Snowden Prefers zCash to Monero ... Be Smart, Buy Both
Famous whistleblower and privacy hero Edward Snowden tweeted his support of zCash’s cryptography over that of Monero’s recently. This flared up a long-standing rivalry between the two privacy-focused coins.
Snowden’s objection calls Monero, “amateur crypto” while other critics of Monero’s technology, notably Andrew Miller, seem to have published concerns about Monero’s input seeding/ring signature system that Monero’s designers are already aware of.
I won’t paint Miller with the genetic fallacy brush because he put his money (into zCash and not Monero) against him. I’m sure everyone involved in this debate has the best of intentions. We
Even if they don’t, as crypto-investors it is a losing game to assume that they don’t. We want them fighting tooth and nail for market share. That’s their job; to impress us with their progress. Our job is to remain skeptical; continuing our due diligence on all the coins that we consider selling our dollars for.
In fact, I don’t really much care who’s right in this spat. I’ll never understand the technology well enough to make a discerning choice between the two. And, frankly, neither will the rest of the market.
As an investor and advisor I’m happy watching competition produce innovation. I don’t have an ideological horse in the race for the “Privacy-Primary” crypto-investor.
But, I’m under zero illusions the best technology will win in the end. It rarely happens.
Windows vs. OS/2? Windows won.
Betamax vs. VHS? VHS.
iPhone vs. Zune? iPhone.
It is one of the strange things about technology investing. Underlying technology is far less important than other market considerations, unless the technology differential is so great it is disruptive to other areas of the economy. ARM vs. Intel is a great example of this.
ARM’s designs were uninteresting when the market didn’t care about power consumption. Now, it’s consumed by shaving fractions of a milliwatt. Intel simply couldn’t in any time frame that mattered find ways to beat ARM despite its enormous market share in servers/desktops.
The likely outcome will be determined by which other successful 'privacy' coins adopt one of the other's system. I know that Steem plans to implement Monero's Ring Signature system and with the announcement of Smart Media Tokens to build the Steem platform into something more formidable, that, to me, holds a lot of sway.
Either way, the market will ultimately decide and there is no room in investing for being a tech snob. Believe me, I've not made a lot of money by refusing to buy Nvidia over the years.
So, I caution you to take Snowden’s words under advisement but don’t swear by them or become a proselytizer for zCash over Monero or vice versa. The best approach is to treat both the way resource investors treat exploration companies.
Buy a small bit of both and let the market decide who wins. In gold exploration stocks there is always the possibility both will win in the market…. slim but possible. In a bull market like the one cryptos are in right now, both Monero and zCash are going to go up in price.
People are still placing their bets. The question is which one will win the technology and marketing race and grab more hearts and minds over the next two years. And that will show up in the price of the coins.
And that’s when you make the decision to sell one versus the other. No matter how smart you think you are, the market is smarter. Always.
The easiest path to the poor house is forgetting that.
I'm no advisor either, pretty much new to all this crypto technology and block-chain.
Was only a few months ago I was looking at what a block-chain even was!
But since then ,I have joined steem, bought some crypto, made a few dollars, traded that for silver, gold, and when the hurricane hit I traded in some just to have cash on hand.
Its like anything else, nobody really knows the trend of which technology will grow faster and which ones will die out, even the crap coins i have seen, one can make money on them, and lose money also.
Monero was mentioned by Cliff h High as a coin that has good possibilities, people are looking for the anonymity of buying selling and saving them without big brother trying to take it, I personally have watched litecoin and Dash make people some nice profits.
Thanks for keeping us updated!!
You're welcome. I like the privacy coins a lot. The best thing to do is to treat them like junior resource exploration stocks... buy small lots of a bunch and spread your risk around.
The Free markets rule!
Great take on this Monero V zCash race.
I have some of both.
You might say I am hedge-funding my bet.
and thats my two STEEMS Worth.
I'm vested in Verge Currency.
I believe it is superior to both, and relatively unknown.
https://vergecurrency.com/blog/whatisverge/
When more people discover this, it will explode in value.
The privacy Cryptos are more attractive to me because with the non-privacy Cryptos somebody can find out what people spent, make maps of associations, ext. and know more about a person then that person knows themselves.
There was an article years ago about data mining and Target with their reward cards knows when somebody is pregnant before she may have shared this with anybody else.
I keep wondering when somebody will get thoroughly burned by things that people expect are private but are actually public. When will this happen and the story go viral? Of course MSM & powers don't want this to go viral, but they are losing control.
Once that happens, then the privacy Cryptos will pop.