Ethereum [ETH]’s Vitalik Buterin speaks about privacy of Zcash

On 9th August, Zcash released their video blog called Perspective, a video series of discussions and opinions offered by Zcash community members and other cryptocurrency developers at the conference. A video of the same series features Vitalik Buterin, the Co-Founder of Ethereum.

Earlier this year, the Zcash community came together and hosted its first three-day long annual conference ‘ZconO’. Several developers from different projects like Ethereum [ETH] and Monero [XMR] attended the event. The event focused on discussing the progress of Zcash since its genesis. Moreover, it covered a wide range of topics, including incentives, governance, scaling, circuits and elliptic curves. Privacy and security were the key focus of the event.

Zooko Wilcox [CEO of Zcash] also spoke about Zcash’s Sprout and how it supported privacy. He said:

“The Zcash sprout uses the zero knowledge technique for protecting privacy which is the, in my opinion, is the only known method so far that’s good enough to actually protect privacy in practice it was a big step forward.”

Vitalik Buterin expressed his opinion on being a part of the event:

“Excited to be at #zcon0 and great to see the Zcash community’s strong and consistent commitment to security and privacy.”

The Zcash community sought Buterin’s views on the importance of privacy. He started off by saying that initially, he believed that privacy was not an important factor in his life. He explained:

“So, I guess earlier in my life I subscribed more to the whole if you have nothing to hide, what do you need privacy for sort of a thing.”

He continued to talk about how at a later stage in life, he started taking privacy seriously. People should be able to do things without the fear of being judged and that is where privacy makes its mark, stated Buterin.

He poises Robin Hanson’s book titled ‘Elephant in the brain’ as a classic example of the above. In his words:

“I started realizing that there are some situations where there is a legitimate need to be able to do things without the thing you’re doing simultaneously being this kind of performance that you’re pretty putting on for an entire world.”

Then he went on to explain how he started believing in the concept of privacy and how important it is. Buterin believes that privacy is valuable and that companies must incorporate privacy at different levels.

Towards the end of his talk, Buterin mentioned that he has been following Zcash from its genesis. He also put in a few words about Zcash’s privacy, stating:

“I guess, first of all, it’s important to keep in mind that even Zcash in some ways is less private than cash. If we have a cash transaction in person there is literally no trace of  this that’s happening in public whereas if we have a Zcash transaction you’re still leaking the timestamp you’re still possibly leaking IP addresses.. The division for  Zcash strong privacy on the internet is in some ways a lot more subtle than even people on both sides of the argument tend to think. So, ultimately a technology that brings balance to a world.”

Buterin concluded by saying:

“We are the kind of fundamental patterns of technology over the last 20 or 30 years, are really going in the opposite direction even more.”