Data Protection: Zerocoin Protocol and ZCoin
With the need to protect one’s data and private information rapidly increasing, various ways to achieve this are being explored and developed on a regular basis. This need to protect data at all cost stems from the fact that people are quite tired of large centralized corporations harvesting their private information for profit.
One way which has been found to be quite effective towards ensuring data safety is to have no data to protect in the first instance, in other words staying anonymous.
Since most centralized cooperation generally requires users to provide some sort of information before they can be rendered service, decentralization seems to be the way to go for anyone looking for true anonymity.
As of recent, there have been developments of several innovations targeted at making sure that user’s data is protected by allowing them to stay anonymous on the network. A good example of such is ZCoin.
What is ZCoin?
Zcoin is the first and only private cryptocurrency with full implementation of the Zerocoin Protocol. ZCoin uses the Zerocoin protocol to enable private transactions.
The ZeroCoin protocol was originally developed as an extension of Bitcoin, unfortunately, the attention it received from the community was quite low. This led to it being released as an independent blockchain and token.
The ZCoin allows its user to spend without any link to their identity or transaction history, and this is a significant improvement on privacy when compared to most other protocols. The ZeroCoin protocol works just like Bitcoin because it was developed as an improvement to Bitcoin. However with Zcoins, even though the entire coin supply is a public knowledge, transactional histories are removed. As a result of this, the sender and the receiver’s information are kept anonymous.
More research and improvement is being done to ensure that once the new ZeroCoin is implemented, it would have the ability to protect its user’s identity, by hiding their transactions, as well as their address balances.
The Zcoin Technology
All transactions on the Zcoin protocol are kept completely private by the Zcoin technology, called the zero-knowledge proofs. This technology makes a zero-knowledge cryptographic statement and only the sender and the user who has received a certain amount of money from a transaction knows what has been received in his or her wallet. There is no information about the receiver and the sender’s identity or any form of transaction history.
Zcoin MTP Algorithm and Minting
Zcoin originally made use of the Lyra2z algorithm for its proof of work consensus. However, Zcoin is expected to start using the Merkle Tree Proof (MTP) algorithm for its consensus once its hard fork is over. The MTP known as a memory hard algorithm provides the egalitarian computing, which bridges the gap between those with high computing power called the large-scale mining farms, and those with little power called the home miners.
The first Zcoin public MTP version was released in May 2017 on their Testnet, that same year when the development of MTP originally began. Ever since the Zcoin MTP has been released, it has been tested, as well as refined. The improvement made on the algorithm is in conjunction with several committed members of the community. Zcoin has already begun the plans and implementation to switch their Proof-of-Work algorithm to MTP since the release of its version 0.13.7.1. The Zcoin’s hard fork has been fixed for On December 10, 2018. The new Proof-of-Work algorithm MTP will also be infused in the new development, and through the Zero-Knowledge cryptographic proofs, complete privacy is achieved. Block time will go down to 5 minutes as well and there will be no change to supply.
Some advantages of the MTP has been identified. One of these advantages is that it prevents the development of ASIC chips and in turn prevents centralization of mining. It also provides other advantages like preventing computers from being infected and making them part of mining botnets.
Privacy-enhancing technology: Zerocoin protocol
Unlike other platforms where all transactions are broadcasted on a public ledger, the Zerocoin protocol removes all transactional history, thereby keeping both sender and receiver anonymous.
Unlike bitcoin whereby external information can be used to link identities and organizations to transactions, Zcoin can help prevent this through a process known as minting. As a result of this, the Zerocoin protocol offers better private protocol than that of bitcoin or most other networks.
Minting and Spending on ZCoin
The newly minted Zcoin is untraceable and can be spent once acquired. The ZCoins can only be minted in the blocks of 1, 10, 25, 50 and 100.
The Zcoin Wallet
There are about 21 million coins originally meant to be created on the Zerocoin protocol because it was based on Bitcoin, but an additional of 388,450 coins were created thanks to a bug in the code. The maximum supply of ZCoin is now about 21.4 million, due to the fact that the bug has been fixed. Zcoin makes use of the XZC Wallet, as the Zerocoin protocol is limited when it comes to storage choices. It has a desktop GUI wallet with a built-in mint, as well as spend functions.
Conclusion
The fact that transactions made with Zerocoin protocol are completely private is a major advantage the platform provides to the cryptocurrency community.
Since the Transactions on the Zerocoin protocol it impossible to trace, it has been referred to by some authorizes as a coin which promotes money laundering. Zcoin is trading at $10.54 as of today 10th November 2018. The coin has gained about 1.19% in the last 24 hours of trading.
