I'm planning to make this thread every week in order to promote & advertise ZEN. I've prewritten few posts, will answer any questions to the best of my knowledge afterwards. Also please refrain from personal attacks since I actually have no energy for that today.
First things first -- Who the fuck am I and why am I shilling ZEN? I am a small holder & believer of ZEN. I hold about 120 ZEN atm which equals to ~850 USD. I have 3 GPU rigs which I use entirely to mine ZEN. I shill ZEN because I believe in the product and also I want to get rich. I think it's entirely possible for zen to grow 100-fold over the next two years. I am not a part of the core team and I do not know all the answers to every question. I mainly do these posts in order to find out what is average Veeky Forums like and if possible to promote ZEN's discord group which is essentially dead.
what makes it stand out over the top10? over the top100?
Luis Watson
What the fuck is ZEN? In short: ZEN is an anonimity coin superior to any other. In full, read next. ZEN is a fork of ZLC which in turn is a fork of ZEC which in turn is a fork of BTC.
Jace Torres
Why the fuck are there so many forks? BTC has a simple and obvious problem - lack of privacy. Whilest it could be good to prevent financial crime, fraud and alike, the downsides of not having privacy in many people eyes outweight the benefit. You could name many examples, starting from your family and enemies knowing all of your past, present and future finance, ending with government crackdown & disintegration of human morale as we know it. And so ZEC was made. ZEC solves privacy by using a genius mathematical concept - zero proof knowledge. In short it allows you to proof something without you having to show a solution: in crypto world that means you could send your funds without telling blockchain how much funds have been sent or who's the recipiet. If you want to know more about zero proof knowledge concept this video is a good starting point youtube.com/watch?v=oubB-VoFnQk So ZEC solves privacy, what is the point of other forks? ZLC has been created as a reaction to ZEC's funding model. Back when ZEC was being designed the blockchain needed very real funding - to pay the developers, to pay the marketing, to pay for different conferences and meetings. Said funds were provided by few wealthy individuals(hedge funds), and they demanded a big cut of ZEC - 20% of all mined coins for 5 years. This isn't premine, it is an actual model where 20% of each block's reward gets redirected to investor's wallet. So a lot of people didn't like that, and ZEC has been forked into ZLC which is essentially a full clone but without the 20% cut. Since ZLC didn't have centralized funding it didn't achieve much and remained a complete clone for all important matters. But ZLC still achieved something - over the years a group of different people with different skillset bundled together in this anonimity coin who wants to push anonimity even further. It was decided to hardfork from ZLC into ZEN and add all the new ideas in ZEN blockchain.
Charles Ward
It is a darkhorse winner. Zcash gives 10% of transaction fees directly to the owners for a huge number of years, it is a total scamcoin.
ZenCash and Zclassic are forks basically that use the homomorphic encryption, ZSnarks, etc but with all the scamcoin, owner gets 10% for life stuff cut out of the node source.
Really great coin, very undervalued.
Gavin Jackson
What exactly does ZEN offer on top of ZEC? - A fully secure network (more on this later) - Secure nodes reward (think masternodes) - Community governance Those 3 alone may seem small to you at first but in fact are very real sleeping giants. Bonuses: - Secure messaging (think 1 to 1 chat or a telegram channel with 10's of thousands of listeners) - Proposal system (go and earn ZEN. have an idea to help network? go and post it, if enough people like it you'll get funded) - IPFS intergration
So why is this coin not yet number one? There are a few issues. First and foremost all of the features are in development, they are not live yet. At this moment in time ZEN is a clone with no added functionality. Secure nodes have been in development for two months now and in 1-2 week beta will be announced. This might seem long however I'd argue it is fast and will elaborate on that later. The second and more real issue is the lack of marketing. There are so many ICOs and inferior coins with much less promise & development having more attention. Core team is entirely to blame for this, they've recently contracted an outside agency for marketing, we will see how it goes.
Liam Rivera
A elaboration on significance of secure network (this is what makes ZEN unique and promising). It's hard to adequately describe the importance of this. You've probably heard before that if all internet traffic was encrypted we wouldn't have cyber crime - it is something very obvious to every party but very and very hard to adopt. A good example would be electric cars which are also superior in almost every aspect but mass adaptation is not possible at this point due to the variety of different reasons. So, let's be realistic, short-term and very real goals of this: a fully secure network, every transaction is encrypted & transmitted using SSL/TLS certificates between everyone in the network. This network will be created thanks to secure nodes which will get 3.5% of mining reward for their service. The monetary reward means that we will see thousands of nodes sprung up around the globe which is a lot.
Ian Carter
Jesus christ, I even like your coin, but this is not the proper way to shill it.
Get your selling point down to a few sentences, not huge blocks of text. If the people who are interested like the few sentence summary they will simply seek out the whitepaper. Format your shit better. Also ZEC/ZEN/ZLC makes that paragraph very confusing to read, half the time I lose track of which thing you are referring to.
Tyler Johnson
the price seems like to be paired with ZCASH
Mason Price
What does it mean today for you as a user and your privacy? It means that no ISP, government, or any other listening party will ever know that you're using ZEN. It goes in sharp contrast with coins like Monero, Verge, etc. They try to solve network security by adopting TOR or I2P. While those protocols are great, they have one terrible flaw - your ISP/government/whoever knows that you're using TOR/I2P. They will not know what exactly you're doing there but using metadata they can pretty much pinpoint your area of interest. ZEN on the other hand will be indistinguishable from an usual encrypted website (paypal, your online banking, google.com). On top of that it's totally possible to setup ZEN nodes behind TOR as well. By the way, TOR is heavily compromised, however that's not the point of this rant. What does it mean for tomorrow? Possibilities are quite literally endless. If there are enough nodes online we could see a birth of 2.0 NET. What does it mean for Snowden? He could've leaked any data in the world using ZEN, to however many parties he wished to, and he would not be compromised (at least not by ZEN, still quite possible to fuck up before reaching this point). What does it mean for an average chinese? You can use ZEN at any point in time without risk of network blocking you. (currently china blocks all TOR traffic, nothing stops them from blocking I2P too, to block ZEN you'd have to block countless list of everchanging SSL protocols which on top could lead to wrongfully banned legit websites)
