Consensus Décentralisé - Blockchains - Smart Contracts - Decentralized Consensus

Bitcoin, which had its genesis block mined in 2009, was the first digital currency to scale. While many early adopters took interest in bitcoin because of its promise of privacy, the digital currency failed to provide this benefit, as interested parties can examine the transactions recorded on bitcoin’s blockchain to get a sense of exactly what a person or entity has purchased.
In the years following bitcoin’s release, developers have created privacy-oriented digital currencies including Dash and Monero. Both of these use innovative technologies to help increase the chances of their users remaining anonymous.
Dash leverages a technique called "CoinJoin", in which several users put funds into the same transaction in order to increase the chances of privacy. Alternatively, Monero harnesses ring signatures to reduce the chance of detection.
Both of these cryptocurrencies have made great progress toward realizing the goal of anonymous transactions, and Monero has received widespread adoption in the dark web.
However, Zcash’s technology seemingly gives users the ability to enjoy an even greater level of privacy. By allowing users to remain anonymous, Zcash can provide them with greater fungibility.
This is because many digital currency transactions rely on the use of private keys – strings of letters and numbers that identify a user. An address can become attached to several transactions over time, making it easy for friends, family, marketers or even government authorities to learn more about a person’s purchasing trends.
And if a user’s private key is attached to certain transactions, some parties may refuse to accept his or her money. This is where Zcash comes in.

When Bitcoin was first released, it brought an open financial system to the world. Anyone could connect without requiring permission from anyone else; anyone could extend and improve on it without permission.

However, it came with a drawback – privacy. Bitcoin allowed everyone to see the sending address, recipient address, and value of all transactions on the blockchain. Sure, they weren’t tied to a user (or computer) by default, but contamination was a possibility. People are, after all, only human. In contrast, Zcash automatically hides the sending address, recipient address and the value of all transactions – unless you have the viewing key.

The Zcash team was founded with privacy in mind: privacy for businesses; privacy for commerce. To be viable long-term, fungibility is needed – and without privacy, fungibility can’t exist. Bitcoin brought fungibility to the digital world, but Zcash is making it accessible. No longer do coins need to be tumbled; no longer do new addresses need to be generated for each transaction to ensure complete anonymity. It’s built in from the get-go.