People often compare Bitcoin to privacy-focused projects like Zcash, but they were never built for the same mission.
Founding matters
Bitcoin launched with no company, no foundation, no premine, no founders’ tax — a once-in-history, organic, leaderless emergence of digital money.
Zcash launched in 2016 with a tech company (ECC), a foundation, a founders’ reward, and a formal roadmap.
One emerged as global digital money.
The other began as a tech startup with a cryptographic product — useful, but serving a different purpose.
Auditability matters
Bitcoin’s supply is fully verifiable by anyone.
Zcash’s shielded pool and past bugs make full auditability impossible.
You can’t build a monetary base layer on unverifiable supply —
but you can build a solid privacy-tech business on top of advanced cryptography.
Hashrate matters
Bitcoin: ~1.1 ZH/s (≈ 1.1×10²¹ hashes/s).
Zcash: ~15 GH/s (≈ 1.5×10¹⁰ hashes/s).
A ~76,000,000,000× difference.
Bitcoin is a global power grid — massively redundant and impossible to take down.
Zcash is a small-town energy system — perfectly fine for specialized, local use, but not designed to secure the world’s monetary base.
And that’s the point:
Zcash might succeed as a privacy-driven tech venture with niche use-cases —
but Bitcoin became the monetary standard because of unparalleled:
decentralized origins + full auditability + global hashrate security.
One is digital money.
The other is a cryptography company with a product.
