zips

For zcash currently, yes. But for the underling tech, no. You scan the blockchain in Zcash to be notified of a payment. But the sender could just as easily send you an out of band message with everything you need to know to spend the money and find the payment. There's even a draft spec for doing it for Zcash. https://github.com/zcash/zips/pull/420/files#diff-635022fa4a...

Probably the authors of the Zerocash paper (http://zerocash-project.org/paper), the authors of the Zcash protocol (https://github.com/zcash/zips/blob/master/protocol/protocol....) and str4d.

I have been reading through and also noticing this. I was looking for a better explanation too - from what I understand basically: Monero uses ringCT algorithm on transfer to mix the payments and obfuscate the sender Monero has a private view key and separate spend key. View key can decrypt transactions made by you to confirm your total balance (Monero balance is unknown to daemon, is calculated as (xmrRecieved - xmrSpent) ZCash has 'zero-knowledge' proofs and while the whitepaper[1] is a bit intense it uses a novel Proof-of-Work explained within. Called zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARKS). ZCash coins origins obfuscated before recieved by user, reducing need to mix payments together Personally, I think they're both great and it's a healthy time for a privacy-based cryptocurrency face off. Having sa