Unlike most of the cryptocurrencies that appeal to me, Zcash seems to be a cryptocurrency that exists only to function in that capacity. It potentially offers more security and anonymity than other cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and Ethereum. Apparently the impending Ethereum hard fork coming up soon, in September 2017, will be deploying Zk-SNARKs to allow the same sort of zero-knowledge proofs to work with Ethereum that currently makes Zcash so secure and anonymous.

The Miner

The fastest miner for Zcash and other equihash algorithm coins seems to be EWBF. It is written to work with Nvidia cards, optimally those with Pascal GPUs. The current version of EWBF is 0.3.4b and can be found on its Nanopool Github page. There is a 2% DevFee written into EWBF, but it is so much faster than competing miners that it is worth the tax. Even with the power limited to somewhat underclock the six GTX 1070s on the CryptoScythe v0.1, it is hashing above 2600 sol/s.

The Wallet

For Windows users, Zcash4win is an excellent and easy to use wallet node. It can be downloaded from their website, https://zcash4win.com/. Zcash4win is a Java-based SwingUI Wallet which will look very familiar if you have used other SwingUI wallets (like HUSH Wallet UI and many others). The latest version, 1.0.11, was just released in late August, 2017. If you are not a fan of performing command line operations to use your wallet, Zcash4win is a great choice.