People use bitcoin by sharing their payment address that looks like this : mp525tN8b3v4aos32hQT8E6cepdhZVyqVC Let us suppose this bitcoin address belongs to a shopkeeper. The shopkeeper puts this address on a poster behind the shop in the form of a QR code. Now, customers can scan that code with their bitcoin wallet application to pay for their bought items. The problem is anyone can look for that address in the bitcoin blockchain and can see every incoming or outgoing transaction of that address and the total bitcoin balance of the address. Anyone with that information can get an idea of how rich the shopkeeper is and how successful the shop has been in the past. This information can be exploited by bad actors such as robbers for their personal gains. Also, if we are sitting next to someone while they pay for their bought items, then we can get the idea of how rich the customer sitting next to us is, by seeing the most recent incoming transaction to the shopkeeper’s address and then looking up the balance of the sending address i.e the customer address. So, Bitcoin does not provide full financial privacy, and your average innocent user gets no privacy whatsoever. There are various examples like this, where user privacy can be breached and information gained through it can be exploited by bad actors for their personal gains. Zcash protocol solves this problem of financial privacy for the users. It allows users to send money an...
