Spotlight on Cryptocoins -- ZCoin/XZC -- 10th feature "private" coins

Hello Steemians

In this series of articles I want to put a spotlight on a specific cryptocurrency and write about the details in all these aspects:

• Aim of the currency

• Technical details

• Market position

• Forecast

The cryptocurrency in focus currently will be one of the so-called "private" coins. Coins that create the possibility to be more or less in private while doing transactions. How private you really are is one of the main questions to be answered in this articles.

In this 10th article of the series, the spotlight will be on Zcoin.

PictureSource

Aim of the Currency

What is this currency about? What does it do differently than the rest?
Where is the unique selling point and at what audience is this coin targeted?

All that questions and more will be answered in the following paragraph.

ZCoin is one of the medium-sized private coins and was already founded in October 2016. There was no ICO at the beginning and also no premine. Instead, there is a fixed Founders’ Reward which was 20% of every block Reward (10XZC per Block). With the introduction of ZNodes this has been reduced to 14%.
Zcoin is no fork from ZCash they are based on different papers (Zerocoin and Zerocash) from the same authors and they both rely on zero-knowledge proofs.
Apart from that these coins are completely separated from each other. ZCoin uses RSA Accumulators within the foundation of the anonymity scheme, while ZCash is relying on zk-SNARKs.
Zcoin is a pure PoW Coin currently using the Lyra2z algorithm, later on they plan to change to MTP (Merkle Tree Proof) algorithm to be even more ASIC resistant and get closer to Satoshi's initial idea of one CPU = one Vote.
This will be explained a bit more in detail in the next chapter.

Technical Details

ZCoin has wallets that support Windows, Linux and Mac. The source code for them is completely visible on Github.
Additionally, the coin is featured in the Coinomi wallet for Android devices.

Zcoin is a PoW coin using the Lyra2z algorithm (it uses Blake256 for the first round and Lyra2 for the second) for improved ASIC resistance. Additionally, with the recent introduction of ZNodes, the coin also features the possibility to host a Node and generate income through this. Currently, 30% of the block reward (15XZC) is used to pay the Owners of the Nodes. The Nodes are simply put in a queue for payout, more Nodes means fewer rewards per Node ultimately.

Maximum number of coins is 21.4 Million, Block Time is 10 Minutes. Rewards are halved every 4 years, this is the same cycle that Bitcoin uses.
After the first 4 years, the Founders’ Reward will cease to exist and all coins will be paid out to miners and Node owners.
Privacy of transaction is achieved using zero-knowledge proofs. This is a proven way of making transaction information anonymous, so I will not explain this further.

Please see Whattomine.com if you are interested in probable mining revenues, ZCoin was a good mining coin lately but take care this changes quite fast. Keep an eye open for the release of the new MTP (Merkle Tree Proof) algorithm, which aims at moving mining further into the direction of CPUs. This can be a very interesting mining opportunity if this is really working out. MTP is since a few months already in the testnet of ZCoin.

Market Position

At the time of writing this article (02/13/2018), ZCoin is placed 84th in market capitalization, with the total value of $220.027.376 USD. The 24h Volume was $5.339.070 USD which is a quite high number compared to the last month.

January is always a very turbulent month for cryptocurrencies, ZCoin is no difference there. The coin had its all-time Dollar value high on December 26th, 2017 with 154.17 Dollar per XZC, afterward, it went down to 30.89 on February 6th. Currently, it seems that the coins are in a minor upward movement listing at 53.73 USD.

We can see a massive spike leading to the ATH in end December. This if for sure partly based on the general hype that was going on December 17 but also on the release of the ZNode functionality, which happened just in November 17.

GraphSource

If we are looking back one year in the market history of Zcoin, we already can see a few spikes in BTC and USD value, caused by software updates made to the coin.

GraphSource

Forecast

Just like all the other private coins ZCoin for sure has a valid selling point in trying to keep the privacy of the sender and receiver.
Zcoin is a cryptocurrency with high potential. The team around Zcoin is currently working on the implementation of MTP and other functionalities as described in their Roadmap
If the problems around MTP can be solved in the near future and they really make it possible to get closer to the one CPU = one vote paradigm, we will see a heavy raise in price.

Conclusion

ZCoin is keeping your transaction details hidden by using zero-knowledge proofs, IP privacy is currently not guaranteed, you would need to setup a TOR (or a similar service) by yourself.
ZCoin is managed by a quite big and professional team around the founder Poramin Insom

Last but not least there are also some drawbacks and they should not be unmentioned:

• PoW coin can be seen as a waste of electricity.
• Privacy of transaction has been also viewed with criticism.
• A big portion of the coins reserved as Founders Fee.
• Uncertainty if MTP algorithm can be implemented soon

Authored by: @jedigeiss





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