A new digital currency has made its debut and has taken over the whole town in no time. Meet Zcash, a new virtual currency, that has been conceived and executed by meticulous university academics to be entirely untraceable. Yes, untraceable.
As of this Monday, investors were readily paying over a whopping $1,000 for a single unit of Zcash. It has only been a few days that the currency has been brought online.
Led by Zooko Wilcox, Zcash has been able to garner great support from some of the top most, respected computer scientists and privacy activists at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins University. Further, it has raked in an impressive $3 million in backing, courtesy a number of Silicon Valley venture capitalists having deep interest in the virtual currency industry.
According to Zcash's developers, they have put in an extra effort to come up with a virtual currency that makes use of advanced cryptography so as to give birth to a virtual currency that be used without any trace, unlike the now in-famous Bitcoin.
Bitcoins were initially endorsed as an anonymous currency, but it later came into notice that all its transactions were being recorded on a public ledger that could be easily tracked and traced by law enforcement. Everyone using the Bitcoin has an address, which is made up of numbers and letters, and these can be easily linked to a real person by the authorities by putting to use a sophisticated data analysis.
In order to counter Bitcoin's this glitch, Zcash developers decided to make use of zk-Snark, a method developed by a team of top cryptographers at M.I.T. and in Israel-- that allowed the Zcash transactions to be confirmed by the network without any recording of the involved Zcash addresses. There is also an option to opt out of this privacy function.
However, these privacy features of Zcash could act as a roadblock for the currency when it comes to winning support of bankers and regulators.
In the past, we have witnessed investigators making use of Bitcoin’s ledger, known as the blockchain, to search down people who are involved in the business of selling drugs for Bitcoins on various black market websites.
There has been a proliferation in the numbers of such websites since the Silk Road, a popular black market site, was taken off the web in the year 2013.
Since then, a vast majority of mainstream financial institutions have developed a taste in virtual currencies, especially in the blockchain technology, which has opened a new decentralised way to keep financial records and to power transactions of all sorts. In fact, major central banks all around the bank have also talked about the possibility of using the technology in the near future for their own currencies. However, a large proportion of the projects in the virtual currency sector, are currently trying to make it easier to integrate virtual currency with the existing financial system.
Since Zcash's opaqueness can become a problem for the virtual currency, its developer Zooko Wilcox has decided to host an open virtual meeting with law enforcement officials as to explain them the entire project.
According to Mr. Wilcox and the programmers behind Zcash, their sole purpose behind developing an untraceable virtual currency is to provide privacy for people who do not want their financial transactions to be visible to the world, and not to facilitate any type of illegal activity.
For now, the strategy is to release Zcash slowly to computers that help support the network underlying the currency. The new Zcash units will be distributed until there are 21 million of them available in the world. The project is being run by a for-profit Delaware corporation, Zcash Electric Coin Company, which is again being led Mr. Wilcox.
Monero, another relatively new virtual currency, had also come with an anonymity built into the system, but it was seized upon by speculators earlier this year who increased Monero's value significantly before the price nosedived. Unlike Wilcox' Zcash, Monero is already being used for purchases on various black market websites.
[Top Image-bitcoinmagazine.com]
As of this Monday, investors were readily paying over a whopping $1,000 for a single unit of Zcash. It has only been a few days that the currency has been brought online.
Led by Zooko Wilcox, Zcash has been able to garner great support from some of the top most, respected computer scientists and privacy activists at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins University. Further, it has raked in an impressive $3 million in backing, courtesy a number of Silicon Valley venture capitalists having deep interest in the virtual currency industry.
According to Zcash's developers, they have put in an extra effort to come up with a virtual currency that makes use of advanced cryptography so as to give birth to a virtual currency that be used without any trace, unlike the now in-famous Bitcoin.
Bitcoins were initially endorsed as an anonymous currency, but it later came into notice that all its transactions were being recorded on a public ledger that could be easily tracked and traced by law enforcement. Everyone using the Bitcoin has an address, which is made up of numbers and letters, and these can be easily linked to a real person by the authorities by putting to use a sophisticated data analysis.
In order to counter Bitcoin's this glitch, Zcash developers decided to make use of zk-Snark, a method developed by a team of top cryptographers at M.I.T. and in Israel-- that allowed the Zcash transactions to be confirmed by the network without any recording of the involved Zcash addresses. There is also an option to opt out of this privacy function.
However, these privacy features of Zcash could act as a roadblock for the currency when it comes to winning support of bankers and regulators.
In the past, we have witnessed investigators making use of Bitcoin’s ledger, known as the blockchain, to search down people who are involved in the business of selling drugs for Bitcoins on various black market websites.
There has been a proliferation in the numbers of such websites since the Silk Road, a popular black market site, was taken off the web in the year 2013.
Since then, a vast majority of mainstream financial institutions have developed a taste in virtual currencies, especially in the blockchain technology, which has opened a new decentralised way to keep financial records and to power transactions of all sorts. In fact, major central banks all around the bank have also talked about the possibility of using the technology in the near future for their own currencies. However, a large proportion of the projects in the virtual currency sector, are currently trying to make it easier to integrate virtual currency with the existing financial system.
Since Zcash's opaqueness can become a problem for the virtual currency, its developer Zooko Wilcox has decided to host an open virtual meeting with law enforcement officials as to explain them the entire project.
According to Mr. Wilcox and the programmers behind Zcash, their sole purpose behind developing an untraceable virtual currency is to provide privacy for people who do not want their financial transactions to be visible to the world, and not to facilitate any type of illegal activity.
For now, the strategy is to release Zcash slowly to computers that help support the network underlying the currency. The new Zcash units will be distributed until there are 21 million of them available in the world. The project is being run by a for-profit Delaware corporation, Zcash Electric Coin Company, which is again being led Mr. Wilcox.
Monero, another relatively new virtual currency, had also come with an anonymity built into the system, but it was seized upon by speculators earlier this year who increased Monero's value significantly before the price nosedived. Unlike Wilcox' Zcash, Monero is already being used for purchases on various black market websites.
[Top Image-bitcoinmagazine.com]
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