The Digital Art Revolution

When we think of the word “digital,” we think of computers: a sequence of intangible codes and numbers that create the vast world sitting behind the screens our eyes stare into seven hours a day…

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A Look at Alternative and Special Cryptos

zcash, ripple, monero are among the dominant altcoins

Let us take a break from the Ethereum-Bitcoin juggernaut for a bit and talk about other currencies in Crypto land.

Most people are not aware that some very interesting features are present with smaller currencies that the two big ones can only dream about.

Wanna learn about privacy, scalability, speed, and security as practised by some other cryptos?

Other fairly mainstream cryptos have decided to dedicate resources to these features.

Here, We will look at the features of Monero, Ripple and Zcash.

Welcome.

It is not easy to talk about cryptocurrency privacy and security nowadays without mentioning Monero.

The blockchain prides itself on providing excellent privacy by making transactions 100% un-linkable and untraceable.

In 2012, a team of seven developers started working on the Bytecoin blockchain to be the first implementation of CryptoNote in real life. CryptoNote is an application layer protocol which has been designed to run several decentralized systems.

Apart from Riccardo Spagni and David Latapie, the other five developers are anonymous to date.

But shortly after the Bytecoin launch, a lot of creepy things were noticed by the users, including an 80% pre-mining that had not been declared at the start. Due to the promise of the tech behind ByteCoin, a consensus was reached to hard fork the blockchain and create BitMonero. It later changed simply to Monero

#1 Complete Privacy

Since Monero’s cryptography is optimized using a CryptoNote property known as CryptoNight, your portfolio is completely secure. No one can tell who you are sending money to.

#2 Fungibility

There is a concept known as ‘tainted bitcoin.’ It simply means that if you possess bitcoin that has previously been used to do illegal stuff, it carries its transaction history immutably and therefore it is traceable and ‘unclean.’

But Monero is completely fungible. This means that any Monero is as good as any other. They have ensured this through a series of very complicated cryptography methods that ensure obfuscation of the senders and receivers.

#3 Flexible Block Sizes

Monero has an interesting feature that allows the blocks to be flexible in size while still preventing malicious attacks through block reward penalties.

What this means is that even if there is flexibility on size, a median of the previous 100 block sizes is used to institute a mining penalty in a quadratic fashion to ensure that miners are not clogging the system through huge blocks.

#4 ASIC Resistance

The near-complete centralization of bitcoin mining through the use of Application Specific Integrated Circuits and mining pools is a constant threat to the fall of the crypto.

Monero has hardcoded a memory-hard approach that makes the memory of a mining rig more important than speed, and hence reduce the need for special mining rigs. This means that relatively cheap mining rigs can be used to mine the coin.

#5 Multiple Keys

Unlike most blockchains that only have one private key and one public key for each wallet, Monero has view keys and send keys. Each of these two come in pairs, a private key and a public key.

This has allowed the blockchain to create what is known as an electronic cash triangle that prominently builds in the sender, receiver and transaction privacy.

This is achieved through ring signatures and confidential addresses.

#6 Stealth Addresses

What the multiple keys allow both the sender and the receiver to do is create stealth addresses where the Monero is sent to by the sender. What the receiver then does is find the transaction on the blockchain, calculate the one-time public key assigned to the stealth address and collect the Monero. No one else can do that on the blockchain, and no one will know where his Monero has come from.

Monero is quite an erratic coin in price but is currently trading between the $220-$350 brackets, with a market capitalization of about $4billion.

Like most cryptocurrencies, it is possible to speculate on the rise or fall of the price and make good profits from it. The more volatile cryptos are, the more attractive they become to traders.

Ripple is the most extensive financial network in the world.

So let us spend some time on understanding how it works;

Formed as RipplePay by Jeb McCaleb and Chris Larsen in 2012, the idea around Ripple as a financial network was hatched by Ryan Fugger in 2004, way before bitcoin was even born.

After conducting two crowd sales, the Ripple Money Transfer Protocol was released and later rebranded to Ripple Labs.

Jeb was to later disagree with Ripple’s management and left in July 2013 to form the Stellar network, and Ripple Labs rebranded to simply Ripple, with their token also known by the same name.

As much as some pundits maintain that Ripple is essentially not a decentralized network, there are quite some similarities between it and other blockchains;

The stark differences of how ripple works constitute its main characteristics

Another privacy stalwart in cryptosphere is ZCash. It started life in late 2016 as Zerocoin and was a hard fork of the bitcoin blockchain.

Like bitcoin, it has a coin limit of 21 million coins. And that is the extent of their mutual similarities.

Zcash enables two types of transactions to be done;

Transparent transactions go similarly to most other crypto exchanges.

But if the receiver of Zcash chooses to have a private transaction, then the transaction is not open to the public.

The blockchain achieves this using what is known as Zk-SNARKs, or Zero Knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Arguments of Knowledge.

Wow! That is a mouthful, so let us break it down;

The problem with decentralized transactions is that it is extremely difficult to hide personal information when sending out or to receive digital assets. We have already seen how ‘tainted bitcoins’ give a headache to the bitcoin network.

This is compounded by the capability of a verifier in a system to access plain text or easy to trace data belonging to a sender.

For example, exchanges will routinely ask you for personal information for you to deposit crypto, and therefore it is easy to link your wallet with the information you share on the platform.

Zero Knowledge Proofs is a technology that allows a sender or prover to convince a verifier that he has a particular set of information without revealing what the information is.

The statements that have to be verified have to achieve completeness, soundness, and zero knowledge.

This means that if the statement is true, then an honest prover can convince an honest verifier of the validity of the statement, is not capable of convincing the verifier by lying, and the verifier will not know what the statement is.

Take for example. If a trickster has identified a secret that differentiates yellow balls from blue balls in a sack without looking, then the verifier can completely blindfold the prover (trickster) and ask him to pick a yellow ball.

If they get it right, the verifier can alternate the ball the trickster is to pick, all the while juggling the balls in the sack.

If every time the trickster gets it right, the verifier is convinced that the trickster knows the secret difference between the two coloured balls without really knowing what the secret is.

While this is all good, supposing that the verifier and the trickster are not available at the same time?

In 1986, Fiat and Shamir invented the Fiat-Shamir Non-Interactive Heuristic that makes it possible for the process to be completed without necessarily having both the provers and verifiers available at the same time.

In blockchain technology, there is a huge use of smart contracts, which are essentially cryptographic agreements that activate payments when certain conditions are met.

Now, these conditions could be very private to a company, and the prover who wants to get paid by the smart contract doesn’t want the verifier (read the network), to know what the steps are.

Think about a secret formula for a secret wonder drink.

What the Zk-Snarks will do is enable the prover to show the network part of the work without compromising the secrecy of the formula, to satisfy the network that the smart contract can release the payment.

This is ZCash’s gift to the cryptocurrency space.

The currency will be mined fully by 2032 and is expected to undergo several improvements to its privacy settings.

It sits at position 25 at the time of writing, with close to $800 million in market capitalization, and has been trading at $300-$400.

As the cryptocurrency landscapes expand, there are very many interesting innovations that are springing up to address the problems that have been encountered by the first and second generation cryptos, represented by Bitcoin and Ethereum respectively.

As much as the latter-day improved cryptos are not the talk of the town, they have given much thought to security, privacy, scalability and speed to ensure that their blockchains will resonate well with mainstream use.

From Monero’s privacy settings, Ripple’s transaction speeds and Zcash’s amazing technology to enhance privacy with Zk-SNARKs, it is possible to see that when the dust settles, some of the smaller coins may one day enjoy more mainstream acceptance due to their advanced features.

Investing in Monero, Ripple or Zcash is a personal choice that is similar to any other investments in crypto and should be done with the knowledge that it is as risky as the coins are volatile.

The Digital Art Revolution

A Look at Alternative and Special Cryptos

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