Financial Privacy & Introducing ZCoin.
“I have nothing to hide, so why should I care?”
It doesn’t matter if you have “nothing to hide”. Privacy is a right granted to individuals that underpins the freedoms of expression, association and assembly; all of which are essential for a free, democratic society.
So the argument that “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” misframes the whole debate.
Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say. (Edward Snowden)
Bitcoin
Most of us know about Bitcoin. We know about how it enables transferring value across the world in a decentralised manner. Thus increasing security and privacy. Except the fact that it isn’t so.
BITCOIN DOES NOT GUARANTEE FINANCIAL PRIVACY!
Yes, Bitcoin is not private. Most of the people who deal with cryptocurrencies on a frequent basis have realised this. We have a daily influx of news and articles where people are writing about how the Bitcoin blockchain has been analysed and people identified who have used the payment network to transfer value.
I am attaching some links here for the more curious ones!
Well, okay Bitcoin is not private. But only criminals want privacy.
This is an argument we keep hearing over and over again.
Ok, is it criminal to expect that if I make a transaction to a person, that person should not be able to view my account balance and the past and future transaction that I have made or will make?
Well, I have a small business and I would not want my competitors to know how much money I have in my account and who I am dealing with and in how much amount. This will be almost catastrophic for my business. I don’t think that makes me a criminal.
Introducing ZCoin
ZCoin is a community based effort towards providing people their well deserved financial privacy. It enables you to transfer value globally without compromising your privacy.
To people who are new to cryptocurrencies and are not fully aware of how a cryptocurrency functions, I will recommend them to join our Slack channel. We have a very friendly community. A lots of concerned people frequent there every day and have intelligent conversations regarding privacy and how ZCoin ensures it for the users.
I am also attaching a video which will make a lot of things clearer.
To people who know about how a cryptocurrency works and the basic aspects of a blockchain, let me tell you more about what makes ZCoin so special.
As I mentioned above, Bitcoin is a public ledger and all the transactions are broadcasted to the whole network. There are many techniques which have been developed and can be used to link individual identities and organisations to transactions. This breaks the privacy in bitcoin network.
Zcoin guarantees complete financial privacy through the Zerocoin Protocol. The Zerocoin Protocol uses Zero-Knowledge proofs to ensure zero leakage of information about senders and recipients of financial transactions.
What is Zerocoin Protocol?
A zero-knowledge proof is a method in which one person can prove to another person that a given statement is true, without conveying any information apart from the fact that the statement is indeed true.
Zcoin uses zero-knowledge proofs by making a zero-knowledge cryptographic statement. When someone is sent Zerocoin, the person only knows that X amount of money was sent to their wallet. Unlike Bitcoin and all previous cryptocurrencies, there is no other unintended identifying information about the sender and receiver, or any attached transaction history. With Zerocoin, transactional history is completely removed.
Fun Fact: Zerocoin research paper has been cited almost 200 times. In comparison, ZeroCash (another popular research paper used by ZCash, a competing currency) has been cited only half the number of times.
There will be 21 million ZCoins. ZCoin follows the same halving cycle as Bitcoin (every 4 years).
There are so many interesting technical details and news I want to talk about but I don’t want to leave with a lot in the first article itself. There are a lot of things I want to talk about:
- What is MTP protocol, it’s advantages and how ZCoin is the first cryptocurrency to implement it.
- Znodes
- How ZCoin is superior to ZCash
- Sigma Protocol (Trustless Setup) [The thing I am most excited about :D]
- Tor/I2P integration
- The amazing team and community behind ZCoin
But I will leave them for future articles.
Still, if you are as excited as me when I first heard about ZCoin and can’t wait to just dive in, I will leave you with a few links. There will be focused articles on each of these topics quite near in the future. But yeah I can understand if you don’t want to wait :D
What I would personally recommend most will be to come join our slack community. It is such a vibrant place and you get to know so many smart people having deep discussions on how to make ZCoin even better.
And remember ZCoin is a community based effort, we always welcome people who are willing to contribute.
Join us on slack.
Join us on reddit.
See you space cowboys!
