Monero vs Zcash: The duel for Anonymity.
Introduction
Many other cryptocurrencies have been developed apart from Bitcoin. Although Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency it has its own set of very practical issues like scalability and anonymity. Hence in order to improve on these attributes, many other Altcoins have been developed. The altcoins employee better working paradigms and consensus mechanism, in order to preserve the integrity of the cryptocurrency, which was envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto. Let us compare Monero Vs Zcash.
Monero vs Zcash vs Bitcoin
As Bitcoin provided higher anonymity than the Fiat currencies, they were actively being employed for the illicit activities on the darknet markets. However, with time people demanded crypto coins with further privacy and hence Monero and ZCash were developed. Litecoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin cash, Monero, ZCash, Dogecoin, etc are some of the most prominent Altcoins. However, ZCash and Monero have a common principle of focusing on an enhanced privacy.
Monero vs Zcash: Intro
Although anonymity and privacy is the pre-eminent concern of any trader in the darknet market, the privacy coins are actively being employed in the actual real world businesses too, for personal reasons of the owner. The business corporation has the complete rights to safeguard its transactional information with an increased security by using privacy-focused coins like Monero and Zcash. The Bitcoin transactions do not provide higher amounts of privacy has its transactional ledger is public and accessible to everyone but in the case of these Altcoins, they employ various techniques to conceal this information.
Monero vs Zcash: Initiation
Monero was developed in the year 2014 as an official fork of Bytecoin. Bytecoin was highly under speculations for being too shady, as many coins were pre-mined and distributed to a selected group of members as well as stakeholders. ZCash is one of the most recent cryptocurrencies, developed in October 2016, by a suite of highly experienced and popular scientist as well as cryptographers. Having been developed by people of such caliber the cryptocurrency didn’t take much longer to become popular and join the list of top cryptocurrencies. It even reached the market capitalization of 2.5 billion dollars in 2018.
Monero vs Zcash: privacy coins
Confidentiality was introduced to Monero in 2017, with the usage of ring structures as a key part of the original protocol. In this mechanism, many senders were involved. Each transaction was split or divided and sent to its respective destination by passing through a number of intermediate artificial nodes. Nevertheless, speculations loom even here as the transactions can be traced. ZCash seems to have an increased privacy than any other cryptocurrencies. In its working mechanism, the ledger doesn’t contain any information about the sender or receiver but only contains only the time that the transaction took place. In simpler words, no public address is attributed to a particular transaction.
Monero vs Zcash: further insights
Regardless of being developed on the Cryptonote algorithm of its predecessor Bytecoin, Monero is highly popular and adopted amongst the people. In many instances, it has been employed for the illegal activities. For example, the recent WannaCry ransomware attack incorporated Monero. For its increased adoption by the masses, it was regarded as the best cryptocurrency in the year 2016 and also the best cryptocurrency in case of its illegal usage. ZCash uses the zk-SNARKs protocol, which in turn uses the zero-knowledge proof, which simply refers to the fact that the transactions can be verified by simple true or false statements.
Monero vs Zcash: Future
Monero has been criticized for providing lesser anonymity due to its traceability. It has been employed by a large number of people for a prolonged duration of time, even though they were exclusively used for the illegal activities. On the other hand Zcash is well known for its non traceability, but nevertheless, experts believe that the owners can be traced by tracking the IP addresses hence it is always preferred that all the Zcash transactions be taken place with an added internet layer security through the use of web browsers like Tor.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, it still remains unclear that which one of the cryptocurrency wins the battle to provide a better privacy, but in case of Monero vs Zcash, ZCash seems to have an upper hand, as the transactional information itself is truncated and the hacker would find it difficult to track the users. In the end, it is left to each individual to decide the best cryptocurrency based on their requirements.
