While Edward Snowden may prefer zCash’s cryptography over Monero’s, investors need to remain neutral while the market figures it out.
Famous whistleblower and privacy hero Edward Snowden tweeted his support of zCash’s cryptography over that of Monero’s recently. This flared up a long-standing rivalry between the two privacy-focused coins.
Snowden’s objection calls Monero, “amateur crypto” while other critics of Monero’s technology, notably Andrew Miller, seem to have published concerns about Monero’s input seeding/ring signature system that Monero’s designers are already aware of.
I won’t paint Miller with the genetic fallacy brush because he put his money (into zCash and not Monero) against him. I’m sure everyone involved in this debate has the best of intentions. We
Even if they don’t, as crypto-investors it is a losing game to assume that they don’t. We want them fighting tooth and nail for market share. That’s their job; to impress us with their progress. Our job is to remain skeptical; continuing our due diligence on all the coins that we consider selling our dollars for.
In fact, I don’t really much care who’s right in this spat. I’ll never understand the technology well enough to make a discerning choice between the two. And, frankly, neither will the rest of the market.
As an investor and advisor I’m happy watching competition produce innovation. I don’t have an ideological horse in the race for the “Privacy-Primary” crypto-investor.
But, I’m under zero illusions that the best cryptography technology will win in the end. It rarely happens. Windows vs. OS/2? Windows won. Betamax vs. VHS? VHS. iPhone vs. Zune? iPhone.
It is one of the strange things about technology investing. Underlying technology is far less important than other market considerations, unless the technology differential is so great it is disruptive to other areas of the economy. ARM vs. Intel is a great example of this.
ARM’s designs were uninteresting when the market didn’t care about power consumption. Now, it’s consumed by shaving fractions of a milliwatt. Intel simply couldn’t in any time frame that mattered find ways to beat ARM despite its enormous market share in servers/desktops.
So, I caution you to take Snowden’s words under advisement but don’t swear by them or become a proselytizer for zCash over Monero or vice versa. The best approach is to treat both the way resource investors treat exploration companies.
Buy a small bit of both and let the market decide who wins. In gold exploration stocks there is always the possibility both will win in the market…. slim but possible. In a bull market like the one cryptos are in right now, both Monero and zCash are going to go up in price.
People are still placing their bets. The question is which one will win the technology and marketing race and grab more hearts and minds over the next two years. And that will show up in the price of the coins.
And that’s when you make the decision to sell one versus the other. No matter how smart you think you are, the market is smarter. Always.
The easiest path to the poor house is forgetting that.