A new announcement for Zcoin. I hope its price back to top in June.
Announcements5 November 2017Mandatory wallet upgrade v0.13.3.1 released, with small but important fixes.
Please upgrade before the hard fork at Block 60000 (approximately 9 November 2017)27 October 2017Mandatory wallet upgrade v0.13.3 released.
19 September 2017New wallet version 0.13.2.4 released.
https://zcoin.io/zcoin-core-upgrade-to-0-13-is-here/13 August 2017Core Upgrade to 0.13 and MTP Update
Zcoin is almost ready to be deployed on Bitcoin Core 0.13 and will be released soon.
We are currently holding off the MTP deployment on mainnet in light of new academic developments.
https://zcoin.io/core-upgrade-to-0-13-and-mtp-update/21 July 2017Bounty for MTP Audit ($10,000) and MTP Implementation ($2,500)
To further encourage research and scrutiny into MTP, we are sponsoring two bounties.
MTP Audit Bounty: 10,000 USD Total
MTP Implementation Bounty : 2,500 USD TOTAL
Further information about rules and bounty distribution can be found in our blog post:
https://zcoin.io/bounty-mtp-audit-10000-mtp-implementation-2500/9 July 2017MTP Open-source Miner Bounty Challenge
Zcoin is sponsoring a prize fund of $21,000 for the development of open source miners for the MTP protocol as implemented in Zcoin.
Details available here:
https://zcoin.io/mtp-open-source-miner-bounty-challenge/8 July 2017We are happy to announce that Litebit.eu, Coinex.ir and Coinexchange.io has listed Zcoin! Thank you to our community for making this possible.
26 June 2017MTP with final specifications on Testnet
MTP is now set to go live at block 47,500 which is in about 1.5 months' time.
Miner bounty program with a total of USD 21,000 will be awarded to the best open source miners for CPU and GPU. If you are interested, please drop by our Slack and join the #minerdevcompetition channel.
Those who are interested in participating in the test and wallet mining on the testnet can use the
pre-release version (Windows version coming soon). Reference CPU and GPU miners will be released in a few days.
11 June 2017Leandro Reinaux joins the Zcoin team
We are happy to welcome Leandro Reinaux to the Zcoin team! Although new to cryptocurrency development,, Leandro has learnt quickly and contributed a lot in upgrading our code and will be an immense help in accelerating our development.
Leandro has 8 years of experience as a fullstack developer, in a wide range of programming languages (C#, C++, Java, Ruby). He is the founder of Even3, Brazilian leading platform for academics and scientific events. He also believes that the cryptocurrencies will be the new standard for financial and transaction systems.
He is on our Slack as @leoreinaux. Give him a shout of welcome!
7 June 2017Pre-release is out
https://github.com/zcoinofficial/zcoin/releases/tag/v0.8.7.8We recommend starting with a
new installation altogether without any wallet.dat though if you wish you can download the chain data from
http://znode.io/ that will speed it up a little bit. First sync still take a while but it shouldn't get stuck anymore. Make sure to backup your old wallet.dat just in case.
If you have an old wallet with existing funds and wish to port it over, you can export your private key from your old wallet addresses by going to Help > Debug Window > Console and typing the following:
If wallet is encrypted type the following into the console. Sometimes it can take a while for console to respond if it's currently syncing.
walletpassphrase passphrase 120
dumpprivkey address
Once your new wallet is synced u can import the private keys into it by:
walletpassphrase passphrase 120
importprivkey address
Tested on Linux and Windows but not yet on Mac. Do give feedback. We're actively testing it in Slack in #developers
4 June 2017We are pleased to welcome Tadhg Riordan to the team as a Solidity developer to work on integration of Zerocoin technology on Ethereum. Tadhg has previously worked on a system of confidential transactions using zkSNARKs which was built into a smart contract and made use of the precompiled contracts which are to be added to the Metropolis update. He hopes to achieve the same with Zerocoin technology as detailed in our previous post. We are confident this will brings greater awareness of Zerocoin tech and its potential uses and its continued relevance and advantages in providing privacy and also eventually allow greater cooperation and collaboration between the Ethereum and Zcoin community.
Tadhg Riordan is a 24 year old Software Developer from Wexford, Ireland. He recently completed my MSc from Trinity College Dublin, where he worked with Blockchain privacy mechanisms, focusing particularly on Zero-Knowledge Proofs and the Ethereum platform. He is a strong advocate for the adoption of crypto-currency and for complete financial privacy.
3 June 2017Coinomi mobile wallet adds Zcoin (XZC) Support
Coinomi a free, secure open source wallet has added Zcoin (XZC) support. Coinomi is an excellent way to hold your Zcoins given that it uses recovery seeds and you are in control of your own private keys. It is also a light wallet meaning you don't have to wait for any syncing and is an easy way to get started with Zcoin.
Coinomi is currently only available for Android for the moment but an IOS option and a desktop wallet is coming soon.
You can grab it from the
Android Playstore or directly from their
website.
19 May 2017We are excited to announce that Tim Ruffing has joined Zcoin as a Cryptography Advisor.
Tim is a cryptographer and blockchain researcher pursuing his PhD in computer science at Saarland University in Germany and
has contributed substantially to the field of privacy enhancing technologies in cryptocurrencies. Some of his notable works are CoinShuffle and ValueShuffle that were proposals to add privacy to Bitcoin in a decentralized manner.
Tim’s research areas in cryptocurrencies and privacy enhancing technologies are particularly relevant to Zcoin’s core technologies such as Zerocoin and the upcoming Sigma protocol and we are confident that his input will assist us in implementing strong and sound cryptography in Zcoin. Welcome Tim!
21 April 2017We believe we have found a way to remove the need for a trusted setup in our Zerocoin implementation through the use of the Sigma protocol combined with elliptic curve groups. This also has a benefit of reducing proof sizes from 25 kb to around 1 kb granting greater scalability.
Further reading
here.
10 April 2017Zcoin (XZC) is proud to be the first coin to have a working implementation of the MTP proof of work! MTP has been launched on our testnet and there will be a period of testing where we fix bugs and tweak the parameters to ensure a smooth roll out on mainnet soon.
Solo mining already works through the inbuilt miner (setgenerate true) and djm34 is working on a GPU implementation of the miner.
For those of you who code, you can participate in the test through our Github on the MTP branch here:
https://github.com/zcoinofficial/zcoin/tree/mtp. We are aware of some bugs and are working to fix them so the code will still be rapidly changing. Note that there may be numerous restarts on the testnet. Remember after compiling to run it with the -testnet flag or define it within zcoin.conf!
Getting the Wallethttps://github.com/zcoinofficial/zcoin/releaseshttps://github.com/zcoinofficial/zcoin/wiki/InstallationHow to Minehttps://github.com/zcoinofficial/zcoin/wiki/Pool-Mining-GuideFAQWhat is the distribution for Zcoin?There will be 21 million Zcoins. Zcoin follows the same halving cycle as Bitcoin (every 4 years). 10% of the total Zcoin supply will be distributed to the Founders Reward as time passes. In the first 4 years, 20% of Zcoins will be distributed to the Founders Reward. In other words, during the first 4 years, 40 Zcoins will go to the miners and 10 Zcoins will go towards the Founders reward. After the first 4 years, the block reward goes completely towards the miners.
What will Zcoin's Founders Reward be used for?The Founders Reward will be given to early investors, developers, and Zcoin community members. We also have bounties for various tasks, such as Zcoin core development, web development, graphic design, marketing, ect. If you'd like to help out, please email or message us on Slack.
Is Zcoin a fork of Zcash? What are the primary differences?Zcoin is not a fork of Zcash in anyway. First of all Zerocoin is the tech, Zcoin is the coin, similarly to how Zerocash is the tech and, Zcash the coin.
Zcoin uses Zerocoin technology from the
Zerocoin paper. This is a very well peer reviewed paper with over 200 citations.
Zcash instead uses the
Zerocash paper.
Although Zerocash is a development from Zerocoin meant to address certain perceived shortcomings of Zerocoin, they are not simple forks of each other and rely on different protocols.
Zerocash was meant to improve on Zerocoin on these issues:
a) Zerocash's proofs are much more smaller than Zerocoin's
b) Zerocoin uses fixed denominations to mint (1, 25, 50, 100) while Zerocash is not subject to such limitations
c) Greater anonymity with Zerocash since sender/receiver/amount are all obscured.
However Zerocoin's advantage over Zerocash are as follows:
a) Although Zerocoin's proofs are larger and occupies more storage space, the computational requirements to generate a private transaction are many times faster. Zcash requires large amounts of RAM and minutes of computational time. Zerocoin requires seconds to use and is not memory intensive. Basically Zerocoin uses more storage space but is computationally much less intensive.
b) Parameter generation for both Zcoin and Zcash requires a trusted setup but Zcoin's parameters are arguably less controversial. (
https://github.com/zcoinofficial/zcoin/wiki/Parameters-in-set-up-phase-for-Zerocoin-in-ZCoin). A zero trust parameter setup is also within our roadmap.
c) Most importantly is that in Zcoin, total supply is still visible so if there's a flaw and someone is secretly creating coins for themselves, this can be much more easily detected. With Zcash, if a flaw is exploited, it may be almost impossible to detect as someone can mint coins for themselves without being detected.
d) Zerocoin's tech is much more reviewed and better understood than Zcash's. Zcash's use of zero knowledge proofs uses ZK-Snarks is much more experimental and only a handful of people understand it.
Here at Zcoin, we believe that multiple zero-knowledge cryptocurrency implementations is a blessing to society. Like Zcoin, Zcash is also enabling individual freedom and open commerce to the world by increasing financial privacy. We applaud the work that the Zcash team is doing. With that in mind, it is important to understand the inherent tradeoffs between the Zerocoin and Zerocash protocols. Zcoin has some major advantages over Zcash, as well as significant disadvantages. By increasing awareness of these tradeoffs, privacy-centric users can more effectively use either coin tailored to their concerns and specific use cases.
You may also read more at our
blog post.
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