All the technology fetishists here who lose sight of how Zcash is useless if not widely accepted as a retail method of payment need to read and re-read Doomberg’s review of the big picture.
Your bank accounts have been frozen, credit cards canceled, and access to your brokerage account denied. Further, imagine you have accumulated some Bitcoin in a cold storage wallet (i.e., on a flash drive in your possession)… How are you going to pay your mortgage, car payment, tuition expenses, or buy groceries with it? The answer is you can’t.
Does that wallet represent a store of value that might be reactivated in the future should the government change its stance towards you, or is itself changed altogether? Absolutely. Does it represent a practical medium of exchange, one that is useful during this personal crisis? Absolutely not.
At a time of utmost need, cryptocurrencies have proven they are not money. If they can’t be used to transact in the main, they’re just bits of data on a flash drive.Crypto proponents will argue that off-exchange peer-to-peer transfers are still possible and this enables bartering, or that you could move to a country that more widely accepts cryptocurrencies as payment. To these critics, we say thank you for highlighting the exceptions that prove our thesis. If that is all you have left, it is clear how much the government has taken away from you and how feeble cryptocurrencies are as a hedge.