Zcash is not just another alt coin trying to compete in an already crowded market full of copycat coins with little to no individual value. Zcash is supported by some of the biggest names in the financial industry including JP Morgan, BTCC, Bitfinex, Kraken among others.
Zcash is the only anonymous and untraceable currency to date that is supported by a large number of reputable corporations, completely decentralized and open source. It has been vetted and analyzed by leading experts in cryptography and peer-reviewed multiple times over. Its architecture was written from scratch with the explicit aim of creating an untraceable crypto currency. Experts such as (amongst others) Gavin Andresen - former lead developer for Bitcoin, Zooko Wilcox - Founder and CEO of Least Authority Enterprises, Patrick Byrne - CEO Overstock.com, Jihan Wu - CEO Bitmain Technologies and Jon Matonis - Founding Director of The Bitcoin Foundation have all declared their support for (and use of) zk-SNARKs.
Zcash launched on October 28, 2016 and the total number of coins is caped at 21 million with 12.5 being mined every 10 mins from block rewards for 4 years so it's similar to Bitcoin in its distribution model.
Like Bitcoin, Zcash has a ledger where all transactions are stored but unlike Bitcoin, only the sender and receiver address is public through the transparent address (t-addr). The zero-knowledge proof constructions within Zcash encrypt all information about the transaction including who sent it, who received it and how much was transacted which allows for completely untraceable transactions. There are two types of addresses that appear when you first start using zcash, t-addr which are visible to anyone on the blockchain and z-addr addresses that appear after your identity has been revealed during a transaction. Z-addrs are only accessible to people who have them which provides total privacy beyond what Bitcoin can currently offer.
Bitcoin is where it all began but in its current form it has many limitations not least of which is transactional privacy. The use of the transparent address (t-addr) in transactions make these open for viewing by third parties which compromises user privacy. This means law enforcement agencies, government bodies and even script kiddies could potentially track down individual identities based on their public addresses in transactions they were involved with in some way or another.
Zcash believes this user privacy and transactional integrity is a basic human right and beyond that, you need privacy in order to be free. The ability to send money between parties without anyone else knowing who sent it, who received it and how much was transacted allows for financial freedom.
Another issue that Bitcoin suffers from is slow transaction times. Currently the average time taken to confirm a transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain is 10 mins which means slower transactions than current banking systems allow for. Zcash’s superior zero-knowledge encryption means transactions can go through within seconds allowing businesses to facilitate real-time payments for goods and services with their customers en masse and across borders effortlessly.
