Just another Bitcoin fork with applied changes made by someone else. The Zero knowledge whitepaper it's based upon was made by the ZEC (Zcash) team (university professors) which didn't even use it for their own coin (ZEC) and went on instead of using ZkSnarks. So this Thai kid just forks BTC, uses their research and creates Zcoin. It's nothing special, won't ever see a wider adoption. ATM bunch of the coins are locked up in Znodes (masternodes which require 1000 coins) and the parasites are waiting on the miners to mine blocks so they can get the divident of 15 coins.
It used to reward like 40 coins per mine block (50 coins in a block) but after the masternodes went live in december 2017, it now awards 28 coins per block to the miners. The breakdown in the past was:
- 40 miners + 10 devs
Now it's:
- 28 miners + 15 znodes parasites + 7 devs per block.
Profitability of this coin is worse than anything else. 99% of the hashing power is at only one pool (mining pool hub) where botnets account for like 85% of the hashing power. So with 8 x 1080ti and some change (multicore cpus, some 1050tis etc) I make barely 0.5 Zcoin per day ($26).
I would seriously recommend anyone to steer clear of this failed project. The Lyra2Z algo is good, light on the cards (~40-60C), but this coin and it's circus management team have drove it to the bottom, and I'm pretty sure apart from botnets, soon, nobody will mine it.
On their official chat (Telegram) - the users say: "We don't need miners, they are not loyal etc" - because the chat is filled with Znode (masternode) parasites who don't care if botnets provide the hashing power as long as they get their 15-30 coins per month without any effort (these people bought the coins when the value was like $1 or less per coin and now live off the dividents.)..
Why is zcoin a dead end? Is it a bad project?