If you told me 6 months ago that Zcash would start absorbing Bitcoin’s original use-case, I’d have laughed. Today, I’m not so sure... In fact, I believe a strong case can be made that BTC's original cypherpunk vision has been hijacked. Not just because it has underperformed things like the $QQQ's, but because its role as a sovereign, censorship-resistant, private medium of wealth storage and transfer has been hollowed out... For example, ~9% of all BTC sits in US ETFs or government treasuries today; custodial, surveilled, fully transparent structures where individual sovereignty is basically zero. At the same time, global financial surveillance is accelerating. From EU stablecoin balance caps, eventual roll outs of CBDC’s across a range of jurisdictions and the very real possibility of a more interventionist, anti crypto “democratic socialist” US government. What many no longer discuss is that Bitcoin actually had an opportunity to fix this over a decade ago... The Zerocoin proposal, a cryptographically sound privacy layer designed specifically for Bitcoin, was brought to the community in 2013. It could have become Bitcoin’s native shielded transaction system or at least a sidechain that preserved the asset’s cypherpunk roots. But Bitcoin Core rejected it. Not because it didn’t work, but because the culture had already begun shifting toward “don’t change Bitcoin,” ossification, and risk-aversion. The team behind Zerocoin eventually left and created Zcash, implementing the privacy Bitcoin refused to adopt. Against that backdrop, Bitcoin has no credible way to shield balances or transaction flows. Even Satoshi openly acknowledged this limitation in 2010: “If a solution was found, a much better, easier, more convenient implementation of Bitcoin would be possible.” ...