Zcash, the encrypted cryptocurrency has dropped in price to $40 USD, a new low for the digital currency.
Zcash is an encrypted cryptocurrency, designed with privacy in mind, Zcash shot to unfathomable highs on it’s first day of trading, reaching $2 million USD, quickly falling to under $40,000 the same day. The rapid increase in mining rewards, coupled with little practical uses at present apart from trading have further fuelled this decline.
The coin is still profitable to mine with a GPU and it is a good use for GPU farms, big or small for now. The potentials of this coin due to the privacy implications are big, but Monero is an already established private cryptocurrency, although has commanded a much lower price it was stable.
There is always risk investing in new coins due to the fact many are simple pump and dump schemes, Zcash bought a new algorithm and features to the table, Monero was all a fork of Bytecoin, and Monero had a more fair release.
As Monero is an established currency, there are currently few advantages to use ZCash over Monero. Bitcoin is pseudo anonymous, if you cannot be linked to an address, transactions are anonymous, but they are all public on the blockchain for anyone to see.
Monero utilizes Ring Signatures to mask where money came/went, although a large concentration of wealth in one place (such as byte coin’s 80% premine) can weaken this to a significant degree, although in practice this will not happen with Monero as the launch was fair.
Zcash works by encrypting transactions on blockchain to further mask them and also cannot be mined with the current generation of ASICs. Many tout ASIC resistance as an advantage for a coin, but in practice you can make a dedicated chip do ANY computing task such as hashing if it is worth the time and energy to do so, unless you regularly changed your hashing algorithm so ASIC resistance alone is no reason to invest in a coin, although it can give GPU miners a head start.
It will remain to be seen what becomes of Zcash, it is likely the difficulty will drop due to the price drop, but this coin went to heights never been seen before in the crypto industry, although it seems like this was a simple pump of the coin before the price stabilized. We will update as soon as more information becomes available.