This is The Way
While Bitcoin and Ethereum still claim commanding share of the cryptocurrency market, recent chatter online makes me more convinced that a certain privacy coin is going to quietly become necessary.
I swear I'm still not using Twitter. I got rid of my account. It's gone. I don't have it. I promise! BUT... sometimes I have friends send me screen grabs or links to things that they see on Twitter. Usually it's just a funny meme or something but occasionally it will be something that I actually find very interesting. That happened this weekend. As you might be aware, I'm pretty bullish Zcash (ZEC). I see privacy in the crypto sphere being something that becomes a big concern as more people and businesses get on board with the technology. My personal opinion is Zcash is the best option because it's the easiest privacy coin to on-ramp (Coinbase). Anyway, my guy sent me this tweet from Grayscale’s Barry Silbert:
Also on the 19th, the Zcash development team announced they're changing the coin from a proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus and provided a roadmap for the rollout of that change. This should be appealing to anyone who cares about ESG investing and how it relates to the crypto space. It is generally viewed that crypto mining is a very energy-wasteful action. PoS consensus mechanisms alleviate the energy consumption problem facing crypto.
But Silbert's tweet wasn't the only thing that caught my eye on the Tweety pertaining to Zcash. Known privacy advocate and expert Edward Snowden weighed-in as well. Snowden occasionally talks about Bitcoin and the issues he has with the hyper-venture capitalization of the digital asset space.
He brings up great points about Bitcoin and other tokens but I think the main takeaway here is he is someone who is incredibly knowledgeable about privacy and the spying capabilities that entities like the NSA have. If he's on board with ZEC, that's good enough for me.
One other point on Zcash; one of the reasons why it's still available through an on-ramp like Coinbase is because the default transaction mechanism is actually transparent. This is why some privacy coin advocates don't like it. The good thing is it is incredibly easy and cheap to solve for the transparent default. If you buy ZEC on Coinbase, you can send it to a self-custody wallet like Zecwallet Lite and immediately shield it through a z address transfer. That's the difference between ZEC and other privacy coins. My Zecwallet Lite app has a “t address” (transparent) and a “z address” (shielded). Transactions with z addresses are private and very difficult to trace.
While the majority of transactions happening on the ZEC network are still transparent, the share of shielded transactions has really started to pick up steam in the last two months. You can also see the transactions are really starting to ramp upward overall when you look at the three year trend.
So not only is the usage of ZEC on-chain picking up steam, but the people who are using it are now starting to use it for the desired purpose of shielding transactions. I don't know about you, but that sure sounds like a use-case developing to me.
Disclaimer: I'm not an investment advisor. I'm long ZEC. Wanting financial privacy doesn't automatically make you a criminal.