Bitcoin advocate Saifedean Ammous stirred debate between Bitcoiners and privacy supporters after questioning how important privacy really is as a feature of money in a recent Cointelegraph interview.
“How much demand is there for money that can’t be debased, compared to money that protects your privacy?” Ammous asked.
He also criticized Zcash, calling it a “shitcoin,” and pointed to concerns about its 2016 launch, which required a trusted setup to create its privacy parameters.
“The entire system relies on a trusted setup, meaning you have to trust the group who created it. I have no interest in playing those kinds of games,” Ammous said.
He acknowledged he isn’t deeply familiar with Zcash’s protocol but still questioned whether its privacy features make it harder for people to trust the accuracy of ZEC’s total supply.
“As I understand, the anonymity benefits come at the expense of the auditability benefits.”
Zcash allows users to transact with either shielded or unshielded ZEC. Shielded transactions are fully encrypted, hiding the sender, receiver, and amount from the public blockchain. This privacy is enabled by zero-knowledge proofs, which let the network confirm a transaction’s validity without exposing any details.
Despite Ammous’s criticisms, both shielded and unshielded Zcash pools can be publicly verified through multiple blockchain explorers.
Privacy vs. Hard Money
A number of prominent crypto industry figures responded on X to Ammous’s comments about Zcash and the broader debate over whether money should prioritize privacy or hard-money properties.
Helius co-founder Mert Mumtaz described Ammous’s question about monetary debasement versus privacy as a “false dichotomy:”
“You should have money that is not debased and is private. That’s zcash. Further, you just can’t have money that’s free from the state unless it’s private. If it can be seen, it can be seized.”
Digital Currency Group founder and CEO Barry Silbert said that privacy still remains a core concern for Bitcoin supporters:
“I’m old enough to remember when all hardcore Bitcoiners cared about privacy. Fortunately, many still do.”
Zcash co-founder Zooko Wilcox joined the discussion, pointing out that the Canadian government was able to identify Bitcoin addresses associated with striking truckers because Bitcoin’s blockchain is fully transparent.
X users continued debating the role of privacy in money and the key differences between Zcash and Bitcoin.
Ammous acknowledged that blockchain privacy is an evolving topic. Regarding Bitcoin, he suggested that some privacy features desired by users can be implemented via layer-2 protocols and platforms.
“Privacy is interesting in how it will evolve. One unpopular opinion I have is that on-chain privacy is very difficult—and continues to get more difficult. That’s not necessarily bad, because people can achieve the privacy they want on second layers, without compromising it,” Ammous said.
Despite this, Ammous’s academic perspective remains grounded in the belief that hard money is essential for prosperity and economic growth.
“I think people would rather have hard money that isn’t private than easy money that is. The idea that people inherently want privacy in their money is massively overblown, often used to market ‘shitcoins,’” he added.
He further argued that money, by its nature, is “an anti-private technology,” since nearly all exchanges leave traces of information—especially in the digital age.
“It’s always going to be difficult to make money truly private on-chain. What people really want is resistance to debasement—that’s what addresses a $300 trillion total market,” Ammous said.
Meanwhile, Zcash has experienced a resurgence in interest as 2025 draws to a close. The privacy-focused cryptocurrency reached the top of Coinbase’s search rankings in November, and ZEC’s price surged tenfold in recent months, briefly pushing its total market capitalization above $10 billion.
