Zcash review

When you think about crypto-currencies, Bitcoin, Ethereum or Litecoin are most likely to cross your mind.

However, there are tons of other crypto-currencies floating out there that hardly anyone knows about. It is important to look into them as you never know where a diamond in the rough may be hidden.

Zcash was launched by Zooko Wilcox, CEO of the Zcash Company. Having been motivated by Bitcoin but considering its many flaws, Zooko sought to create a new digital currency.  With Zcash, he wanted to fix some fundamental flaws that Bitcoin presented to users.

The Public-Private Blockchain

According to Zooko, while Bitcoin allowed people to get greater privacy and autonomy for financial transactions, it opened up a Pandora’s Box because it compromised the security and privacy of several users.

Anyone can see what the blockchain holds, so it’s no problem for any hacker or financial fraudster who knows what they’re doing to look into it and exploit users of Bitcoin blockchain.

Zcash takes this premise and flips it on its head. It allows privacy in blockchain. The algorithm being used for transfers is the same, but has been tweaked to decrease transparency a bit.

If you conduct a transaction on the Zcash blockchain, you can control who sees it and who doesn’t, kind of like choosing who can see your profile or status updates on Facebook.

A Little History

Zcash traces its roots to the 1980s when a currency called Zerocoin was invented by Matthew Green –a professor at Johns Hopkins University. He was a grad student at the same university back then and used zero knowledge proofs to make blockchain-like transactions. It allows the content of those transactions to remain anonymous even though the transaction itself could be seen by anyone.

However, that version of blockchain had a lot of holes. The calculations required to conduct transactions were CPU intensive and this increased the transaction costs (far more than those required by Bitcoin). The system also didn’t possess any crypto-currency it could call its own and couldn’t mask its own metadata from public ledgers. Zcash took the best of both worlds from Bitcoin and Zerocoin and made a hybrid that, while not perfect, did what either couldn’t do quite well.