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Zcash

How to actually send money privately — and why Bitcoin can't.

From a public Bitcoin ledger to fully private payments — learn how Zcash hides sender, receiver, and amount using zero-knowledge proofs.

Bitcoin writes every payment — who, to whom, how much — into a public ledger that never forgets. That’s great for auditors and terrible for privacy. Zcash keeps the public, verifiable ledger but hides the sensitive parts using zero-knowledge proofs: math that lets the network confirm a payment is valid without seeing the sender, the receiver, or the amount.

This topic builds from the ground up. We start with why Bitcoin leaks, define what “private money” even means, meet the cryptography that makes it possible, open up the Zcash machine, and finish by walking through a genuinely anonymous transaction — plus the mistakes that quietly de-anonymize people who think they’re safe.

In this topic

  1. 1 What Is Zcash? Private Digital Cash, Explained Zcash is a cryptocurrency that lets you prove a payment is valid without revealing who paid whom or how much. Learn how shielded transactions and zero-knowledge proofs work. 11 min
  2. 2 Why Bitcoin Isn't Private Bitcoin is a public, permanent ledger — every payment, sender, and amount is readable forever. It's pseudonymous, not anonymous, and very traceable. 8 min
  3. 3 What "Private Money" Actually Means The four properties of financial privacy — sender, receiver, amount, unlinkability — and what Bitcoin actually hides versus reveals on-chain. 7 min
  4. 4 Three Roads to Privacy — Mixers, Monero, Zcash How CoinJoin mixers, Monero ring signatures, and Zcash zk-SNARKs hide payments — what each conceals, and exactly where each one leaks. 9 min
  5. 5 Zero-Knowledge Proofs, Intuitively zk-SNARKs in plain language — completeness, soundness, zero-knowledge — and what a proof actually proves about a shielded Zcash transaction. 10 min
  6. 6 Inside Zcash — Addresses, Notes, and Nullifiers How Zcash works under the hood — transparent vs shielded addresses, notes, commitments, nullifiers, and the Sapling/Orchard shielded pools. 13 min
  7. 7 Making a Truly Anonymous Transaction How to send Zcash with full privacy (z→z), the mistakes that de-anonymize you, viewing keys, and the honest trade-offs you should know. 12 min