Money for an Infinite Civilization

Transcript

Hello. Thank you all for being here. Thank you for coming. My name is Zuko and this is about Zcash. What is Zcash? Zcash is money. Money for an infinite civilization. Zcashers want to make something that everyone can use, that no one can ever be denied, and that can empower everyone's dreams and opportunities and cooperation. And Zcash is a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. And like Bitcoin, uh, Zcash started as Zcash just started as a clone of Bitcoin. It was just encrypted Bitcoin. We took Bitcoin and

we added encryption into it. But it's changed and it continues to change more and more over time. So I was involved in the early days of Bitcoin and we had a specific reason that Bitcoin is the way it is, which is we wanted to protect Bitcoin's essential values from being corrupted. And one of the main purposes or values or principles of Bitcoin is scarcity of the money supply. Everyone knows that there's only ever going to be 21 million Bitcoin coins. And that's the exact same with Zcash. Zcash, everyone knows that there will only ever be 21 million Zcash

coins. And the strategy they use in Bitcoin to protect this kind of uh critical principle is never to change. the the the the way to protect Bitcoin is to ban any changes to Bitcoin. And the strategy we use in Zcash is almost the opposite strategy for the same goal, which is in order to protect an essential value, you have to constantly change. You have to adapt to meet your users changing needs and to meet new threats and challenges.

So in the 10 years that Zcash has been in operation, we have collectively upgraded it many many times. Each one of these dots is another um time that all of the Zcash users collectively accepted a change to the rules that improve something. And how can you allow changes into an open distributed system that anyone can access? How can you allow changes that improve it or that protect it against a new threat without thereby opening the door to a change that undermines it um that gives someone an advantage over others or or violates its

basic principles. And the answer is the people. the people uh are are vigilant to accept only changes that improve Zcash and meet their values and they will not accept changes that violate Zcash's principles. We do this by a rough consensus policy in which um a combination of polls and coin holders and miners. They have proof of work mining and development teams all collectively agree that a change is valid and worth it and only if we have sufficient consensus can we make

changes. Now, the most recent time this happened was called Ironwood. And it's a great example of what's going on today because you see all the headlines about quantum computers, AIs, unknown new threats like the world is changing faster and faster. Well, we found one of those risks threatening every Zcash user. they were in danger of of all of their coins being stolen or destroyed. Same as what's you're reading about in the press right now with Bitcoin and Ethereum. And all of the Zcash development teams got together um set aside everything else and

cooperated to upgrade Zcash to fix the weaknesses and protect every user. um which we did successfully and our next that was what happened this summer 2026. We were um we were the ones who got ahead of the AIS and we found the problems and fixed it before the enemy AIS found it whereas a lot of other companies and projects and cryptocurrencies and software packages have suffered from the same attacks. Now the next uh situation we face is quantum computers and AIS and once again Zcash is going to rise to meet the challenge

by um that the strength of Zcash comes from the the governance process that will make changes to meet challenges but will also safeguard its principles. So that means the strength of Zcash really comes from the people. Zcash is people. Thank you for listening.