Zcash is starting out buggy, and China is rumored to consider banning Bitcoin. Here are the cryptocurrency highlights of week 44:
- Zcash is just a few days old, but it’s already encountering a serious bug in sending anonymous transactions. The website mentions that “there is one known bug, which causes private transactions (those in which all of the inputs and outputs are shielded addresses) to not get mined.” This means that currently only t-address transactions are working properly, which are transparent transactions similar to Bitcoin. The fully private z-address transactions which caused a hype for Zcash are thus planned to get fixed in v1.0.1.
- Zcash might be hardly a week old, but some are already working on a fork currency called Zcash Classic. The fork describes itself as a “a Zcash Fork with No 20% Founders Tax”. This number isn’t fully accurate, but indeed ten percent (2.1 million) of the 21 million ZEC to ever exist are set to be allocated to groups outside of the miners who successfully place a new block on the ZEC blockchain. A significant part of this will benefit the Zcash founders, Zcash company and Zcash foundation. This has caused some controversy leading to the creation of Zcash Classic.
- In December 2013, the Chinese central bank barred financial companies from having anything to do with bitcoin, and the price crashed from $1,095 to $105. This week prices went down after Zerohedge reported rumours of “Chinese officials considering policies including restricting domestic Bitcoin exchanges from moving the cryptocurrency to platforms outside the nation and imposing quotas on the number of Bitcoins that can be sent abroad”. The rumour is unfirmed so far, but for now at least it seems to have spoiled Bitcoin’s rally.
- Microsoft will soon enter the next phase of its blockchain work with the formal launch of its Ethereum Consortium Blockchain Network. If successful, Microsoft hopes the project will help entire industries work together to more easily build increasingly complex consortia that better leverage the network effects of shared, immutable ledgers. As such, a major point of emphasis for the Ethereum Consortium Blockchain Network will be usability. The product has been designed so that groups of companies can deploy a private ethereum network with a single click.
- The price of Bitcoin decreased by a little over one percent this week to a current rate of about $701 per BTC. The price of Ethereum rallied, taking Ether up to a rate of $11.10 per ETH. Ethereum Classic also experienced a strong gain, with the price increasing 19 percent to $1.06 per ETC. Zcash crashed, and lost 87 percent of its value. One ZEC is now trading at $510 per coin.
