If you are in the crypto-currency world, you know there are literally hundreds of of them. Majority are what most call "shitcoins" and no, that is not a name of a coin. Actually... I wouldn't be surprised if there is or one is created.

There is one new crypto that is launching this coming week on October 28, 2016. It's called Zcash.

Why Is This Exciting?

Not only is the confidential transactions exciting, There are a huge group of well know developers, cryptographers, engineers, scientists, etc. are all behind this experiment. Couple of their advisers you might all know:

Gavin Anderson - Chief Scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation and a former lead developer of Bitcoin
Vitalik Buterin - Founder and Chief Scientist of Ethereum

They also have a long line of investors and you might recognize some of the name and companies like Shapeshift, that are helping this new crypto to take off.

More on who's involved and the list of investors:
https://z.cash/team.html

I'm Intrested, How Can I Get Ready For The Launch?

Zcash is currently out of beta and in the 2nd release candidate. If you would like to try it out and be ready from day 1, you can check out the https://github.com/zcash/zcash/wiki/Beta-Guide for all the details on compiling it on mac OS or linux.

How To Compile Zcash(Linux Ubuntu)

Here's a quick tutorial on how to compile rc2 version or head over to the site mentioned above.

Install dependencies

sudo apt-get install

build-essential pkg-config libc6-dev m4 g++-multilib

autoconf libtool ncurses-dev unzip git python

zlib1g-dev wget bsdmainutils automake

Compile

./zcutil/build.sh -j$(nproc)

Test

Tests can use up to 8GbB of RAM. You can choose to do one or the other.

./qa/zcash/full-test-suite.sh

RPC Test(takes much longer)

./qa/pull-tester/rpc-tests.sh

Running

mkdir -p ~/.zcash.

Then create the conf file

sudo nano ~/.zcash/zcash.conf

Enter the following contents

testnet=1 addnode=betatestnet.z.cash rpcuser=username rpcpassword=password

Now you're all set! Time to run the daemon.

./src/zcashd -daemon

You can test it out and try out the test coins they have and see how to use the wallet and other features that zcash has from the same github page.

Mining

The mining is CPU but there may be closed source GPU miners that are going to be used for mining pools. I know Zogminer is the open source zcash miner that is being developed and will hopefully be ready by launch. I haven't tried it out yet so I'm not sure if it works yet but it seems like it will be done in time or at least within the first few weeks of the launch we will see the open source GPU miner

https://github.com/nginnever/zogminer