Zcash is a cryptocurrency. It is a digital currency with certain distinct features. Zcash is a peer to peer, decentralised and open sourced crypto currency. But Zcash allows anonymity behind the details of senders, the details of recipients and the amounts for transaction.
Zcash uses a special Proof of Work developed by Zcash team. This Proof is called as zk-SNARK. It is also known as Proof of Construction. This Proof of Construction allows the Zcash network to maintain a ledger of balances, which is fully secured in nature. It does not disclose the parties or the amounts involved in the transactions. Zero Knowledge Proofs help in achieving these results in privacy in transactions.
Zcash was launched on 28th of October, in the year 2016. The founder team of Zcash has collected money from the investors. This was done to create the crypto currency before release of the digital coin. There is a controversy in the mining process of Zcash that for every unit of Z currency mined by the miner during first 4% of released currency, the company running Zcash gets 20%, amounting to 10% of the total supply of Zcash. Many of miners consider this process as unfair as the investors are enriching themselves by using the Zcash network, by the power controlled by the miner.
Zcash uses Equihash as the hashing algorithm. Equihash is an asymmetrical, memory hard, Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm. This algorithm is based on generalised birthday problem. Mining of Zcash relies on the requirements of high RAM. This is needed to bottleneck the generation of Proofs. It also is needed to make development of Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) unfeasible, similar to Ethereum.
Zcash has a slow mining start because it needs to avoid instamine. In this slow mining, the Zcash block rewards are issued at a slower rate than normal speed of issuing block rewards of other cryptocurrencies. Zcash is presently in the stage of beta.
Every miner willing to mine Zcash may not have a computer, or the necessary mining hardware. Every miner may also not have the required technical knowledge needed to be able to mine Zcash. There is no Graphic User Interface (GUI) Miner available yet to mine Zcash.
Zcash can be mined using a Central Processing Unit (CPU) or a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) on Windows. Two different software prove to be useful for each type of mining hardware. Nicehashminer is best for CPU hardware and Claymore miner is best for GPU hardware. A Cloud Mining Contract may also prove to be very useful for beginning of Zcash mining for a miner who is not interested in procuring of her/his personal mining rig or operating and managing it, or is not technically equipped to mine Zcash all by herself/himself.
The Zcash miner needs to first procure a wallet to store her/his Zcash coins. Presently, a multiple number of GUI wallets are available for the Zcash miners to choose from and acquire.
A best, reliable and reputable Zcash mining pool service provider company is the greatest help for a miner of Zcash. The miner needs to join the mining pool to direct her/his hashing power. One needs to check the mining pool service provider before joining the mining pool.
Once the Zcash miner has both the GUI wallet to store her/his funds and has joined the right Zcash mining service provider company, the miner is all set to start mining Zcash.
