In this episode I interviewed Zooko Wilcox, the CEO and founder of Zcash, a new cryptocurrency set to make waves internationally this coming October. What makes Zcash so unique is that it plans to take the excellent functionality of bitcoin and extend it even further to allow users to make completely private and secure transactions without a trace through their encrypted network.

Zooko believes strongly that with  Zcash businesses will be given a proper chance to thrive as commerce can be done without any roadblocks and society can move forward a much more rapid pace. And that’s all because of one little thing called privacy.

“Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn’t want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.”

Eric Hughes, A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto

Zooko believes that in an open and programmable financial system, privacy is the only way we will be able to ensure money is treated equal and all exchanges are fair. We explore this further as Zooko explains this key concept known as fungibility and why it is so important to the modernization of commerce and improvement of our society. 

Zcash is set to launch on the 28th of October 2016 and while this may not be the next bitcoin overnight, Zooko sure does have a grand vision for the long term future. A future so bright that we might just see the replacement of commodities like gold and silver with cryptocurrencies like Zcash!

Be sure to listen in and get your notebook handy because this episode is jam packed with amazing content.

In this episode you’ll discover:

0:40 – How Zcash provides a neutral playing field for all businesses and a look into some of the biggest and best use cases for Zcash.

3:35 – The long term future goals of Zcash: is it here to replace bitcoin?

05:00 – How Zcash plans to deal with the block size debate?

06:30 – How Zcash will handle large capacity transactions and manage issues with scalability

11:30 – The shared values, beliefs and technology goals of Zcash and bitcoin

13:10 – Whether Zcash could potentially be integrated into bitcoin in the future

15:08 – What makes Zcash more anonymous and potentially better than Monero?

20:30 – How Zcash generates their public/private key parameters

24:00 – Zooko’s journey into the world of cryptocurrency

25:00 – The skills and experience Zooko took from working at digiCash

27:46 – Zooko’s thoughts and predictions on who he thinks the primary user of Zcash will be

30: 34 – The benefits that Zooko obtains from eating a ketogenic diet.

Key Takeaways

“Zcash isn’t the ‘opposite’ of Bitcoin. zCash has selective transparency.”

“The invention of bitcoin showed us a whole new continent of possibility that previously we thought there was an ocean of impossibility.”

“Zcash is not set up as an opensource community but as a Company. This is the first major difference to Bitcoin and other crypto currencies such as ethereum.”