Zcoin Joins Steemit !
Hi Steemit -
This is our first official post and we are excited to be joining this diverse and growing community. Here is a little information to introduce ourselves for those that may not be familiar.
What is Zcoin?
Zcoin solves the privacy problem found in all previous cryptocurrencies. Zcoin implements a protocol called ZeroCoin, which allows users to have complete privacy via Zero-Knowledge cryptographic proofs. Zero-Knowledge proofs allows one to show the existence of a Zcoin coin without having to reveal which coin one owns. The original Zerocoin paper can be found here.
Zcoin strives to increase individual liberty. By guaranteeing financial privacy, Zcoin can help ensure freedom of commerce. People should be able to transact however they want, as long as it does not infringe on the well-being or individual liberty of others. We are also big believers that freedom of commerce also facilitates peace and prosperity across countries and cultures. By guaranteeing financial privacy, Zcoin can directly guarantee fungibility, an essential property for free commerce.
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For some more great information and commonly asked questions please visit our FAQ page.
How does the Zerocoin technology in Zcoin work?
Bitcoin and most cryptocurrencies rely on public ledgers. This means that all transactions are public, and the history of a coin can be traced from its inception along with all the transactions that it has been involved in. There have been attempts to scramble and mix transactions but this often involves trusting the mixers and is still subject to transactional graph analysis.
The Zerocoin protocol acts as an inbuilt coin laundry whereby coins with transaction history go into it and then new coins come out with no prior transaction history.
The easiest way to visualize Zerocoin tech is a black box, where everyone who wants to anonymize their coins places their coins in it. When they are ready to spend the coin, they produce a proof that they did place coins in the box, but the proof does not state which coin they placed. The proof could refer to any of the millions of coins in the box, and nobody knows which coin the proof is referring to. The proof simply states that the creator of the proof has placed a coin in the box, without giving any specific information about which coin it is. When other people see this proof, they have no idea who created this proof but are mathematically convinced that it is a valid proof. If the proof is valid, the proof entitles the proof creator to create a new coin with no transaction history and not related to any of the coins in the box, provided that it is of the same value. This means there is no linkage between the deposit transaction into the box and the redemption transaction whereby a coin is taken from the box.
The innovative part of Zerocoin is how this proof is generated where although you deposited the money into the box (and this transaction is recorded in the blockchain), you are somehow able to prove that you deposited into the box, without revealing which 'deposit' transaction was originally yours, hence the term 'zero knowledge proof'.
Who are we?
Poramin Insom - Founder and Core Developer
Poramin Insom created what was the world's 4th most valuable cryptocurrency in February 2014. He is also the world's first person to implement stealth addresses in QT-Wallets, improving cryptocurrency anonymity. He earned a masters degree in Information Security from Johns Hopkins University where he wrote a paper on a proposed practical implementation of the Zerocoin protocol.
Reuben Yap - Community and Communications Manager
Reuben Yap is a practicing corporate lawyer in Malaysia and an early adopter of cryptocurrencies. He a strong privacy advocate and the Co-Founder of BolehVPN, the first merchant to accept Bitcoin in Malaysia and one of the largest VPN providers in the SEA region. Reuben graduated with a LLB from the University of Nottingham. He is tasked with managing the Zcoin community and assisting with communications and documentation on behalf of the Zcoin team.
What's Coming ?
Zcoin is working to be the first cryptocurrency to implement MTP as a proof of work algorithm and work is ongoing. As the foundation of a coin’s security with also fundamental implications as to distribution and also verification speed, implementation of MTP is very high on our list of priorities and in our roadmap. Implementation of MTP is also expected to lower wallet initialization times due to its fast verification as compared to the current stop gap Lyra2 implementation.
The MTP algorithm was devised by Alex Biryukov and Dmitry Khovratovich from the University of Luxembourg in their paper published on the 11 June 2016 titled Egalitarian Computing.
MTP is an amazing new mining algorithm that is high performance, high security and promotes egalitarian computing. Zcoin intends to be the first to implement this and we foresee that MTP will offer good future proofing. Being a privacy centric coin, it is even more important that mining power is decentralized and as such we are focusing on working on the very core of Zcoin’s security first before embarking on other features. We hope to finish MTP implementation in the coming months.
We also have several other updates that we are looking forward to sharing with the steemit community when the time is appropriate :)
With its intersection of blockchains and web content, it surprises me that we don't see more interaction with cryptocurrency/blockchain projects here. So here's a warm welcome!
You have to run a solid project to withstand social scrutiny that can come from a social network platform like steemit. I suspect any blockchain that is not posting on steemit must have massive holes in their game.
Thanks @pfunk, we are happy to be hear!
Indeed, I feel the same @pfunk. Love seeing Official Sources show up. My interview series started today on here too! A "spicy" first guest!
This is great, learned about zcoin 2 days ago, made me realize that coins that provide privacy are now at a point where speculating on the value of privacy driven coins was fad. The zcoin concept is so simple that it puts shame to monero and zcash. I even predict the slow death of monero as a result. I went on bittrex to buy some zcoin but felt like $1.90 was too high a price. Perhaps I will buy some if it goes back under 90 cents, or if one day I feel like I need to use the utility of privacy, zcoin would be my choice.
For what it's worth ... secure multiparty computation requires a trusted setup.
Unless I'm a party in the multiparty (or you are, too), why anyone would trust a trusted setup is beyond me. Note that there is no indication that the secure multiparty computation was compromised and currently there is no auditing mechanism to find out!
Ring signatures, on the other hand, suffer from sybil attacks in that a malicious actor could try to make available his public keys to be included in the signature.
That said ... just because people (speculators) don't understand the intricacies of a particular technology, i.e. the mathematics, doesn't always imply that the token is not a good investment vehicle.
Finding out in detail how much a dev understands this technical background is always a good start.
Then again ... I tend to invest tokens based on utility, application, and, foremost, technical prowess and innovation.
ZCoin is most definitely on the list.
yes, speculators like myself mostly go by utility than technical prowess, and while it may take some advanced technical prowess to effectively provide privacy on blockchain, the utility of privacy is not worth anything speculatively because of so many coins who claim to have or will have privacy, steem included https://steem.io/roadmap/confidential/
You may be right, except ONLY those that have been proven to have the best rock-solid privacy will become the ones that rich people with $Millions will store their money. For example if you have money you wish o hide from your wife because of divorce laws in your country, you will not risk that by using a coin that "claims to have" privacy or has weak privacy and/or security (for example Dashcoin). For the majority of saving accounts which will not have much money, yeah, most people will not care and good-enough privacy is OK. So there will be different coins with different use-cases. Both may gain sizeable market cap but for different reasons - different users and use cases.
Glad to hear your a recent fan @craig-grant, make sure to follow our developments we have a lot coming that we are excited about.
Please explain how MTP works. Many of us do not have time to read a white paper or interpret it.
Apologies for the extremely late reply!
Basically it is an algorithm that can make miners work very hard using immense amounts of RAM (even up to 10gb) making ASICS development very costly, while remaining very lightweight for nodes to verify the proof of work so that they don't need to have high memory requirements.
Did anyone regret NOT buying DASH when it was 2$ ? I did. I mean I had multiple chances to buy that but I didn't. And now? It's history.
When DASH was $2 there were better buys on the market, like ether or bitcoin, dash was a good buy when it got to about $10. Dash is not up because it has privacy, it's because master nodes are holding dash
Not it was less than 2$ when no ETH is around. Define better buys? For me an 8x with stable volume and price is clearly a best buy. Btw I do agree with ur statement about masternode value of DASH.
you are right, when dash was $2.90, eth was about 90 cents, but very scary to buy because of the big "warning don't buy". I did buy DASH at $3 after getting some free dash, eventually sold it for eth tho. All these coins are 100% speculative, I cant hold any of them for a long time. I sold $7000 worth of ether for steem power, utility of hyper inflation and blogging rewards. I have already got back my $7000 investment and still have lots of steem power, so that was good move. Steem power forces me to hold, and that's the only way I can hold.
Keep it up!!!
Craig this is very true and something that many, (if not most?), Dash speculators do not realize. Over half of the Dash market cap is "locked up" in Masternodes. Now yes, anyone can sell their 1000 Dash coins per MN, but the fact that they receive that 11% "interest" payments gives them even more incentives to not sell.
"The zcoin concept is so simple that it puts shame to monero and zcash." Please explain why you think this. Thanks.
Hello Zcoin, welcome to Steem! :-D
(^ That sounds really great)
have been mining this since some time. hows GPU miner going?
Thanks for your support @kingscrown. The GPU miner will be released in approx. 24 hours. The code is complete, we are just finishing up our testing.
Could you let us know here when it's ready? FWIW, I have a Geforce GTX 1070. Nearly new.
The fastest way to receive updates is to follow our twitter. Updates will be provided here shortly thereafter.
Right. I'm following you now on Steemit, btw.
You are everywhere, you know everything I think lol
Oh come on! Thanks for the flattery, but if I were expected to live up to it I'd have to run off to the woods. :D
LOL! Take a good Mora / Morakniv product with you!!!
Same here pls, I have a GTX 1080 ;)
great coin and project im following this im also on twitter - https://twitter.com/kingscrownBTC
@kingscrown -- on top of all the news, always, every day, without fail!!
haha i assume its not easy to beat me :))
Not that it is a competition but yeah LOL, you will always be someone I look up to and learn from 110%.
I want in on the gpu miner also
Glad you are on here, hope you get Jaxx, shapeshift, blocktrades and poloniex integration
This is great news, I love seeing Official sources show up on here and join in. Great welcome I see in the 2 hours or so your post has been up!
-- I do a few series on here, #Crypto101 series, started my interview series today, an official What are you Trading series etc. --- could be a great fit!
I think I followed you on twitter a week or 2 ago.
Following you here now!
I have heard of you for sure -- I would love some of your coin
May the best Crypto win only time will tell. All the same Goodluck with this protocol.
I see a prosperous future in store for zCoin, and I am never wrong.
Congratulations on your achievement of a record-high market cap this weekend, @zcoinofficial.
Wow this is awesome. About time some of the other projects in the space jumped on Steemit!
To @zcoinofficial: welcome to steemit!
To everyone else, A PSA: Zcoin is not Zcash. They are separate projects with sadly confusing names.
Thanks for the welcome @sneak. Correct, we are completely separate projects - we will be doing a post on some of the differences between our projects that can be found here as well. We were actually first to launch and have had a working Zerocoin implementation from the beginning.