This is the most relevant interview you will see this year.
My first interview with @cameron and @tyler.
0:00 Intro
0:47 The 2012 thesis: digital gold
1:46 Bitcoin’s missing feature: privacy
2:28 The first internet-native money
3:15 Why they seeded Zcash in 2016
4:47 Money has always been private
5:31 The true separation of money and state
6:20 Privacy: where the state ends and you begin
7:59 AI and quantum as accelerants
9:11 Bullish AI means bullish Zcash
9:27 Bitcoin’s place in a Zcash world
10:53 Zcash in 5–10 years
11:47 AI cycles, not halving cycles
13:37 The biggest infrastructure build-out ever
14:08 Valuing Zcash as a percentage of Bitcoin
14:54 Zcash is encrypted Bitcoin
16:04 Gold is abundant in space
17:27 Why start Cypherpunk
19:05 The coming war on privacy
19:55 Flock cameras and mass surveillance
22:18 The encryption wars: Zcash is HTTPS
23:47 Wrench attacks and public blockchains
25:10 “I have nothing to hide”
27:11 Einstein at the patent office
29:14 Self-censorship in academia
29:48 Privacy forces you to engage with ideas
30:41 Outro
0xMadness retweeted
I stepped back from Zcash protocol work today. I spent years on the cryptography behind shielded pools, Halo, Orchard, Ironwood, and Tachyon. Zcash is not acting responsibly. It is racing toward planetary-scale, post-quantum private money and gambling with the financial system.
This is the death kiss. Every candidate that Sanchez has promoted has lost the elections.
Lula representa un Brasil que lucha contra la injusticia y la desigualdad, que amplía derechos, y que defiende la democracia frente al autoritarismo.
Ese Brasil merece seguir avanzando hacia un futuro de esperanza y progreso.
Por eso, todo nuestro apoyo a @LulaOficial.
Força! 🇧🇷🌹
0xMadness retweeted
the most interesting thing about zero-knowledge proofs isn't that you can prove something without revealing the underlying data.
it's how many systems we built assuming you had to reveal everything in the first place.
0xMadness retweeted
Until users make that mental leap that privacy doesn't come from something you move your money through, it comes from *where you store your money at rest*, they'll keep making this mistake.
I've thought a lot about what @balajis is saying here. Institutions will hold bitcoin because it's transparent and they can prove their holdings publicly, but I think it's quite the opposite.
No serious relevant institution wants the public (retail), their competitors (companies) or their enemies (countries) to know when and how much they're transacting and with who. Information is a desestabilization tool and can be used to front run, complicate or change the expected outcome of a position.
Wealth and value storage (as with gold) works better when counterparties don't know the movements.
Auditability for control can be done periodically (every 3 months, for example, with viewing keys). Trust is gained by long term behavior. Institutions can profit from moving funds and store value privately inside Zcash, leveraging their intrinsic trust they have already gained (Federal Reserve, Hedge Funds, Public investment managers).
0xMadness retweeted
The quadratic residue trick used in the OSS service is brilliant, and first-time ever to my knowledge!
TL;DR: Zero knowledge prove set-inclusion / exclusion, without any hashing overhead!
Zcash is the solution for this.
They can’t know what you have in a shielded wallet.
0xMadness retweeted
the tam for p2p electronic cash is far larger than the tam for fiat debasement hedge
bitcoin can't and is not trying to be p2p electronic cash so it's not even competing against zcash
zec is a no brainer, generational play as both p2p electronic cash and a fiat debasement hedge
Bitcoin was a leap forward to fight debasement. Zcash is a leap forward to fight debasement, quantum and governments surveillance.
Zcash will hit 100k sooner than people expect.
Bitcoin's proof of work has done around 2^96 hashes over all time. Breaking the ZKP's in Zcash requires a minimum of 2^120 elliptic curve operations assuming ECDLP. If you had a dedicated ASIC, an elliptic curve addition would cost around 10-100x more than SHA2.
So today breaking an Elliptic curve would cost around 1 billion Bitcoin-hashrate equivalents. AKA a billion times the hardware buildout of all Bitcoin mining ASICs, dedicated to break this.
If a hypothetical billion X improvement came in, you'd need a chip buildout on the level of bitcoin mining before you can break anything. While competing against all the hyperscalars for fab-space.
AKA plenty of warning time, for a recovery process that takes a couple day response time max.
0xMadness retweeted
Hot take: Zcash holders are Bitcoin maxis who went one level deeper in self-improvement.
They just realized that financial freedom without privacy is an incomplete upgrade.
bitcoin:native zcash:native
0xMadness retweeted
Do the labs have better algorithms for breaking crypto?
Independent of the answer, the most important thing is to have crypto agility. Zcash has proven this, with 3 upgrades happening in 6 months, and Tachyon planned for January. The protocol design has plans for how to turn off features to enable safe protocol upgrades. This is what Quantum Recoverability is, and it applies equally well if there's a non-quantum ECDLP attack.
We're equipped on multiple fronts to protect against future bugs. In the next cryptography upgrade, coming January, already slated features are:
- PQ transparent
- Switching to Tachyon
What people don't realize about Tachyon is it switches us to R1CS, and enables far more crypto agility away from elliptic curves. The nullifier derivation no longer depend on elliptic curves. We get far greater SNARK agility and can very quickly move to STARKs when any crisis comes.
Today's Zcash transparent UTXO's give a better security guarantee than an ETH address. @ZakuraZcash has solved the privacy and performance problem that were blocking rotating T-Addresses natively in the wallet. This is done using PIR to fetch balances, and its already live in Vizor. So its a short UX leap to get this backup plan.
In January, the Transparent pool will be upgraded to support hash based sigs, that can later be STARK aggregated.
0xMadness retweeted
I was a Bitcoin maxi who found Zcash through @naval and @mert. It clicked right away.
But the most beautiful part is that Zcash gave me a second chance to live the journey.
I believe in Bitcoin today, but I wasn’t there for the ride from $200 to $10,000. I never had to find out whether my conviction could survive all the volatility, the doubt, the drawdowns, and the temptation to sell.
With Zcash, I do. I get to experience that journey in real time and find out whether I actually have the conviction I thought I had.
That might be the greatest gift of finding zcash:native as a bitcoin:native maxi: a second chance to test whether you really would have held.
I was a Bitcoin maxi.
What clicked for me was how much of Zcash I already understood just from learning Bitcoin.
Bitcoiners, you’ve already done the hard work. Scarcity, self-custody, money without permission. You know this stuff.
You’re already most of the way to understanding Zcash.
- Add existing shielded privacy on L1.
- Look at how Zcash scales.
- Compare block times and fees.
- Lastly, compare market caps.
That’s where I found the opportunity. That’s why my thesis changed.
The market undervalues $ZEC. For now.
You’re so damn close. Study Zcash with the same open mind you brought to Bitcoin.
We are not even ready about the future of Zcash. It has an Astra team on quantum and privacy research. It'll flip bitcoin.
0xMadness retweeted
As of 30 September 2026, one ZEC buys 0.01722 BTC — up 7.2× over five years, up 26× on the year and up 148% over three months. Five years ago it bought 0.002385 BTC.
In dollars that is $1,441.70 a coin (up 19× on the year and up 247% over three months), a market cap of $24.5B — 1.5% of Bitcoin's. Spot sits 4.2× above the realized price of $343 — the average price at which a ZEC last crossed a pool boundary — so the typical coin is held at a gain.
Behind it: 29.1% of all ZEC — 4.94M ZEC, $7.1B — sits in shielded pools, against 23.4% a year ago and 7.4% five years ago. Ironwood, the current shielded pool, holds 4.06M ZEC, with 379k ZEC still in Orchard, its predecessor, crossing the turnstile.
Transactions average 12,749 a day (up 298% on the year and up 186% over three months), of which 4,972 — 39% — are shielded, against 22% a year ago. Transparent addresses are being paid for the first time at 3,110 a day (up 239% on the year and up 135% over three months). An address is not a person: wallets derive a fresh one per payment received.
17.0M of 21M ZEC has been issued, 81% of the cap.
Network security: the hashrate is 28.7 GSol/s, up 5.5× over five years and up 280% on the year. Block rewards run $2.2M a day — 1,512 ZEC of coinbase, of which 3.6 ZEC — 0.2% — is transaction fees rather than new issuance. Users paid $143.1k in fees over the 30 days to 29 September 2026 — up 32× over five years and up 177% on the year.