Hacker News Reader

Comment by moyix | Hacker News Reader

I'm kind of confused by the tenor of the comments in here. I'll admit I haven't been following cryptocurrencies closely, but there seem to be a large number of comments suggesting that ZCash is a scam and that Monero is better (without any concrete arguments).

Could someone enlighten me as to why that's the case? I know of ZCash via the academic papers on it, and because the people involved – Zooko Wilcox, Matthew Green, etc. – are extremely well known and trusted in the security community. I've heard basically nothing about Monero.

View on HN

I have been reading through and also noticing this. I was looking for a better explanation too - from what I understand basically:

Monero uses ringCT algorithm on transfer to mix the payments and obfuscate the sender

Monero has a private view key and separate spend key. View key can decrypt transactions made by you to confirm your total balance (Monero balance is unknown to daemon, is calculated as (xmrRecieved - xmrSpent)

ZCash has 'zero-knowledge' proofs and while the whitepaper[1] is a bit intense it uses a novel Proof-of-Work explained within. Called zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARKS).

ZCash coins origins obfuscated before recieved by user, reducing need to mix payments together

Personally, I think they're both great and it's a healthy time for a privacy-based cryptocurrency face off. Having said that, ZCash theoretically sounds better (to me) yet Monero is proven in the wild - and both have people with money already sunken in.

IMO the cryptocurrency world will be much better off when it's userbase is looking for a CURRENCY and not a COMMODITY.

[1]: http://zerocash-project.org/paper

[2]: https://github.com/zcash/zips/blob/master/protocol/protocol....

[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/41vg68/monero_vs_zc... - decent ZEC vs XMR ELI5 thread

edit: formatting

SNARKs are not proofs-of-work, but are instead used to prove that you can spend a coin, without revealing which coin you're spending.

What is the difference between a currency and a commodity? If the rate of appreciation is perceived as high enough, and the exchange rate into goods and services is high enough, anyone will have a tendency to hoard a currency - why wouldn't you?

It would be simple to create an alt-coin that degrades in value over time, thus encouraging circulation and not hoarding (though how you would battle fake-circulation through shill transactions is up for debate), but no one wants to buy into such a thing.

I happen to think the conflation of money/debt/interest with the corresponding need for continual economic growth is one of the great tragedies of our age, but I'm not entirely sure how to get out of it.

> What is the difference between a currency and a commodity?

Whether you want to spend it.

> If the rate of appreciation is perceived as high enough, and the exchange rate into goods and services is high enough, anyone will have a tendency to hoard a currency - why wouldn't you?

Of course it's reasonable to do in such a situation, but that doesn't make it good for the thing being hoarded. Ideally a currency would have minimal appreciation.

Bear in mind that owners of either coin are financially motivated to promote it vs the alternative, as its value is driven by demand. Expect to disregard the majority of comments about altcoins (Monero and ZCash are among the few doing anything remotely interesting, so it's only worse for less well known coins).

Monero is just an over-hyped pumped up alt coin. All of the trade volume is on the exchange Poloniex which claims to be based in the US but provides no details of who owns or operates the site beyond that. They allow margin trading. I highly doubt their legitimacy. The initial rise of Ethereum also occurred on Poloniex. Lots of hype surrounding both of those coins without any real world utility.

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/monero/#markets

AlphaBay is pushing Monero http://motherboard.vice.com/read/monero-cryptocurrency-dark-... . This is not a surprise: right now, aside from a few geeks meddling with things the only real world usage for all of these cryptocurrencies (where the word currency is strongly debatable) is one which a bank can not do because if a bank can do it, it's better to use a bank for now. See, one of the (biggest?) selling points of banks are providing a safety layer between the stupidity of people and their money. All cryptocurrencies remove this to one extent or another (I believe this https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4yru3h/scared_and... to be the sad end of the scale).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com