secure payments with built-in anonymous messaging. You can also publish documents and store data anonymously.

And developers can use the platform to build and launch their own privacy apps.

Outside a small number of people, this coin is virtually unknown. But over the last six months, some of the brightest minds in crypto have been quietly rallying around this project.

Charles Hoskinson is the former CEO of Ethereum. He’s a close advisor of the project. And he has a team of developers working on it right now.

The main core technical team developer is the same guy who leads the payments engineering team at the $31 billion vacation rental behemoth Airbnb.

The project has attracted a fierce following of developers and community members that number over 1,000.

In the next few weeks, the project is about to make a big announcement.

The announcement will make this privacy coin the most secure network in the world. More secure than current leaders Monero, Zcash, and Dash.

When this announcement is made, investor money will flood into the coin.

We want to own this before that announcement is made. (More on that below.)

Short term, I think we’ll see this one double over the next few weeks.

Within one to two years, I expect this coin to have a $1 billion to $2 billion market cap.

That would take the price from around $7 per coin to between $250 and $500 per coin.

That would turn a $400 investment into $14,300–28,500. Or a $1,000 investment into $35,700–71,400.

At Palm Beach Confidential, we call this asymmetric-risk investing. It’s the strategy we use to take a trivial sum of money and convert it into life-changing wealth. Thousands of my subscribers have already done this.

If you are new to Confidential, welcome. It’s your turn to get a crack at a 50-bagger.

I want you to remember that just like Neo, this idea will be wildly volatile. We might double in price right out of the gate. We could just as easily drop 50% next week.

And I’ll tell you it doesn’t matter…

Dѵd ∆, [20.10.17 01:42]
When you take a small position size, you can safely ignore volatility and focus on the big picture.

And the big picture for this idea and its future are bright.

Be sure to check out the resources we’re constantly adding to our Crypto Corner. If you have questions about anything cryptocurrencies, chances are you’ll find the answers there.

There, you can access our research on web-based wallets, hardware wallets, and other cryptocurrency services.

The Dream Team: Mercenary Mathematician, Nuclear Sub Officer, NASA Hacker

This idea was born from the meeting of three ex-military guys who wanted to create a “more secure, anonymous version of bitcoin.”

To do that, they combined their expertise in the military, intelligence, and cryptography fields.

In his own words, project leader Rob Viglione is a “mercenary mathematician.”

He’s a former U.S. Air Force officer with experience in satellite radar, space launch vehicles, and combat support intelligence.

He also was a private U.S. military contractor embedded in Afghanistan. There, he used mathematical algorithms to map out the likely locations of improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

Rolf Versluis is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. After graduation, he was commissioned as an officer of a nuclear submarine.

Joshua Yabut is a former cybersecurity expert at NASA and former National Guard executive officer. His job was to break into government and corporate networks. By all accounts, he was excellent at it.

A year ago, these three men joined forces. They saw a world becoming increasingly hostile to individual freedoms and decided to do something about it.

They want to give people back control over their privacy. Here’s what they wrote in their white paper for the project:

We live in a hyper-regulated and surveilled world where billions of individuals are deprived of basic human rights, such as property ownership, privacy, free association, and access to information. The technology now exists to solve some of these problems…

These three men come from a unique background in government. No one I’ve met in the crypto space has a better understanding of the government’s security apparatus than they do. They understand nation-led security threats at a deeper level than any other privacy coin team in the world.

That’s why instead of just building another privacy coin, they built an entire privacy ecosystem.

Your Privacy is Under Assault

Everywhere we look, our privacy is under attack.

In an increasingly online world, governments can see what we read, with whom we talk, and what we do with our money.

Take Turkey, for instance. That country’s government has jailed people for downloading certain apps.

In 2016, a military coup tried to topple the government. The plotters used a smartphone messaging app called ByLock to coordinate the attack.

In retaliation, the Turkish government jailed nearly 75,000 citizens for downloading the app. Even if they had nothing to do with the coup.

Think about that.

And don’t think this is just something that happens abroad. Your privacy is under assault in the United States, too.

According to former FBI director James Comey, you have no right to privacy at all.

“There is no such thing as absolute privacy in America; there is no place outside of judicial reach,” Comey said at a Boston College conference on cybersecurity back in March.

Apparently, in the eyes of the FBI, no corner of your life is sacred. It can look at it all.

That’s why it should have been no surprise when we discovered the National Security Agency (NSA) has been monitoring all of our communication for years.

But it doesn’t stop there. Governments also want complete oversight of our personal wealth.

Here’s why…

In the West, governments are drowning in debts they can’t pay back. The only answer is to assault our wealth with new taxes.

But you can’t tax what you can’t see. And that’s one of the reasons many governments fear cryptocurrencies.

Unlike fiat currencies, governments can’t easily steal cryptocurrencies when a crisis hits.

Dѵd ∆, [20.10.17 01:42]
That’s what European Union member Cyprus did during its banking crisis in 2013. The government confiscated up to 30% of its depositors’ money in some cases.

With cryptocurrencies, you control your own private key. That means no one can take your wealth from you. Governments hate this.

It’s not just national governments targeting citizens’ wealth.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is an international organization with 189 country members. In 2013, it proposed a global 10% wealth tax on all citizens with a positive net worth.

As governments struggle to bridge funding gaps, we expect more and more outrageous attempts to seize your wealth.

Long story short: The world is becoming a smaller, less private place.

Whether it’s the NSA listening in on all our calls, or the Turkish government cracking down on privacy apps, or the IMF trying to tax your wealth, governments are trampling over citizens’ rights.

This has led to the rise of “privacy” coins.

Privacy coins are cryptocurrencies that seek to hide your identity. They are designed so governments can’t track how much you have or what you buy.

When I first started looking at privacy coins a year ago, the entire market was under $200 million. Today, it stands at over $4 billion.

That’s a 1,900% increase.

Two of the top 10 most valuable cryptocurrencies are privacy coins Monero and Dash. We own both and have done quite well.

As of this writing. we’re up 923% and 111%, respectively. But as good as Dash and Monero are at protecting privacy, they focus on small niches.

In my research, I’ve found only one project that provides a much broader level of privacy that the future will demand.

A New Way to Shield Transactions

The name of this project is ZenCash (ZEN).

ZenCash has about 2.2 million coins outstanding. Just like bitcoin, there will never be more than 21 million ZenCash coins.

Here’s the background on ZenCash…

ZenCash shares a similar history to the $2.2 billion privacy coin giant Dash. (Dash is currently the sixth largest cryptocurrency in the world.)

What many folks don’t know is that Dash went through a long, winding road before becoming the powerhouse it is today.

Dash started as a clone of bitcoin… but with privacy. Its original name was Darkcoin. It then “forked” (spun off) into XCoin, and then forked again into Dash.

Each change brought further refinements to the underlying protocol.

We’ve seen ZenCash follow a similar path.

ZenCash started as a clone of Zcash.

Zcash was the first cryptocurrency to use a form of cryptography called zk-snarks.

A detailed explanation of zk-snarks is beyond the scope of this report. The bottom line with this technology is that it allows for something called “shielded transactions.”

A shielded transaction hides the identity of the sender, the receiver, and the transaction amount.

Zcash is a brilliant project, but it has problems. One of the biggest is how the mining reward is set up.

For the first four years of Zcash’s existence, 20% of the mining reward went to its original development team. This didn’t sit well with certain developers. So, they forked Zcash and created a new coin called Zclassic.

Zclassic stripped out the founders’ reward and gave miners 100% of the mining fees.

Scrapping the founders’ reward was a step in the right direction… but it didn’t go far enough.

Zclassic still had a fundamental weakness… It was dependent on the goodwill of the community to keep developing it.

It had no funds of its own to ensure constant development and improvement.

That’s when Rob Viglione, Rolf Versluis, and Joshua Yabut decided to “fork” Zclassic and create a better version: ZenCash.

In a moment, I’ll explain to you the changes the team made that will make ZenCash the No. 1 privacy coin in the world.

Before I do that, I want to show you what’s wrong with the privacy coins we have right now.

The Four Problems With Current Privacy Coins

The world’s privacy coins are each solving small parts of the overall privacy problem.

Zcash wants to keep your transactions and wealth secret.Dash wants to be a commerce coin with optional privacy.Monero wants to be untraceable digital cash.

Each of these coins has done great work in its relative niche… but each has fundamental drawbacks.

Drawback No. 1: Inadequate Funding Model

Monero’s funding model relies on developers donating their time to the project. They are not paid to improve Monero. Perhaps that’s why there still isn’t a user-friendly mobile wallet.

Zcash’s funding model is only in place for the first four years. After that, Zcash is expected to rely on the “community” for further development.

Only Dash has truly sustainable long-term development funding through its treasury model. Dash’s design sends 10% of the mining reward into a treasury to pay for ongoing development.

For long-term success, a privacy coin must have a self-funding model.

Drawback No. 2: Not Fully Secure

Privacy coins aren’t as anonymous as advertised. To our knowledge, no cryptocurrency today employs end-to-end encryption.

End-to-end encryption is a system of communication. In this system, only communicating users can read the messages they send and receive. No eavesdropper can access the messages.

Without end-to-end encryption, anyone monitoring the network could see all traffic across all blockchains.

This means governments could track down the origin of transactions and identify users.

Here are two examples of so-called untraceable coins getting traced…

In 2016, federal law enforcement agents seized nearly 12,000 Monero coins.

And this year, law enforcement agents seized nearly 3,700 Zcash coins from the late Alexandre Cazes, the alleged leader of dark market drug purveyor AlphaBay.

Obviously, the government did not publicize how it was able to track down these “untraceable” coins. But it makes sense that the lack of end-to-end encryption could have played a role in unmasking these transactions.

While you and I have no interest in running an illegal drug bazaar, there are many legitimate reasons to want privacy. For instance, do you want everyone to know exactly what you buy or what causes you support?

The government has a history of persecution based on political beliefs.

In 2013, news broke that the IRS had targeted organizations affiliated with the Tea Party.

Let’s say you want to give money to WikiLeaks, a website that publishes secrets and classified information from anonymous sources.

If you donate publicly, the government could use that information to deny you a security clearance or federal job. Even private sector jobs could discriminate against you.

What if you want to give money to a pro-life or a pro-choice charity? Either choice could lead to employer and/or social discrimination.

The point is there are lots of legitimate reasons to keep your financial transactions secret. Without end-to-end encryption, you can’t be sure you are safe.

Drawback No. 3: Easily Blocked

As governments become more fearful of cryptocurrencies, they’ll try to block your access to them. We’re already seeing this in China and Russia.

China has shut down its domestic crypto exchanges. The Russian central bank has said it will block access to all cryptocurrency trading websites.

Governments will enforce these bans by making Internet Service Providers (ISPs) keep a list of banned sites.

You literally will not be able to connect to these sites. Dash, Monero, and Zcash have no way to overcome this type of government blocking.

This is a huge flaw in today’s leading privacy coins.

Drawback No. 4: They Only Handle Payments

Dash, Monero, and Zcash are primarily designed to handle the transfer of money.

Zcash offers something slightly different with its private messaging function.

Dash also has unique offerings like “instant send,” which allows you to receive money instantly.

The privacy coin of the future must be able to do more than move money.

It must have built-in messaging.It must allow anonymous data publishing and storage.It must have end-to-end encryption and be unblockable.And of course, it must be able to handle the anonymous transfer of money.

None of the current privacy coin leaders have all of those functions… except ZenCash.

Why ZenCash Will Become the Most Widely Used Privacy Coin

Earlier, I told you ZenCash is the brainchild of three ex-military men.

This is important because if you believe in the saying “it takes a thief to catch a thief,” then you’ll understand the value these military insiders bring to a privacy ecosystem.

Throughout their careers, these founders have had ringside seats to how governments really operate.

That’s why they shed their government careers and devoted their professional lives to the creation of a total privacy platform.

The ZenCash team has designed a platform that will plug the holes that plague the current privacy coins.

Plug No. 1: Robust Funding Model

Developing software costs money… lots of money.

Traditional software firms rely on issuing stock, sometimes bonds, and on rare occasions, actual earnings to fund their operations.

Typically, cryptocurrency projects rely on community donations of time and skill.

Relying on the goodwill of others is not a long-term scalable solution.

The other problem with relying on a community of developers is that a small group of folks ends up steering the project.

This results in a centralized development team, which can lead to a weaker project.

We like decentralized development teams. In that model, the community votes on which aspects of development get priority.

When you have a funding mechanism that the community votes on, it ensures the best ideas and the most committed developers are getting the money they need to keep improving the project.

ZenCash has solved this problem by using a “Treasury Model.”

Every 2.5 minutes, 12.5 ZenCash gets mined. Under its Treasury Model, 88% of the mining reward goes to the miners. The ZenCash Foundation Treasury gets 8.5%.

(I’ll explain where the rest goes in a moment.)

Right now, 7,200 new ZenCash gets mined each day. Of that, 612 coins (8.5%) go to the ZenCash Foundation Treasury.

At current prices, that’s $4,284 per day… or $1,563,600 each year.

Now, remember: ZenCash is only at $7 right now. As the price starts rising, we’ll see the treasury allocation rise along with it.

This model ensures that ZenCash will have a steady supply of capital to pay for its ongoing development without having to engage in dilutive coin offerings.

This funding model means ZenCash will always have the money needed to keep growing and improving.

Plug No. 2: End-to-End Encryption

Earlier, I mentioned that ZenCash is on the cusp of a major announcement that will bring in a flood of new investors.

It has to do with end-to-end encryption.

As of this writing, there is not a single cryptocurrency that offers end-to-end encryption.

ZenCash is about to fix that with a solution it calls “secured nodes.”

According to the white paper, secured nodes “ensure the system remains distributed, resilient, and secure. By enforcing encrypted communication between nodes, and between nodes and wallets, Zen protects against eavesdropping […]”

As I mentioned earlier, end-to-end encryption helps thwart government efforts at linking network traffic to users’ identities.

As regimes such as China and Russia’s become more hostile to cryptocurrencies, this service will become a must-have option.

The secured node network is being beta-tested right now. It will go live in two to four weeks.

Right now, there are 170 test secure nodes. The founders estimate they will have 1,000 secured nodes by the end of the first quarter of 2018.

They expect such rapid growth because anyone operating a secured node will be entitled a share in 3.5% of the mining reward.

We think this is a very smart way of ensuring the ZenCash network stays highly distributed and secure.

Plug No. 3: “Domain Fronting”

As I write this, Russia’s central bank has announced it will block its citizens from accessing cryptocurrency websites.

As already mentioned, China has shut down its domestic cryptocurrency trading platforms.

The founders of ZenCash have long known this day would come. That’s why they built “domain fronting” into ZenCash.

With domain fronting, you can make a domain (website) you’re trying to access look like something else.

For instance, if you are in Russia and want to access a ZenCash wallet, domain fronting would make your network request look like you were going to an approved website.

Here’s another way to think about domain fronting…

It’s like having a plane ticket that says you are flying to London. This lets you pass the security checkpoint. Except once you’ve passed security, the ticket changes and lets you fly to Cuba without anyone knowing.

ZenCash is the only privacy coin we know of that will have domain-fronting capability. As more governments become hostile to cryptocurrencies, this is another feature that will be critical to a privacy coin’s success.

That’s why we expect the global demand for domain fronting to soar, and ZenCash along with it…

Again, as of this writing, ZenCash is the only privacy coin that offers domain fronting.

Plug No. 4: Full Privacy Platform

ZenCash is more than just a way to send and receive money anonymously. It is a full privacy platform that other developers can build upon.

So instead of having to build your own privacy platform from scratch, you can build applications on top of the ZenCash system.

Here are some of the different applications you’ll see launch on the ZenCash platform.

ZenTalk is a secure communications network that allows you to broadcast a message from one person to many people. Think of it like an encrypted invitation-only Twitter feed.ZenPub is a platform that will let you publish and store documents anonymously.ZenHide is the domain fronting service. ZenHide will give users the ability to circumnavigate crypto-commerce blocking.

On top of all that, ZenCash includes the ability to send and receive money anonymously (or publicly if you wish). Plus, you can use it as a one-to-one private messaging system.

In addition, ZenCash can work with other blockchains (that means it’s interoperable).

Let’s say you want to set up an Ethereum smart contract but handle the payment via a ZenCash shielded address.

In the future, you’ll be able to do that.

This rich set of features makes ZenCash more than just a privacy coin.

It’s a privacy platform… and platforms are incredibly valuable.

This is because platforms attract other developers. And more developers equate to more apps, which equate to more users.

More users equal more demand for ZenCash, and that, my friends, equals much higher prices ahead.
Three Ex-Government Agents Just Created the Ultimate “Privacy Coin”

Here’s How We’ll Make 7,000% Gains Over the Next 12–24 Months Buying It

By Teeka Tiwari on October 19, 2017

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In February 2017, I wrote to you about a tiny Chinese crypto project then valued at just $5 million.