I’ve been thinking about the competition between Zcash and Bitcoin, and it reminds me a lot of the Betamax vs VHS format wars from the '80s.
Betamax had superior picture quality compared to VHS yet VHS won out nonetheless.
Think QWERTY vs Dvorak, JPEG vs PNG, PowerPC vs x86.
I fear that while Zcash is superior to BitCoin, BitCoin will win at the end of the day because it’s “good enough”. I don’t like that outcome but it’s something worth considering.
Reminds me of the Blu-ray vs HD DVD days.
The thing that really pushed the adoption of Blu-ray over HD DVD was that Sony included it for “free” in the PlayStation 3. All of a sudden millions of people who bought the next PlayStation wanted high quality movies to go with it, HD DVD just couldn’t compete.
If we can make using Zcash privacy as “easy” as using Bitcoin is, then when users are faced with the option of one or the other then I think they will choose the private choice. The issue now is just getting Zcash to be as simple and widely adopted as possible so it’s a no-brainer, and then Bitcoin won’t be able to compete because it’s too reluctant to change.
it will never be “easy” as long as we have all those different transaction types.
shielded only!
In the end there are no winners or losers in crypto. Only competing private currencies in a free market. And you chose those that best suit your needs.
This free market is still in its infancy and subject to very strong interferences from the fiat overlords, that are trying to rig it for their profits and delay the ineluctable (old habits die hard). But this won’t last very long.
We could talk until we’re blue in the face about privacy and it will go through one ear and out the other.
BTC with all its faults is good enough. The push for zcash isn’t going to come from better informed individuals, it’s going to come as a result of necessity when some tool makes it trivial to view an individuals wallet balance and transaction history.
Until then, BTC gets the limelight as far as I’m concerned.