Hi,
Bitcoin is currently at about $639. So zcash will do what bitcoin does but with the added privacy which is great! As a noob, I probably would prefer to use zcash over bitcoin because of the privacy feature. Thus, do you think BTC’s value will drop because of zcash? Will the BTC’s miners stop mining BTC and switch over to zcash? What’s your thoughts on this?
Don’t think that zcash will influence BTC price 
No alt coin has affected BTC as of yet…
None can in the short term. Long term, another coin or other coins can begin to steal its market, BUT said coin/s would have to go through rigorous testing and review.
Bitcoin has been adopted by many not-so crypto-enthusiast types as an asset, hence why the demand is so high and why the price reflects that.
good points… so if zcash were to have any influence on BTC’s value, it would take maybe a couple of years?
I’ll go even further: I wouldn’t be surprised if the advent and spread of Zcash helped Bitcoin’s value, at least for the next several years. They offer different kinds of values in some ways. For example, Bitcoin is very widely understood and widely built-on-top-of, and it has a strong tradition of evolving the protocol extremely carefully and slowly if at all. In contrast Zcash is newer and more experimental, could have “growing pains” kinds of bugs and security failures in the coming years (like Bitcoin did in its early years), and as we’ve recently blogged, we intend to make Zcash more of an evolving protocol than Bitcoin currently is. (But less quickly evolving than Ethereum currently is. 
)
My point is that there are use cases and trade-offs that better served by Bitcoin, at least for the forseeable future, and others that are better served by Zcash.
And, the two can interoperate and cooperate (the development teams behind Zcash and Bitcoin frequently cooperate on technical issues), and the two can grow in slightly different directions as they mature, doubling-down on the particular values that appeal most strongly to their most important user bases.
Also each one can learn from the other, copying both the ideas and technology from each other and also learning from what users and markets the other explores.
So, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the advent and the success of Zcash causes Bitcoin to become more valuable to more people.
Not that I — or anyone else — knows what will happen.
Father of Zcash doesn’t even have a time machine… Satoshi has a time machine.
Agreed.
The more we get ANY cryptocurrency to spread, the better off the rest will be.
More investors = higher total market cap. Fingers crossed for mass adoption in 2017 to 2018…
Hoping the bankers and governments don’t figure out a way to control cryptocurrency.
I mean, that’s why crypto was invented in the first place…
I don’t know whether to be afraid of or happy about them all investing in Blockchain tech.
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Gandhi
I might be crazy, but I’ve always imagined Zcash operating in a completely different sphere than bitcoin… IF it reaches its potential (which is a very tough row to hoe). Zcash, I think, could be the $1,000 bill of cryptocurrencies, the medium for massive organizations to make larger transactions between each other more than for consumers to buy pizza. (actually replacing centralized proprietary digital transactions which previously replaced high denomination bills)
Is that the differing use case zooko alludes to above? I assume not. He seems pretty under-stated most of the time. That’s probably a good thing. Better to under promise and over deliver than the inverse.
I remain eager to hear from banks et al who have legal obligations to protect their customer’s privacy about how and what privacy in cryptos could enable them to do. There was a great bank podcast a while back where that industry interviewed zooko, but I’d really love to hear zooko interview the financial organization tech people about what they wish they could do with bitcoin, but can’t yet due to privacy regulations.
That’d be great for supporters of Zcash to hear, but it could also stoke interest from potential institutional users who might not be thinking about how to apply the tech practically yet. A lot of what I’ve heard talked about thus far has been about the tech in the abstract. If a part of your desired market is institutional, a lot of them might need some help connecting the dots on what Zcash can do (as opposed to what zksnarks are). Tech companies that look to serve those users with products built on Zcash might appreciate a platform to highlight what Zcash (and their ideas for it) can do as well.