Vitalik Buterin: Why Privacy and
$ZEC Changed Crypto Forever
“Bitcoin has decentralization, but it doesn’t have privacy.”
That single line from Vitalik Buterin explains a structural flaw many still ignore.
Bitcoin proved trustless money works. But transparency at scale comes with a cost: every transaction is traceable, forever. That’s not financial freedom that’s permanent surveillance.
According to Vitalik, the real breakthrough came in 2016 with Zcash.
ZEC wasn’t just another coin. It introduced zero-knowledge proofs in a live, permissionless network showing that privacy and verification can coexist.
What followed reshaped crypto entirely:
ZK-rollups, private DeFi, scalable L2s all trace their roots back to Zcash’s early work.
Ironically, privacy is often treated as “optional” in today’s narratives.
But history suggests the opposite:
Decentralization without privacy is incomplete.
And Zcash was the moment the industry realized that.
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