Snowden: Anonymous Zcash Project Could Address Bitcoin's Surveillance Risks

Last week, world-renowned government whistleblower Edward Snowden mentioned the anonymous cryptocurrency project Zcash as a solution to the surveillance risks of bitcoin’s public transaction record.

The former NSA operative, now a fugitive, made his comments about the Zcash project during a video panel discussion on “Decentralization and Encryption” at the “Upgrade the Internet” conference hosted by venture capital firm BlueYard Capital in Dublin on June 1.

Zcash founder and CEO Zooko Wilcox also participated in the event, tweeting:

What is Zcash?

Zcash was born out of the Zerocoin project, which was originally intended as a cryptographic anonymity layer for Bitcoin and later transformed into an independent cryptocurrency.

The Zcash team currently includes cryptographers and researchers from the Zerocoin project at Johns Hopkins University, including the famous security expert Matthew D. Green.

Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox is an experienced computer security researcher who was inspired by David Chaum’s book “privacy-preserving money.” Wilcox started with Digicash, a digital currency created by Chaum in the 1990s.

(Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox)

Transparency and Privacy

Currently, Zcash has launched an alpha public version of the software. On June 1, the Zcash team announced that it would start the "slow start mining" phase of the project.

This distribution method means that its initial mining rewards are slow and then gradually increase to ensure that miners can experience a fairer experience during the distribution of Zcash tokens. Like Bitcoin, the total amount of Zcash is also 21 million.

It is reported that the funder of the project is Roger Ver the owner of Bitcoin.com.

Zcash has a public blockchain to display transactions, but it hides the transaction amounts, and viewing the owner of the key (that is, the owner of the coin) allows others to view the information associated with this key.

It encrypts the original transaction data instead of publishing it to the public like Bitcoin. The complete transaction output is not saved by the Zcash node, but only the ability to spend coins is recorded using a proof mechanism called "zk-SNARKs".

Most transaction details can be pruned from the blockchain.

Other projects seeking to avoid the “trackability” of public chains include competing coins Monero and Dash, as well as the anonymous Bitcoin wallet Samourai Wallet.

Do you think the market will accept a new cryptocurrency that promotes anonymity? Share your thoughts.