Zcash , which is an implementation of the zerocash concept, is often referred to as the first form of truly anonymous digital cash. While Bitcoin been called a haven for criminals by many misinformed individuals, the reality is Satoshi Nakamoto ’s creation is a mostly-transparent ledger.
Although Zcash enables the highest level of privacy currently allowed by cryptography, there are still some potential issues (mostly unrelated to privacy) for the financial-anonymity protocol to overcome. Zcash CEO Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn recently discussed some of these issues on Epicenter Bitcoin .
Privacy Preserving Spends Take a Minute or Two to Generate
The main issue with Zcash right now is that generating a new privacy-preserving spend is somewhat inefficient. Zooko, as he is commonly known, explained this issue during his recent Epicenter Bitcoin appearance: “The current alpha code that we have running on a testnet ‒ it takes like about a minute or two of CPU time to generate a new privacy-preserving spend and only like a few milliseconds, I think, to verify. The latter part is for the good for performance, and that’s really important because all the full nodes and the miners have to be doing verifications all the time. The former part is pretty bad because it takes a whole minute or two on like a high-powered, supercomputer 64-bit laptop CPU.” Zooko also added that privacy-preserving spend generation likely requires more than 4 gigabytes of RAM, although he also mentioned that they don’t have precise measurements on RAM requirements quite yet.
In regard to the consequences of the current system requirements involved with privacy-preserving spends, Zooko stated: “That is totally prohibitive for certain use cases like generating a new spend on your smartphone, for starters. Also, anything that’s got a real low- latency requirement where you get incoming money you receive and […]
