8

There was another question about the comparison between ZCash and Monero's anonymity, but I wanted to ask another regarding the other differences.

  1. Do Monero and ZCash have different transaction fees?
  2. Do Monero and ZCash have different mining algorithms?
  3. Do Monero and ZCash have different coin supply curves?
Community
  • 1
MrRed
  • 406
  • 3
  • 7
  • 5
    Possible duplicate of How does Monero privacy and security compare to ZCash? – Moroccan Engineer Oct 12 '16 at 21:57
  • 2
    I saw that question but this one is aimed at other advantages over security and privacy. e.g. Transactions per second, Private company VS open source with massive community, transaction costs, coin supply and release, greener mining. Many aspects to compare – MrRed Oct 12 '16 at 22:21
  • 1
    Can the title and the body be edited to differentiate it, so that it is not immediately thought of as a duplicate? – scoobybejesus Oct 12 '16 at 22:35
  • Done. That should be sufficiently different. Cheers! – MrRed Oct 13 '16 at 00:37
  • 2
    Zcash is on behalf of a company like other trash coins. I am not sure the details, but I know you are forced to "donate" zcash to the company in the beginning stage. – Ben P.P. Tung Oct 13 '16 at 01:24
  • 1
    So, the question should be asked / answered in terms of actual facts that differentiate the 2, attempting to avoid speculation or personal opinions. I'd like to remove the "investors point of view" as well, considering cryptocurrencies are not a stock or similar, and price movements are often de-linked from the underlying tech. We could instead ask, what important features make one or the other more likely to be widely adopted in the future? – JollyMort Oct 13 '16 at 09:44
  • One obvious difference in the coin supply is the 20% being diverted from block rewards to the Zcash company. I don't know about the rest so can't comment. – user36303 Oct 13 '16 at 11:40
  • I reworded this question for clarity. – sgp Oct 13 '16 at 14:56

1 Answers1

9

Do Monero and ZCash have different transaction fees?

This is largely going to depend on the price, which is currently unknown because Zcash hasn't launched yet. However, on testnet the fee seems to be approximately 0.00005 TAZ (Zcash tesnet coins) per kB, whereas Monero currnetly has a fee of 0.002 XMR per kB.

A more interesting comparison is transaction sizes. The average transaction size for Monero is currently approximately 1 to 3 kB. By contrast, the anonymous Zcash transactions seem to be approximately 2 kB, according to one of their engineers, namely Sean Bowe.

Do Monero and ZCash have different mining algorithms?

Yes. Monero uses CryptoNight as PoW algorithm, whereas Zcash uses Equihash as PoW algorithm. Both are aiming for ASIC resistance. However, one could argue that the CryptoNight algorithm is more vetted, because it has already been used in Monero for over two years. The Equihash algorithm, however, was until Zcash's implementation purely theoretical.

Do Monero and ZCash have different coin supply curves?

Yes. Zcash uses the same supply curve of Bitcoin, whereas Monero uses a faster supply curve. A comparison between both emission curves can be seen here.

There are two things to note. First, in Zcash 20% of the mining rewards will go to the Zcash Electric Coin Company, which is a US based company, in the first four years. This company subsequently distributes the so-called "Founders Reward" to its shareholders. These shareholders are founders, scientists, engineers, advisers, outside council, and investors. They can be seen here. In addition, the "Founders Reward" is depicted here. Secondly, in contrast with Monero, Zcash doesn't have a tail emission, which may lead to disincentivized miners in the future.

dEBRUYNE
  • 15,227
  • 17
  • 57
  • 114
  • 3
    A comment on Equihash - it is supposed to be memory-hard to minimize the advantage of ASICs and GPUs over CPUs. And yet, there is already a GPU miner that is claimed to be 50x faster than CPUs https://forum.z.cash/t/toomim-bros-gpu-mining-software-and-cloud-mining/2080 As such it seems Equihash has already failed as a fair PoW algorithm. – hyc Oct 13 '16 at 17:32
  • @hyc most users have GPUs now a days, so it seems reasonably fair and secure. – Christopher King Oct 13 '16 at 20:19
  • 2
    That is not the point. GPUs are bad at random memory accesses; this is fundamental to their design. If the Equihash algorithm is fast on GPUs, that proves that the algorithm is not actually memory-hard. Which also means it will be easy to accelerate with an ASIC. – hyc Oct 14 '16 at 13:13
  • 3
    For the record, while the typical monero transaction may be 1 or 2 kB, the typical monero ringct transaction will be ~12 kB (though most of it prunable at some point). – user36303 Oct 16 '16 at 18:42