Published On: June 26th, 2019Categories: Uncategorized

Tim Copeland, deputy news editor for Decrypt recently attended a developer conference hosted by the Electronic Coin Company (ECC) in Croatia. He reports that the firm is considering the most efficient way to change its product, Zcash.

Private Eye

If you’re are looking into cryptocurrency, you will more than likely have heard about Zcash but in case you haven’t, Zcash is basically a privacy coin that allows users to keep their transactions private from the public.

After Monero, Zcash is currently the second biggest coin in its field – so to speak – but the developers of the project want the privacy coin to service as many as ten billion people over the coming thirty years, according to the chief engineer at the ECC, Nathan Wilcox.

“I think we should make Zcash usable by 10 billion people by 2050 if we can.”

It seems that they’re willing to do anything to get there too.

One of the major considerations that the token is currently taking is how to and whether they should or not integrate a scaling technique advanced by Ethereum dubbed as sharding.

The Adamant Capital analyst and big Bitcoin enthusiast, Tuur Demeester is a big believer that this is an admission on ECC’s behalf, in that their original design was never scalable at all. In fact, Zcash is basically the protocol associated with Zerocoin but inserted into Bitcoin as an “oversimplification”.

Some of the key factors of spending funds change. Despite its good features, Zcash does have some limitations – mainly those that were passed on from Bitcoin in its initial design, which the firm would like to fix in a more creative manner rather just increasing the block size.

Zcash is building on something that has already made, so to speak. The private coin is following in the footsteps of Ethereum’s developmental roadmap. The firm says that they will have to make changes so drastic that a whole new blockchain design will be needed.

Getting Creative

This future hardfork will presumably credit existing holders. However, new designs can produce new vulnerabilities. 

A bug was found on the Zerocoin protocol a few months ago which gave a green light to unlimited inflation. In essence, coins could be created out of thin air. The flaw is fixable but the Zcoin team doesn’t plan to provide the needed resources to the issue and will instead keep on focusing on transitioning to its new privacy protocol, Sigma.

The underlying protocol in Monero, CryptoNight saw a similar bug surface in Bytecoin, it’s first integration. Even though no one knows who, a single user could likely hold the majority of all of the token. Even the leading cryptocurrency, Bitcoin has experienced similar vulnerabilities related to inflation.

In another world, the Zcoin developers could be preparing to implement recent innovations from Dash including ChainLocks, an anti-51% measure just brought in by Dash.

“Bitcoin is Broken”

A popular viewpoint is that the next step following the scalability of blockchains usage to serving masses of people is privacy. Bitcoin bulls can’t accept that Bitcoin could be lacking in this area though as evidenced by the user, BTC Sessions on Twitter:

Demeester spoke on the ECC subsidy which comes at the end of Copeland’s report, to which he says:

“Wilcox said that development and governance need to be funded. Currently, the ECC and the Zcash Foundation are funded through mining rewards. These are slated to stop in 2020. He argued that continued funding is necessary for development, but failed to specify how that might work.”

With this, ECC executives are keeping the door open, just a crack as to extend their subsidy, which is provided “programmatically”, in exchange for fully rebuilding the product.




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