Despite its reputation as the anonymous currency of the digital underground, bitcoin has never been anonymous enough for Zooko Wilcox. As the 41-year-old cryptographer will remind anyone who'll listen, the public nature of the blockchain, bitcoin's ledger of transactions, means that unless currency users funnel it through intermediaries or special software, their transactions can be traced-the opposite of its supposed privacy benefit. 1 So in January, Wilcox and his team launched the public alpha release of Zcash, the cryptography world's best shot yet at perfectly untraceable money. Using a mathematical sleight of hand known as a zero-knowledge proof, Zcash offers the same antiforgery assurances as bitcoin but also lets users keep their payments entirely secret. "It's the first time you can transact with anyone on the Internet and control who gets to find out about those transactions," he says. 1 Wilcox says that Zcash's incognito properties are crucial for anyone from a startup complying with health-care privacy laws to a businesswoman in Afghanistan dodging corrupt cops and tyrannical male relatives. Of course, it's equally well suited to the dark web's $100 million-a-year drug trade. (Prosecutors proved bitcoin's shortcomings for narco money laundering last year, when they traced $13.4 million from Silk Road to its admin's laptop.) But Wilcox argues that his stealthy project isn't liable for how criminals misuse it. He insists that benign applications will outweigh shady ones, comparing Zcash's potential to that of the Internet itself: "Can the Internet be used for crime? Yes, but that's not what's important about it." The Feds may see things differently.
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