Reviews on Aquasp's blog

Fastest Monero Wallet on Android in 2025? I Timed All Three With My Own Node

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 22:46:43 +0000

Introduction

One of the major pain points of Monero is restoring an old wallet. Today, I will compare the speed of three popular Monero wallets to check which one is the fastest at restoring.

Test data

Date of test: 2025-12-10 Device: Samsung Galaxy A56 (Exynos 1580, 8 GB RAM, mid-range 2025 phone) Connection: Local Monero full node over Wi-Fi (same LAN, Using Deco S7) Wallet: Legacy 25-word seed created in December 2024 (~1 year old, moderate transaction history) Goal: Full restore + sync from my restore height with each wallet to see real-world performance on a typical self-hosted setup in 2025.

The contenders

Wallet	Version	Restore height method	Notes
Cake Wallet	5.6.2	Legacy 25-word	Official multi-coin wallet
Stack Wallet	2.4.2	Legacy 25-word	Privacy-focused, Bitcoin-first but good XMR support
Monerujo	4.1.7 (Exolix build)	Legacy 25-word	Long-time Android-only Monero favorite

Results

Wallet	Total time to full sync	Behavior at 90–100%	Screen stay-on?	Finished?	Notes
Monerujo	21 minutes 45 seconds	Steady speed, no slowdown	No	Yes	Absolutely crushed it
Cake Wallet	40 minutes and 13 seconds	Very slow after ~90%, ETA broken	Yes (huge W)	Yes	Got there, but it was a bit slow
Stack Wallet	Gave up after ~1 hour 16 minutes	Crawled after 98%, resync didn’t help	No	No	Stuck forever around 98–99%

Detailed observations

Monerujo 4.1.7 – The clear winner

Started scanning instantly
Progress was smooth and predictable the entire time
Never slowed down, even in the final 10%
Just worked. 21m45s from entering the 25th word to “synchronized”.
Does NOT prevent screen timeout → Android kept suspending the process

Cake Wallet 5.6.2 – It gets there… eventually

Restore started fine
ETA counter was not precise (showed 2 minutes for 30 minutes)
Massive slowdown after ~90%
Kept screen on the entire time ← this alone probably saved the sync from dying
Eventually finished

Stack Wallet 2.4.2 – Disappointing

Actually started the fastest of all three
Flew to 98% in ~25 minutes… then died
Speed dropped
Restarting the app resumed at 98.49% but didn’t fix the crawl
Tried using the “Resync” button – no improvement
Does NOT prevent screen timeout → Android kept suspending the process
Abandoned after 1+ hours of no meaningful progress

Conclusion: Monerujo is the fastest in 2025

If you want to restore an old Monero wallet on a phone using your own node in 2025, the answer is crystal clear:

Monerujo is in a completely different league.

Cake Wallet is still very usable and has an amazin UI/polish, but the sync performance lag is real. Stack Wallet unfortunately seems broken/super slow for large restores right now

Shoutout to the Monerujo dev(s) — whatever witchcraft you did with the scanning engine, thank you. Privacy on mobile just became faster.

Tested on 2025-12-10 with a local node. Your mileage may vary with transaction count, but the relative ordering should hold.

Pop!_OS 22.04 review after 6 months of use

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 22:28:25 +0000

Introduction

Pop!_OS is one of the most used Linux Distros. It’s also a recommendation for beginners, gamers and even experienced users.

But is it worthy it? In today’s post I will write about my experience using it, from the installation to the day-to-day usage.

Installation

Pop have one of the best installers there, I must admit. It’s simple, beautiful and feels modern. The installation is pretty simple, you can just click in a few buttons to setup language and a few other options. It’s also possible to encrypt the disk during the installation, which helps if you travel a lot and contain confidential information inside your laptop (like personal passwords, documents, photos, etc).

For the installation process, I will rate Pop 9/10. Why not 10? Well, it doesn’t contain a option to dual boot automatically. You need to do it manually if you are using Windows for example. Other than that, it works really well and does a great job to provide you a nice experience.

First boot

Pop first boot is also a great experience. You will be able to create your user and password and login normally at your new Gnome environment. Pop helps you to customize a few options (dark mode, docker location and online accounts). Those are all great options for beginners.

The default apps are also well integrated with the system and everything feels just in place.

Overall, I hate the post installation as 10/10, I don’t see anything to improve here, they just did great.

Details that makes Pop!_OS special

Probably this is the best part of Pop, that makes it a really really solid choice. These are some characteristics that are rare to find in other Distros:

System76 Scheduler - Did you konow that Pop contains CPU optimizations by default? Yep, that is right. By defualt, Pop will reduce the latency and improve performance on apps, specially when the laptop is charging. This is also great for gaming, since you don’t need gamemode anymore.
System76-Power - By default, Pop provides three options for your Battery: Economy, Balanced and high performance. That is amazing because under pop, battery optmimizations are already applied by default. You don’t need TLP and you have a easy GUI to control the battery mode. That is just awesome.
Swappiness is set to 10. On most linux distros that I’ve ever used, swappiness is set to 60. This means that your Distro will start to use swap when ram usage reaches 40%. On Pop, swap will only be used when you use abour 90% of your ram. That feels amazing and much smoother since swap is really slow, even on a NVME ssd.
Kernel isn’t the same of Ubuntu 22.04. Pop does a great job on keeping the kernel updated. This is great specially if you are using a newer desktop/laptop. As far as I know, Ubuntu 22.04 is serving Kernel 5.15.x. Pop os already on 6.1.x
Custom shortcuts. At first, I hated it, but after trying the “pop way”, I loved it and I actually change other distros to their defaults on shortcuts! For example, instead of alt + f4 (which usually requires 2 hands), Pop uses “windows + q” which is more accessible and easier to use. Instead of ctrl + alt + t for the terminal, you can use “windows + t” on Pop. This is really great and helps when you are working with a lot of multitasking (pretty much anyone who works with CS will love it).
Easy Firmware updates. Pop comes with a option inside gnome settings to make hardware updates. That is really great because it gives you more controls and details on these upgrades.
Recovery as a option. On pop, you can have a “copy of the ISO” in the settings and “refresh the OS” if you ever need it. It may be useful if you broke something and want to restore the system without using a USB stick.
SystemD boost instead of Grub. This doesn’t makes difference for me, but a lot of people seems to praise systemdboot. I think it provides a faster boot time and it’s “simpler to setup” (I’m used to grub, so grub is easier for me, but I barely customize anything on the boot)
Pipewire instead of Pulseaudio. For years one of the softwares that people used to complain a lot about was Pulseaudio. It used to lag, crash, do not recognize devices, etc. Pipewire is the new guy that is leaner and has a lower latency. A lot of people praise it too. For much, I prefer Pipewire too as it just feels simpler and better to use than Pulseaudio.
Flatpak theming right and not Snap. Snaps are being “forced” by Ubuntu distros, but a lot of people dislike them. Some dislike about the server not being open source, some complain about the bugs, space used some complain about auto updates (which can’t be turned off). For me, I also prefer Flatpaks, and it’s great to see that on Pop Flatpaks looks like native applications and flathub is Added by default. It’s also nice to see that Pop_Shop integrates well with Flatpaks.
Pop created popsicle. This probably doesn’t get enough attention, but man! It’s WONDERFUL to have a iso flasher by default. And this one is so beautiful and integrates well with Pop. I like it more than Balena Etcher and other common software used on linux to create bootable sticks.

Pop downsides

Although Pop is amazing, I see a few downsides on it as well. Most of them are personal, so you may not actually see them as downsides.

Gnome. I just don’t like gnome at all. Feels heavy and changes all the time with major updates, breaking plugins and the user experience. The good part is that Pop is developing their own rust DE, which will be HOT when it releases.
Pop_Shop uses 0.5GB of ram when idle. That may not be a issue for computers with more ram, but when you have less, that is kinda bad. If you have 4GB of ram for example (that is still common on third world countries) you will feel the difference. You can disable pop shop, but honestly the usage in idle should be lower.
tracker-miner-fs can suck your CPU if you download folders that contains a lot of subdfolders. Once I downloaded a WordPress site backup and extracted it. It had a lot of subfolders. I did notice my laptop slower, but I didn’t know what was happening. When I checked the task manage, tracker miner was acting and sucking all the CPU trying to index that subfolder. I tried to reset tracker miner, clean, see the status but it wasn’t replying. In the end, I disabled it as a pop developer said it was 100% safe.

Performance overall after 6 months

After 6 months using Pop, I can say that I was quite satisfied with the performance. I had a issue while for a few seconds mouse was slow and audio was freezing, but that is probably due to something I did (or maybe due to my hardware not being able to handle encryption well. I’m on a 12GB ram Ryzen 5 5500U laptop with NVME ssd of 256GB).

Due to the issues with tracker miner and this freezing issue, I decided to leave Pop and try Linux Mint XFCE for a while (I love XFCE and Mint is stable enough, so I decided to give it a try). I will probably review it after using it for a while as well.

Overall, using pop was a pleasure and I could do a bunch of great work on it. I work as CS/Devops, so most of the time I was chatting with customers or using bash scripts on the server, and for that Pop worked fine. For gaming it also worked well so I’m not complaining and I definitely would recommend it for most people. Pop has the best defaults that I’ve ever seen. It’s the distro that I tweaked less, because it comes with everything that I need and use.

Conclusion

Pop is awesome! If you like gnome, give it a try. It will give you a great performance and all optimizations that matters are there out of the box. Battery will be nice on laptops and drivers will probably be optimized for gaming. Vulkan is also enabled by default.

My dad is using Pop on his laptop (I installed it) and he loves it.

I will definitely try Pop again once they release their new DE. In the meanwhile, I will enjoy my XFCE experience.

Thank you for reading :)

Zcash is losing

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 22:11:49 +0000

Zcash is NOT the most important project in the world, and it is losing.

Zcash was born as a project to fix Bitcoin’s major flaw: privacy. But launching a new coin isn’t easy, and it’s not just about technical aspects.

A serious cryptocurrency is supposed to be money, and it needs to be better than what we currently have with governments; otherwise, we should keep using the dollar. This means that while the technical aspects of any cryptocurrency are important, it should also be reliable, trustworthy, and as stable as possible. The main flaw in government money is inflation. Governments typically love to spend money and can charge a hidden tax by printing it. When money is printed, the amount of goods and services in society remains the same, but there is more money in circulation.

This means your money will now have reduced value. The winner in this case is the government or whoever spends the newly printed money first, because the market will adjust itself, leading to higher prices for services and goods.

The issue with Zcash

Zcash sounds good. It deploys zk-SNARKs technology to prove transactions and store them privately, meaning that when you send transactions, everything is hidden (so no one can see the sender, the amount sent, or the receiver). Sounds amazing, right? Let’s buy Zcash then!!

No. And why not?

1. Zcash was launched with a trusted setup

Yes, that’s right. When Zcash launched, it utilized a trusted setup to bootstrap the network. In this event, multiple participants collaboratively created cryptographic parameters without any single party having full control. This assumed that at least one participant destroyed their portion of the secret keys to guarantee privacy. If participants united their parameters, they could, in theory, create unlimited Zcash and trace shielded transactions.

Now, I have to be fair. Zcash is currently running on NU5 (Network Upgrade 5). This upgrade removed the trusted setup, ensuring that after May 2022, Zcash does not depend on trusting anyone else.

But at the same time, as far as I know, there is no way to prove that everyone destroyed their parameters and that no Zcash was generated or traced.

2. Zcash is not private by default.

Considering the latest updates (not using Sprout or Sapling), users can leave Zcash in a public address (t-address) or a shielded address (Orchard, ideally). So if some users want to use Zcash just like Bitcoin, they can.

Zcash aims to fix this by recommending privacy-friendly wallets. For example, Zashi wallet tries to shield your funds by default. The issue with this? Zcash is not widely used, so buying Zcash peer-to-peer or from a decentralized exchange like Bisq or Haveno Reto is very hard.

So you have to buy it from a non-privacy-friendly exchange like Binance or Coinbase. And of course, these exchanges do not support shielded addresses. You need to use your transparent address to receive your Zcash before shielding it.

Zcash somehow believes it can provide full privacy while complying with governments and anti-privacy laws. Zcash community and users are accustomed to buying their coins through non-private means. If the government decides that shielding your Zcash is illegal, you will not be able to buy and shield your coins because the government knows the t-address is related to you, and if you make a shielding transaction, you’ve just committed a crime.

They can even block “tainted” coins, so if a Zcash was ever shielded, it can be considered “tainted” and blocked on exchanges. During the Canada convoy protest, the government tried to seize Bitcoin, but since the wallet was non-custodial, they couldn’t. They quickly realized they could ask all exchanges to refuse those “dirty” Bitcoins.

Now you may be wondering how Monero is any different. Well, Monero is private by default, meaning users don’t have to worry about shielding and “unshielding” coins. And every shop that accepts Monero does so for privacy, unlike Zcash, where shoppers and exchanges can accept Zcash only on transparent addresses.

And yes, as you may have thought, some governments and exchanges have banned Monero, which was actually good for Monero. Why? Because it is now miles ahead of Zcash. Monero has an actual ecosystem. You can buy goods and services directly with Monero, you can buy Monero without any exchanges, and Monero knows how to survive in an environment without legal approval.

For example, you can buy gift cards at Coinsbee or Cake Pay directly with Monero, sell services and products for Monero directly at XMRBazaar, find different kinds of services accepting Monero at Monerica, use AI privately with Monero at Nano-GPT, or trade Monero privately with no KYC at RetoSwap.

And this is just the beginning. Monero usage has been increasing, and the goal is to be able to live entirely with Monero to achieve financial freedom.

So, private by default is definitely the superior choice. Cash is private by default, just like Monero.

3. Zcash is very centralized

Yep, that’s right. Perhaps you aren’t aware of this, but one mining pool of Zcash, ViaBTC, has nearly 70% of the mining power.

This means that if ViaBTC starts to act maliciously, they could, in theory, double-spend ZEC or censor transactions.

Zcash has a plan to fix that, but for now, it’s a promise and not something live. They want to create a PoS layer (proof-of-stake) to ensure users have more control over transaction validation.

I don’t have a specific opinion about this PoS layer yet, so I will refrain from talking about it.

The point remains valid, though: Zcash is very centralized. And not only due to the mining pool. We can clearly see that the community on Reddit is not very active; you don’t see people promoting and running Zcash nodes as you do in the Monero community. The community groups are typically made up of Zcash-related institutions.

Zcash has to put effort into marketing and convincing people to use it, while Monero has natural adoption, and users spread the word for free. There are several community-based sites, podcasts, and you can actually see people using it instead of just buying it and hoping for a massive price increase.

There are several guides on how to use a Monero wallet, how to run a node, how to spend it, etc. With Zcash, you typically have promises that “the technology is amazing and it will have more value than Bitcoin.”

4. Zcash has a developer tax

If you were proposing a global money to be used by everyone in the world, do you think it’s fair to allocate 20% of the mined money to pay for its development?

I don’t think so, and most people don’t think so. Zcash did exactly that. 20% of the mined coins go directly to Zcash institutions that are supposed to develop and market Zcash.

With this proposal, developers and the governance of the coin do not need to gain the trust of users. They are compensated by default and will obviously sell the Zcash for fiat since that is basically their salary, and they have bills to pay.

With that in mind, potential investors and users will always fear a massive dump in the cryptocurrency when prices spike.

5. Zcash UX still sucks

Zcash is still somewhat complex for the average user. To fix that, the recommended way to use Zcash nowadays is with Zashi, which tries to shield transactions by default.

Zashi has some serious issues, though. The first issue is the language. Only English is supported. I mean, is that serious? The most recommended wallet only supports English? Is Zcash only meant to be used in America/UK? It’s a shame that a project with a development tax can’t make a multi-language wallet. Cake Wallet, Stack Wallet, and Monerujo didn’t have any development tax, but they support several languages. What is your excuse, Zashi?

The second issue is that Zashi doesn’t seem to be stable, especially with larger amounts of Zcash. Recently, a user reported that he cannot spend his Zcash. That happens because Zashi only allows you to spend shielded Zcash, and the wallet is unable to shield his Zcash.

I know this isn’t specifically a skill issue because not long ago, when I was testing Zcash, I had a similar issue. I received Zcash on Zashi but was unable to shield it. I don’t remember exactly what I did to solve the issue (I was trying Ywallet and Nighthawk), but it definitely wasn’t a good first impression of Zcash. I remember testing receiving Zcash on an older phone vs. a newer phone (both using Zashi), and my newer phone was able to receive and shield the coins easily, but the older phone struggled.

I’m not sure if this was a coincidence, but it seemed that Zashi is heavy on your phone. I never had this issue with Monero before.

Sure, syncing Monero takes a while, but it works in the background seamlessly with Monerujo by just waiting. It runs even faster if you have a local Monero node running at your home, which I suspect 99% of Zcash users don’t have.

Right now, Zashi also needs to be synced to be properly used, and it takes a lot of time and requires you to leave your screen turned on.

Both coins need to be easier to use, but Monero is still better than Zcash for UI. Users don’t need to worry about Sapling or Orchard pools or have issues “shielding” their coins.

6. Price action

Due to the trusted setup launch and the development tax, Zcash is likely destined to be a pump coin. With no real-world adoption, its price can be manipulated to rise, but such gains are unlikely to last.

Cryptocurrency enthusiasts are currently focused on Zcash due to a massive price pump, but I doubt this will sustain. If you zoom out the price graph for Zcash, it still looks ridiculous. In contrast, zooming out for Monero reveals steady and slow growth over time.

Conclusion

Zcash sucks. After studying it better, calling it Ztrash is the right thing to do. Doing otherwise is not honest.

Credits

https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/monero-and-other-privacy-coins/