Just another Bitcoin fork with applied changes made by someone else. The Zero knowledge whitepaper it's based upon was made by the ZEC (Zcash) team (university professors) which didn't even use it for their own coin (ZEC) and went on instead of using ZkSnarks. So this Thai kid just forks BTC, uses their research and creates Zcoin. It's nothing special, won't ever see a wider adoption. ATM bunch of the coins are locked up in Znodes (masternodes which require 1000 coins) and the parasites are waiting on the miners to mine blocks so they can get the divident of 15 coins.
It used to reward like 40 coins per mine block (50 coins in a block) but after the masternodes went live in december 2017, it now awards 28 coins per block to the miners. The breakdown in the past was:
- 40 miners + 10 devs
Now it's:
- 28 miners + 15 znodes parasites + 7 devs per block.
I would seriously recommend anyone to steer clear of this failed project. The Lyra2Z algo is good, light on the cards (~40-60C), but this coin and it's circus management team have drove it to the bottom, and I'm pretty sure apart from botnets, soon, nobody will mine it.
Profitability of this coin is worse than anything else. 99% of the hashing power is at only one pool (mining pool hub) where botnets account for like 85% of the hashing power. So with 8 x 1080ti and some change (multicore cpus, some 1050tis etc) I make barely 0.5 Zcoin per day ($26).
On their official chat (Telegram) - the users say: "We don't need miners, they are not loyal etc" - because the chat is filled with Znode (masternode) parasites who don't care if botnets provide the hashing power as long as they get their 15-30 coins per month without any effort (these people bought the coins when the value was like $1 or less per coin and now live off the dividents.)..
Unless the botnets are banned at MPH, this coin is worthless to smalltime miners.
I agree with you . I used to be a fan of Zcoin before but now I sold out my coins because of this issue . I think I will consider my investment and mining zcoin Once it's useful for me .
I don't really see the value of blaming the masternode owners for this. As if being a miner with a graphic card is such a hard job. Both pretty passive ordeals, where in both cases you need to put money in beforehand to get a reward.
Not aware of the whole botnet issue, but that also sounds like something that is a bigger problem in the crypto sphere.
I like normal miners and masternodes both. Masternode owners might or might not have bought the coins at a low price, they still put down this collateral that they don't use for something else. At least there is an opportunity cost involved there. Locking up so many funds is good for price stability and stimulates people to go in long-term instead of just speculating on the price. That capitalism rewards people for putting in the capital is not exactly Zcoin specific...