Hard Money Vs. Privacy? Saifedean Ammous Questions Crypto’s Privacy Push
The post Hard Money Vs. Privacy? Saifedean Ammous Questions Crypto’s Privacy Push appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
Bitcoin advocate Saifedean Ammous ignited a lively debate between Bitcoiners and privacy advocates by questioning the perceived importance of privacy as a key characteristic of money in an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph. “This is the question. How much demand is there for money that does not get debased versus how much demand is there for money that allows you to maintain your privacy?” Ammous said. Ammous, the author of “The Bitcoin Standard,” described Zcash as a “shitcoin” and raised concerns about the initial launch of the project, which involved a trusted setup ceremony in 2016 to generate the cryptographic parameters for its privacy features. “The whole thing is built on a trusted setup, where you have to trust a bunch of people who started the whole thing. I’m not in any mood to get into these kind of stupid games,” Ammous said. While admitting that he did not have in-depth knowledge of Zcash’s protocol, Ammous also questioned whether the privacy features of Zcash would limit the ability of people to trust the total supply of ZEC tokens: “As I understand, the anonymity benefits come at the expense of the auditability benefits.” Zcash features the ability to use shielded and unshielded ZEC for transactions. Shielded ZEC is used in transactions that are encrypted and private, hiding the sender, receiver and amount from the public blockchain. This privacy is achieved using zero-knowledge proofs, which allow the network to verify transactions as valid without revealing sensitive details. Despite Ammous’s concerns, shielded and unshielded Zcash pools are publicly verifiable on several blockchain explorers. Privacy vs. hard money Several key figures from the cryptocurrency industry weighed in on an X post that featured Ammous’ comments on Zcash and the role of privacy in the use of money. So, what do hardcore Bitcoiners actually think about…
Filed under: News - @ November 28, 2025 11:14 pm