FAQ
Pages 18
Frequently Asked Questions
Some even have answers!
Note, if you don't find the answer you need here, try our Forum.
Contents
Q. Is there a whitepaper?
Not yet.
There is some pretty detailed background references on our specification page, and we have a very rough early protocol specification.
Q. How does Zcash compare to X financial privacy technology?
There are many alternatives, and we hope to blog about the differences and similarities in the months to come.
If your X happens to be Confidential Transactions, then you're in luck because we've already blogged about `Zcash and Confidential Transactions`_.
Q. What is the mining consensus system?
The current tech preview testnet uses PoW mining identical to Bitcoin. We will be changing the mining algorithm, and we'll write a blog post about our design selection, rationale, and process.
Q. Is Mining Private?
No. Mining produces globally transparent balances, just as in Bitcoin.
Q. How do Bitcoin-style scripts and opcodes interact with this protocol? Such as CLTV?
It's still possible to use scripts for things such as CLTV, but currently they do not get our privacy benefits. Our scheme is independent of these scripts: we only allow transfer of value between addresses. It's possible to add scriptable outputs for pours in various ways, some which preserve privacy but have high cost, and some which don't and have low cost, but this is still being considered.
Our protocol is based off of Bitcoin and adds a new field to Bitcoin Transactions. All of the old fields have similar semantics, such as nLockTime and the scriptPubKey and scriptSig system.
Unanswered Questions
If your question isn't here, try our Forum.