I think that 2018 will be the year of anonymous coins.
Why I like ZEC?:
Fundamentals:
1. Zcash offers zero knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKS) and was the first project which integrated this feature. 2. They have an improved trusted setup, in which everyone can participate, ongoing since a couple of weeks. There are really cool ideas and proposals. 3. In September 2018 they plan to launch the "Sapling" upgrade. Which is believed to reduce the RAM usage for zero knowlodge proof transactions from >3GB to 40 MB. This will make it possible to send/recieve zero knowledge private transactions via mobile devices. 3. They have huge financial backing by many early crypto investors (Barry Silbert, Roger Ver, Fred Ehrsam, Fenbushi Capital, Ben Davonport, Pantera Capital, etc.) and a partnership with the Ethereum Foundation and JPMorgan. 4. Vitalik Buterin said last month, "zero knowlodge proofs are the most underhyped thing in cryptography right now". 5. Ethereum has been integrating zk-SNARKS into their platform since last year.
Technicals and Market Psychology:
1. Since Zcash was launched in October 2016, it's in chop-mode. 2. It never had a constant and steady uptrend. Only fast pumps with 100%+ gains, within a daily candle. 3. The Market Markers try to shake out as many people as they can, to accumulate a large stack of ZEC for a good price. They want a great share of the coins supply to control the market. 4. After the Market Maker is finished with the accumulation, he will start the pump and will push it to new highs.
The heart and soul of cryptography is, will be, and always has been, since well before the inception of blockchain, anonymity/privacy. This goes back even well before the 1990s, when a guy named David Chaum created DigiCash and begged Congress for support, explaining that credit cards were never meant to use over the Internet. His dream, among other civil libertarians and Cypherpunks, was to create a digital payment system that allowed any and all ecommerce participants to send and receive money/value over the Web as if they had spent cash in real live marketplace full of strangers. At this crucial time in the 90s, while the infrastructure of the Internet and the Worldwide Web that we know today were first being built, crypto innovators like Chaum saw exactly what was happening, how massive the impending ecommerce revolution might actually (when no one else had a clue). He and many others saw where we were headed: towards a Web/electronic marketplace in which the most valuable resource was personal/private information associated with and all individuals transacting over the Internet.
Crypto innovators saw the dangers of the business model and players that were funding and fabricating our new system of ecommerce called the Web before took shape. Before Google figure out that the personal and transactional information associated each every transaction conducted over the Web was more valuable than the 29.99 a month subscription fees being paid to America Online for Web access. The money that funded the creation and fabrication of the Internet and Web came from advertising. Thus, the Web and the newly forming payment system for ecommerce was designed first to collect, store, and harvest our personal/transactional information to increase the efficiency/profitability of ads -- aka bring you and I free web services whose primary function was to collect our data and sell it to data brokers and sell it to fortune 500 companies looking to, for the first time, sell their products over the Web, and they offered that service to the rest of the commercial world through targeted marketing and focused advertising capability with revenue creating potential like nothing the marketplace/world had ever seen. Just ask Google and Amazon.
When you hear about Web infrastructure inventions/creations like the cookie, and you hear that they were created to make our Web experience more enjoyable and personalized, that's only half the truth. The other half of that sentence is ". . . in order to, with the greatest magnitude and invasiveness possible, collect and then monetize our personal information information in whichever ways would generate the most revenue. Essentially, the greater early Web companies infringed on individual privacy rights, the more money they made. And so, even though it sounds dramatic, the Web was built basically to be a huge surveillance machine, and guys like David Chaum and crypto innovators saw this and started innovating cryptographic solutions to protect individual privacy and anonymity early on, but nobody--except these early crypto minds--realized how how big--and to what degree the infrastructure for digital payments was being built on invasiveness--the ecommerce revolution was actually going to be.
Crypto scared the government in the 1990s, dating all the way back to German enigma machine. Even in late 80s and early 90s, encrypted communications were so scary to the US government that the penalty for private citizen exporting any advanced cryptography software--even just a simple communications program--was the same as exporting a high grade weapon. It was almost treasonous. Visa and MAstercard were scared too. They were scared of any innovation that was going to cut of their supply of information which they could sell to capture those advertising dollars.
So when Satoshi solved the double spend problem, removing the need for a trusted third party to debit money from Bob and credit that money to Alice (decentralization), this was the first time privacy rights minded individuals had agency, and they were soon to have the means to operate without being so reliant on government, industry, and the Web surveillance machine to complete their transactions.
Enter Bitcoin. My point is that Bitcoin should be viewed more as privacy technology that was designed specifically to protect the anonymity and privacy rights of its users. It is privacy technology. And "anonymity coins" are, were, and always will be, the beating heart and soul of crypto.
prep16505
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I'm enjoying your posts. Keep them coming
simba08
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nice write up, I can't help but agree. It seems ZEC Is one of the few projects that is more concerned about development for the long term instead of marketing for the "next pump". Not to mention heavy institutional investing into this project for good reason...its a long term play- throw a few in a hard wallet and forget about them.
Crypto innovators saw the dangers of the business model and players that were funding and fabricating our new system of ecommerce called the Web before took shape. Before Google figure out that the personal and transactional information associated each every transaction conducted over the Web was more valuable than the 29.99 a month subscription fees being paid to America Online for Web access. The money that funded the creation and fabrication of the Internet and Web came from advertising. Thus, the Web and the newly forming payment system for ecommerce was designed first to collect, store, and harvest our personal/transactional information to increase the efficiency/profitability of ads -- aka bring you and I free web services whose primary function was to collect our data and sell it to data brokers and sell it to fortune 500 companies looking to, for the first time, sell their products over the Web, and they offered that service to the rest of the commercial world through targeted marketing and focused advertising capability with revenue creating potential like nothing the marketplace/world had ever seen. Just ask Google and Amazon.
When you hear about Web infrastructure inventions/creations like the cookie, and you hear that they were created to make our Web experience more enjoyable and personalized, that's only half the truth. The other half of that sentence is ". . . in order to, with the greatest magnitude and invasiveness possible, collect and then monetize our personal information information in whichever ways would generate the most revenue. Essentially, the greater early Web companies infringed on individual privacy rights, the more money they made. And so, even though it sounds dramatic, the Web was built basically to be a huge surveillance machine, and guys like David Chaum and crypto innovators saw this and started innovating cryptographic solutions to protect individual privacy and anonymity early on, but nobody--except these early crypto minds--realized how how big--and to what degree the infrastructure for digital payments was being built on invasiveness--the ecommerce revolution was actually going to be.
Crypto scared the government in the 1990s, dating all the way back to German enigma machine. Even in late 80s and early 90s, encrypted communications were so scary to the US government that the penalty for private citizen exporting any advanced cryptography software--even just a simple communications program--was the same as exporting a high grade weapon. It was almost treasonous. Visa and MAstercard were scared too. They were scared of any innovation that was going to cut of their supply of information which they could sell to capture those advertising dollars.
So when Satoshi solved the double spend problem, removing the need for a trusted third party to debit money from Bob and credit that money to Alice (decentralization), this was the first time privacy rights minded individuals had agency, and they were soon to have the means to operate without being so reliant on government, industry, and the Web surveillance machine to complete their transactions.
Enter Bitcoin. My point is that Bitcoin should be viewed more as privacy technology that was designed specifically to protect the anonymity and privacy rights of its users. It is privacy technology. And "anonymity coins" are, were, and always will be, the beating heart and soul of crypto.