Is there any way to mimic Zcash's z-addresses in Bitcoin?
I like the ideas behind Zcash and it solves important privacy issues, but I don't like the idea of a for profit company being the heavyweight behind Zcash.
From what I gather, Bitcoin is more of a community effort than most other altcoins, which inspires trust.
I looked up Zcash's price chart, it fell from ~$1300 at launch to ~$90 now. Ouch.
If I recall correctly, more than 500btc was traded when the price was over 100 btc per Zcash - $350,000 in trade volume at a price exceeding $70,000 per token, when the price today has fallen to about $100 per token. Max price was almost $2,000,000 per token, someone actually literally spent that much.
Perhaps the greatest example I've ever seen of tulip mania. And I'm fairly confident those were real trades, as they occurred on a public exchange where anyone with money or zcash was able to buy or sell at any time. Granted, at this point there were only dozens of people with the asset, but anyone was able to mine the currency and blocks were being found every 2.5 minutes using commodity hardware (e.g. laptops and desktops).
>Max price was almost $2,000,000 per token, someone actually literally spent that much.
No. When zcash was trading at such a price, it was less than a single zcash coin in total. So a few people were paying significant sums for very small fractions of a zcash coin, but no one payed 2,000,000 for a single coin. The price has crashed because supply has grown exponentially. What you were seeing was supply vs demand in action in an unusually obvious way.
I did not mean to suggest that a whole $2M was dropped, but someone did buy a fragment for $2M per coin.
These people buying it hopefully would have been aware of the publicly known upcoming inflation, the fact that they bought at these prices I believe is a tragedy and a black mark against Zcash.
So if I buy 0.01 BTC for $750 [1] and cause the price to "fall 99%" that will leave a black mark against Bitcoin? Perhaps the blame really lies in the exchanges who were so eager to allow trading on such a scarce asset.
[1] I realize this is not really possible because you'd have to buy the entire order book first, but in the case of ZCash the order book was empty.
The order book was not empty, as stated above there was over $350,000 in trade volume at prices greater than 100x what they were less than a week later.
It might make sense for receivers of the Founders Reward to pay such huge sums, even knowing full well that the price can only go down. They would keep buying coins while the price slowly drops, just to make the eventual floor, where more people will consider it a bargain, higher than it would be otherwise. It's all about creating a perception of value.
There is no tragedy here, IMO. Just some calculated market manipulation...
It is pending a Bitcoin softfork (segregated witness) (edit: actually I don't think it depends on this), and I don't think anyone has implemented something approximating z-addresses on this yet, but the opportunity is there.
I like the ideas behind Zcash and it solves important privacy issues, but I don't like the idea of a for profit company being the heavyweight behind Zcash.
From what I gather, Bitcoin is more of a community effort than most other altcoins, which inspires trust.
I looked up Zcash's price chart, it fell from ~$1300 at launch to ~$90 now. Ouch.