Image: Zcash Cryptocurrencies are a dime a dozen these days, and it seems like a week doesn’t go by without news of digital thefts, crashes, and cataclysmic conflicts in the world of decentralized digital money. Nevertheless, a newly-launched cryptocurrency created by expert cryptographers holds the distinction of being the only one explicitly designed to provide bitcoin’s biggest missing feature: anonymity. Zcash, which went live on Friday with version 1.0 “Sprout,” is essentially an experimental fork of bitcoin that attempts to address an inherent contradiction of the supposedly “untraceable” cryptocurrency. Rather than publish the full details of all transactions on a distributed public ledger called the blockchain, Zcash can mask the sender, recipient, and amount of all transactions using what’s known in mathematics as a zero-knowledge proof. Basically, a zero-knowledge proof is a way to mathematically prove a statement is true without revealing any of the information you’d normally need to prove it. Suffice it to say, this sorcery allows Zcash transactions to be validated without actually exposing any of their details. Zcash founder and CEO Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn has been working on the concept for at least as long as bitcoin’s mysterious pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, and has enlisted cryptographers from Johns Hopkins University who had originally drew up plans for a bitcoin anonymity upgrade called ZeroCoin . As Zcash’s creators put it: “If bitcoin is like http for money, Zcash is https,” referring to the now-ubiquitous secure protocol that protects a website’s visitors from eavesdropping. Zcash also notably addresses another of the biggest pitfalls of bitcoin and its ilk: that big corporations with tons of dedicated computers are pretty much the only ones with any shot at mining the cryptocurrency. As time goes on, the “difficulty” of mining cryptocurrencies like bitcoin—which involves computers solving millions of complex math problems, […]
