
Zcash Integration Guide - mrb
https://z.cash/support/zig.html
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SRTP
How is Zcash different from Monero and Shadow?

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kbody
Shadow has too many red flags (PoS etc.) so I focus on Zcash vs Monero.

The disadvantages of Zcash is the trusted setup toxicity which requires trust
on people even though they put the name on the line. Another problem is that
if a vulnerability is discovered that creates new coins we will never be able
to know that it happened and that's by design.

Monero on the other hand doesn't have its full anonym power until RingCT is
running on live, which should be Jan 2017. Also Monero is more expensive
storage-wise per transaction.

Imo, Monero is the golden mean (so far) for an anonym coin. Zcash even though
it has a tremendous academic and cryptographic value with zk-SNARKs, it's too
risky when it comes to sacrificing the integrity of the coin supply.

For a better more in-detail comparison check:
[https://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/83/how-does-
moner...](https://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/83/how-does-monero-
privacy-and-security-compare-to-zcash/99)

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corv
Good link!

In summary,

Zcash ships with a magic number, essentially a public key whose corresponding
private key is able to counterfeit ZEC.

In order to mitigate the risk developers shard the keypair generation, such
that only one participant needs to destroy their private shard to guarantee
destruction of the private key.

More details: [https://z.cash/blog/snark-
parameters.html](https://z.cash/blog/snark-parameters.html)

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duskwuff
So, how long does a transaction take to verify? Hopefully that's much faster
than generating the transaction...

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corv
Generating the transaction does seem to be very resource intensive!

"On a quad-core benchmark server, generating a private transaction consumes
~3.2 GB of memory and ~50 seconds of compute time. On a 32-core Amazon EC2
server, compute time is around ~30 seconds."

*These figures have changed during development.

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murbard2
That's for creating a transaction. Validating / verifying a transaction takes
milliseconds, which is important for the consensus algorithms to work
properly.

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tribby
I think this will improve with time but I also don't think it matters much.
the benefit of the currency is worth the associated time costs.

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knocte
Worth it? You sure? Check this out: [https://blog.okturtles.com/2016/09/how-
to-compromise-zcash-a...](https://blog.okturtles.com/2016/09/how-to-
compromise-zcash-and-take-over-the-world/)

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Ar-Curunir
That fellow has been fear-mongering about Zcash for a while. I tried debating
him on how the trusted setup assumption can be weakened, but he kept repeating
the same arguments over and over again.

