You can try following our new guide here:
https://zcoin.io/solo-mining-zcoin-guide/



Picture is from the awesome Youtube vid from The Yogscast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytWz0qVvBZ0

1) We currently have 4 devs working on it (I'm waiting for the last one to give his info to me). Another 2 will be joining us in May/June.
2) The major plans are MTP and Znodes. MTP should be on testnet in first week of April. Znodes will take a few months. We have other improvements that we wish to get into such as stealth addresses, TOR support and an updated GUI.
3) Currently we have enough finances to develop the coin. We are funded by our investors and with the price strong in the past few months our bounty wallet is also sufficient to fund development.
4) We have just started our marketing efforts and have engaged several contractors to assist us with this. You will see these in the coming weeks.

Hi all! We're kicking off our marketing!

As a first step we're doing a retweet campaign!

Join our Slack invite.zcoin.io and head to the #promotion channel for details!

*Effective Now, until the end of March GMT, we will be rewarding free XZC to those who retweet @zcoinofficial posts on Twitter.*

Tweets can be retweeted manually or through IFTTT using this recipe http://ift.tt/2nd0XWR. If retweeted manually, you need to indicate so in the google form mentioned below.

In order to ensure your tweets are counted and the appropriate XZC address is rewarded, please private message your Twitter account name & XZC address to Silver so it can be added to this google sheet.

We will verify your twitter following to calculate your reward.  *Your Reward % = Your Verified Followers / Total Verified Followers. 100 XZC will be given to participants in total. Rewards less than transaction fees will not be sent*

Thank you for your support! Let's build the biggest Zcoin retweet engine and help expand the reach of Zcoin!

How to use the IFTTT Recipe?
1.)    Simply click the bitly link
2.)    Click “ON” at which point it will ask you to sign up (free) and connect your twitter account
3.)    You will need to enter zcoinofficial as the account to watch
4.)    Click save and Zcoin tweets will auto retweet !

Thanks for your feedback! I have updated the mining guide here:
https://zcoin.io/language/en/guide-on-how-to-mine-zcoin-xzc/

Perhaps you missed out on some of the things we did in the past. We are indeed big fans of P2Pool but at the moment, we are only in a transition algorithm that is due to be phased out pretty soon. (https://zcoin.io/language/en/zcoin-transition-algo-lyra2z-specs-finalized/)

We had ocminer from Suprnova to release his pool code for the original Lyra2 which he did. You can view the Github here: https://github.com/ocminer/node-multi-hashing-xzc
A sizeable bounty was paid to him. This was however not updated to the temporary transition algorithm for lyra2z yet.

MiningPoolHub (http://zcoin.miningpoolhub.com/) and ZPool (http://zpool.ca/site/mining) under Lyra2z are both big mining pools that support mining Zcoin with the latest algorithm so there are 3 big quality mining pools that support Zcoin's current algorithm Lyra2z. We work closely with them and provide support where needed. Suprnova's predicted earnings are not accurate so you have to rely on your own calculators. MPH did do some work on getting accurate earnings predictions on their site.

We also engaged djm34 to develop public binaries for the Lyra2z miner code which we released (most other coins don't give a crap),
https://github.com/djm34/sgminer-msvc2015
https://github.com/djm34/ccminer-msvc2015

P2Pool is of course something we are looking at but we're only considering developing it once we move to our MTP algorithm.
http://zcoin.io/language/en/what-is-mtp-merkle-tree-proof-and-why-it-is-important-to-zcoin/
It doesn't make sense to spend resources in developing too much for the transition algorithm Lyra2z when the MTP release on testnet is a few weeks away. We foresee this will be the final PoW mechanism that will be used and then we can dedicate our resources to developing for it.

Again, djm34 has been engaged to come up with the publicly released binaries of the miners.

Remember, right now we're quite a lean team. Right now, we're not like Zcash's army of devs and millions of dollars to spend on multiple code audits so our current focus is
a) Finishing MTP and rolling it out
b) Fixing wallet experience
c) Working on Znodes
d) Code audit

Once a) and b) tasks have been finished especially a) we can definitely look into getting P2Pool code out. Heck, we have been playing around with the idea that all Znodes should even host P2Pool (but nothing finalized yet).

We are starting an education blog post series on how Zerocoin works and how it compares to other anonymity solutions:
https://zcoin.io/language/en/understanding-how-zerocoin-in-zcoin-works-and-how-it-compares-to-other-anonymity-solutions-part-1/

If anyone wants to try there's been some new commits on the dev branch https://github.com/zcoinofficial/zcoin/tree/dev that hopefully will reduce syncing to less than a day.

If it's stuck on a particular block. please restart with ./zcoin-qt -reindex

where are you getting this?

Is it from here? https://github.com/djm34/sgminer-msvc2015/releases

Awesome thanks for the update

Suprnova is pretty solid I think most of the early issues we had were due to the old lyra algorithm (not ocminer's fault) but it's been pretty good!

MPH is pretty good too and they have more accurate earnings estimate.

Shouldn't be! Should be every 10 minutes or so and the last few blocks have been quite recent.

Where are you waiting for your confirmations?

Still not confirmed. Working out the details on this along with the share of the block reward. We'll get a better idea of the landscape once we are closer to release since there are many factors to take into account.

Development Update

Full blog post: https://zcoin.io/language/en/zcoin-development-update-znodes-and-scaling-zerocoin/

Znodes

One of the key challenges with Zerocoin has been scalability both from a computational cost and also the space it occupies on the blockchain. Currently, the way Zcoin implements the Zerocoin protocol, the RSA accumulators (where people burn their minted coins) are not stored anywhere but recalculated every single time. Although this approach is conceptually the safest and easiest, it does add significant computation time when calculating a Zerocoin spend transaction. At current Zerocoin transaction volumes, these are not a problem, but as Zerocoin usage becomes higher and RSA accumulators store more coins, this isn’t an ideal solution from a scaling perspective and it was always our intention to improve on this.

We also currently store all Zerocoin spend proofs (25 kb each) on the blockchain which again, isn’t a problem currently, but as more transactions go through, it will lead to significant bloat on the blockchain. The original Zerocoin paper did foresee this and proposed the use of a distributed hash table or a separate blockchain that would reduce Zerocoin spend transactions on the blockchain to a mere 64 bytes.

A key point that arose in our experience is, as Zerocoin spend transactions are computationally intensive and do not attract fees (currently all mint transactions attract a fixed 0.1 XZC fee that are paid to miners while spend transactions are free), mining pools are incentivized to ignore Zerocoin transactions. A pool before submitting a block needs to spend time to verify the Zerocoin spend transactions and during this time, another pool might have found the block and submitted it. This means that pools will make more money by purposely ignoring Zerocoin spend transactions. One approach is to add a spend transaction fee on top of the mint fee to incentivize pools to process Zerocoin transactions. However, after consideration, we did not favor this as it would mean that whatever denomination of Zerocoin you minted, you would get back slightly less (for e.g. if you minted 1 Zerocoin, you would get 0.9 XZC back). This becomes more complicated when we do eventually change the Zerocoin fee structure to be variable and it no longer becomes certain how many coins you’ll get back from a Zerocoin spend transaction which may prove to be a privacy risk as well. It also doesn’t address the concern of mining pools spending resources verifying these Zerocoin spend transactions.

Our proposal to implement Znodes solves both of these problems by creating a group of incentivized nodes that are tasked to support Zerocoin transactions. By having nodes incentivized, we can also have higher requirements for nodes that allow them to process more Zerocoin transactions and mining pools no longer need to spend time to verify Zerocoin spend transactions.

• A fixed number of XZC is deposited into an address so that Znode holders have a ‘stake’ and makes Sybil attacks much more expensive.
• Znodes will earn a portion of the block reward.
• Znodes will be the only nodes that verify Zerocoin transactions allowing normal nodes to have low requirements and also removing the disincentive for mining pools to ignore Zerocoin spend tx.
• A high percentage of Znodes will have to come to the same result for the transactions to be processed and we are also exploring the use of peer reputation management systems to reject malicious nodes.
• Znodes will store the RSA accumulators allowing quick verification instead of having to recalculate every single time allowing much larger RSA accumulator sizes.
• Allows a secondary layer for Zerocoin proofs to be stored in the future (won’t be implemented in first iteration).

The use of incentivized nodes have been controversial in the past especially when used in providing anonymity through tumbling/mixing methods. This is because in such systems, those incentivized nodes can see at least part of the mixing taking place. With Znodes, this isn’t an issue since the use of zero knowledge proofs means there is no ‘mixing’ to see.  The nodes are verifying are mathematical proofs to show that a person doing a Zerocoin spend transaction has indeed done a valid Zerocoin mint without revealing which mint it is. Furthermore, we aren’t at this time considering any governance system to be implemented in Znodes. There’s also the often misplaced concern that the Zcoins would be locked up and affect liquidity. Zcoins can always be transferred out immediately from Znodes and the only effect is that the node stops being recognized as a Znode and functions as a regular node.

It is our opinion that having an incentivized node structure allows higher performance nodes which will form a strong backbone of the Zcoin and the Zerocoin network.  This allows a larger number of spend transactions to be processed in each block without choking mining pools or normal nodes, larger RSA accumulator sizes and a more resilient network. With Znodes, we are confident that our Zerocoin implementation will be the premier anonymity solution for cryptocurrencies.

This post lays out the general principles of our implementation but will be subject to tweaking and potential modifications as we develop and test it.

Immediate Development Goals

We also haven’t forgotten the other aspects of our project as just as it is important to have technical advancements, it is also critical for it to be user friendly. Together with our ongoing code audit, we are also working on improving the user experience of our wallet and Zcoin in general in a few key aspects:

Initial Load Times

This has been one of the biggest complaints for users where an initial startup of the wallet takes a very long time. This is primarily due to the highly computationally intensive nature of the initial Lyra2 algorithm and that the verification is not multi-threaded. This was significantly improved in our current algorithm Lyra2z. We will be beginning work shortly to make this verification multi-threaded and the next step is to upgrade Bitcoin core which will include support of pruning and make it easier to develop light wallets.

Own Block Explorer

We are already in the final stages of testing our own block explorer that will reduce reliance on third party block explorers and will have additional features related to Zerocoin transactions.

Finishing up MTP

MTP will be delayed slightly to be released on testnet in the first week of April. djm34 has already started on miner development and hopes to have something to show in approximately 2 weeks.

Ability to do Zerocoin spend transactions to a third party address

Currently, Zerocoin spend transactions only can be redeemed to a new address that is owned by you. However we can easily add the feature for Zerocoin spends to be redeemed to third party addresses, allowing users to ‘teleport’ coins directly.

Language Translations

We are working on translating our Zcoin wallet into multiple languages (in particular for our large Chinese community).

Nope that is controlled by someone who is no longer with the project and has refused to take it down. It also has its own Github and Slack (which has a lot of users but is defunct).

We have been quiet for the past few days but will post a development update pretty soon

We also realize there's still a lot of people going to the wrong site!! Our website is zcoin.io and not zcoin.tech

Please do spread the word and prevent people from getting the wrong info/binaries.

Some good news! For those of you asking for an update for a code review, we have engaged New Alchemy (Peter Vessenes' company) to do an initial assessment to assess the scope and breadth of the audit before we drill in further.

We will make further announcements as we go along.

Could you let me know where you downloaded it from? Make sure it's from here.

https://github.com/zcoinofficial/zcoin/releases

It took 2 days for me and it's not actually the downloading but the verification of the Zerocoin txs that is taking time combined with the memory hard algo.

One of the issues is that the verification is a single threaded process and we are currently looking into making this multi-threaded (use all cores).

Once it is synced however, things are a very fast to sync up and you should notice this.


There should be a backup function in the wallet menus. You just need to save that wallet.dat somewhere.

Think it doesn't support older cuda if I'm not mistaken.