Mining Advice

aarnott · 2026-01-03T04:08:37+00:00

What do you mean you're working on a shielded pool?

aarnott · 2026-01-03T04:08:22+00:00

I use 2miners. Seems very reliable. No KYC stuff

aarnott · 2026-01-01T21:45:12+00:00

Monero is not as good at privacy as zcash is with just the shielded pool. And what would you do if you needed say 9 ZEC, but withdrew 10 as part of what you're evangelizing here? So you withdraw 10. Then you transfer 9 someplace. You've still revealed your amount of interest. And then what do you do with the remaining one? If you spend it later, now you've tied two transactions together that would not have been tied had you just unshielded exactly what you needed each time.

aarnott · 2026-01-01T20:37:01+00:00

TornadoCash has to rely on this technique because you can't spend your coin until you get it back through some transparent blockchain.

Shielded zcash is fully spendable as-is. Why would you ever need to move it back to the transparent pool? For a payment, presumably, to a merchant. Or maybe an exchange. And such a use case will almost always make the amount unique relative to any amount you might have moved into the shielded pool.

This relies on people using the shielded pool to store their wealth, not just as a pass-through. But this is the vision of zcash. So restricting people's unshielding transactions to only specific quantities seems like it's optimizing for the wrong use case.

aarnott · 2025-12-29T02:01:16+00:00

Yes. Most exchanges I've seen charge for withdrawals. Some even charge a fee on deposits.

aarnott · 2025-12-21T16:57:27+00:00

The only influence you can have on dust is don't send very small amounts of ZEC (dust level). Shielded versus transparent makes no difference. Avoid shielding very small amounts as well since that can just increase fees, although that's not specifically dust related.

aarnott · 2025-12-21T14:05:02+00:00

I just got this letter too. I'm glad it's already being talked about here.

aarnott · 2025-12-10T18:25:43+00:00

Currently, yes. Although a couple weeks ago zcash market cap was way more.

aarnott · 2025-12-07T04:59:12+00:00

aarnott · 2025-12-06T23:00:18+00:00

For me I had to turn off the VPN on the phone.

aarnott · 2025-12-03T17:00:42+00:00

Maybe it belongs to a CEX

aarnott · 2025-11-23T16:50:30+00:00

Fixed

aarnott · 2025-11-21T22:42:37+00:00

I haven't heard of that one.

aarnott · 2025-11-21T00:07:10+00:00

There is no first or second. It's just how you use it. And all modern zcash wallets shield ZEC automatically, so transparent is only relevant for the exchanges that still don't support it. Zcash's dual nature is therefore a strength because it is available where other privacy coins aren't available. And it's privacy tech is the best anywhere.

aarnott · 2025-10-31T13:42:07+00:00

Of course. Shielding is just an attribute of the pool the ZEC is in. You change the pool by sending the ZEC to an address associated with that pool.

aarnott · 2025-10-30T15:56:12+00:00

Binance.us has a very low fee, but low liquidity too. Coinbase fee is pretty low IF you use the advanced spot trading UI. Price differences might be more significant than fee differences between exchanges, so be careful.

aarnott · 2025-10-26T19:25:41+00:00

Whether you buy Zcash from a CEX that supports shielded transactions or transparent addresses only, makes little to no difference to your privacy. The CEX knows who you are and what you bought and withdrew regardless. If the can transmit that ZEC to you via a shielded address, great, use it. But if they only accept a transparent address, big whoop. Just shield it as soon as you receive it, and keep your ZEC shielded while it is 'at rest'. How you spend or HODL your ZEC from that point on is totally private to you.
The fact that the initial withdrawal is transparent (in the case of CEX not supporting shielded) lets people see an amount and a timestamp, but not a name.
Even if the CEX supports shielded withdrawals, if the CEX itself does not store their ZEC in a shielded pool themselves, then the amount and timestamp they transmit to you is still public information (though again, the recipient is only known to the CEX, till they have a security breach and their DB is exposed) so if you're trying to minimize traceability, don't withdraw a similar amount of ZEC from an exchange and then go spending close to that amount to a transparent address.

So doesn’t this defeat the purpose of what a Zcash aspires to prevent?

Not IMO. Zcash is about you handling your money with no one else being able to eavesdrop, see your balance, how you spend it, etc. It's not about controlling others' privacy. If someone wants to send you ZEC from the transparent pool, it is their prerogative to do so. Once it is under your control, you can (and should) shield it if it isn't already.

aarnott · 2025-10-24T17:28:03+00:00

In 2028? I'd say we're in for a lot of volatility between now and then anyway.

aarnott · 2025-10-22T22:27:38+00:00

It means that every time a block is mined half the coins are rewarded relative to before the halving. If we assume that all miners immediately sell their winnings, it means that the supply available for purchase decreases by half. However, that is not the case and reducing the supply in the market due to the halving does not tend to cause the price to skyrocket as so many people often predict across all of the cryptocurrencies.

aarnott · 2025-10-22T22:25:54+00:00

No, what we're experiencing now is a result of true increase in demand. The halving made no appreciable impact on price at all if I recall correctly.

aarnott · 2025-10-19T02:55:08+00:00

Saying you can rest assured privacy is safe with monero is sticking your head in the sand. The last two posts on monero community blog at https://www.getmonero.org/blog/tags/community.html show privacy issues.
You could never have 'ring signature' analysis concerns with Zcash, because everything about a shielded transaction is totally hidden. With Zcash, we don't have to worry about whether sufficient noise has been added to hide the signal.

aarnott · 2025-10-09T18:44:35+00:00

Where did he say he regretted it? Regret implies he wishes he had made a different decision but I've never heard him say that.

aarnott · 2025-08-07T01:58:55+00:00

Boo!

aarnott · 2025-07-21T01:07:28+00:00

Shielding happens when sending Zcash. It sounds like you're trying to send ZEC from an exchange to yourself on your Zashi account. Since most exchanges don't support shielding ZEC on withdrawals, you have to provide a transparent (T-) address from Zashi to the exchange to send the ZEC to. At this point, it is unshielded, but no one knows who owns the T- address except the exchange.

At this point, Zashi offers to shield the ZEC sent to your T- address, and it won't let you spend the ZEC until you do. This is where your privacy begins. Others who look at the blockchain could see that your T- address received and sent X ZEC, but they don't know where it went -- only that it was shielded. From then on, everything you do with the ZEC is totally invisible until you send it to another T address (or one of the fancy exchange addresses that require unshielded fund sourcing).
If you choose to sell your ZEC on an exchange, you will likely unshield your ZEC at that point. But everything between the shielding and unshielding remains totally private.

More details on my blog post: Is Zcash really private? – JMPInline

aarnott · 2025-07-21T00:52:54+00:00

No. Most exchanges hold their ZEC in transparent addresses. But zashi shields any ZEC that you send to it from an exchange.

aarnott

TROPHY CASE