Why Zcash Is The Real Bitcoin
Zcash is the cumulative effort of many people. An evolution of ideas beginning in 1970, launching in 2016, and ending never.
The year is 1970 and James H. Ellis discovered what would be called public-key cryptography. At that time he was working for the UK government so this discovery was immediately classified.
He saw no way to effectively implement this technology.
The year is 1985 and zero-knowledge proofs are first conceived by Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali, and Charles Rackoff in their paper, "The Knowledge Complexity of Interactive Proof-Systems".
They saw no way to effectively implement this technology.
The year is 2008 and Satoshi Nakamoto solved the "byzantine generals" problem(google it) by inventing triple entry accounting. Don't know what that is?
Single entry accounting is when only one person is keeping records of a list of information, and you need to trust this person wont cheat anyone out of their information.
Double entry accounting was first documented by Luca Pacioli (1446–1517) and it is when there are multiple people recording the information. For every transaction in one book, there is an equal transaction in another book owned by someone else, but there is no third party to verify the records. There is still a level of trust but it is much smaller. The entire world ran on this system of trust because there was no other option until 2009.
Ok, so triple entry accounting is double entry accounting, but everything is verified by a third party, instead of themselves. Instead of having multiple copies of the ledger(accounts), there is only one ledger everybody can see update in real time verified by the third party that is a large distributed computer network. Computers do what they are told to do. If they are coded correctly, they will not make an error.
Bitcoin was created, and it's a breakthrough technology, but it has one major flaw. Satoshi valued privacy, but bitcoin isnt private! Only pseudo-anonymous.
Satoshi Nakamoto posted here[1], mentioning how he did not know how to apply zero knowledge proofs yet.
11 days after bitcoin launched, Hal Finney posted on twitter saying how he was looking at ways to add more anonymity to bitcoin.[2]
Unfortunately Hal passed away in 2014. RIP Hal.
For those that don't know, Hal Finney was the reciever of the first bitcoin transaction ever, from Satoshi himself.
It is safe to assume that Satoshi valued privacy. After all, he dissapeared forever on purpose and never revealed his identity. We should respect that, and not speculate on it!
I believe if Gavin Andresen didnt immediately go to the CIA after being given the bitcoin alert key, Satoshi would have stuck around and zero-knowledge proofs would have been implemented into bitcoin. But he didnt stick around, and bitcoin fell into the hands of blockstream.
Zcash launches exactly 2 years after the date of Hal Finney's death and solves the privacy issue that bitcoin faced.
Zcash also solves some of bitcoins other problems such as the slow difficulty adjustment, which can cause a back-log of transactions in certain scenarios. It is also faster and more scalable. The team behind it is self funded, unlike the mess at blockstream with bitcoin.
Zcash really stays true to cypherpunk roots.
PGP, HTTPS, were privacy protocols developed by cypherpunks for real world use.
They made these protocols for protecting information on the internet. Every time you use your credit card on the internet, it gets encrypted. Its private. This is good because it keeps people from stealing your money.
The big innovation with Zcash is they have figured out how to make private money, instead of making money private.
Zcash is a technology over 50 years in the making (1970-2021) and it can empower everybody worldwide with economic freedom.
Privacy is important not because you dont have anything to hide, but you need to protect yourself from nefarious actors intending to harm you from your information leakage.
A potential worrying scenario (based on a true story) is someone tracking you down to your home because you bought something from their shop in bitcoin and they looked up your wallet now you have a gun at your head demanding the code to the safe, all because you 'dont have anything to hide'.
Zcash is Satoshis Vision.
[1]https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/339/#selection-45.0-45.70
[2]https://twitter.com/halfin/status/1136749815
Thanks to Zooko and the whole team at the Electric Coin Company, and the Zcash Foundation.
4/18/2021