Conversation with the Winklevoss Twins: In the AI Era, Why Is Zcash the Ultimate "Encrypted Bitcoin"?

Compiled & Translated by: TechFlow

TechFlow Introduction: Gemini co-founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss appeared on Maxime Desalle's interview. Starting from their 2012 bet on Bitcoin's "digital gold" investment thesis, they explained why they led Zcash's seed round in 2016, and why they have now set up a dedicated company, Cypherpunk, to continuously buy and mine ZEC. The core judgment from the twins is: Bitcoin solved the decentralization of money, but it exposes every transaction to the sunlight; Zcash fills in the missing privacy link, making it "encrypted Bitcoin."

Against the backdrop of accelerating advances in AI and quantum computing, they believe on-chain financial privacy will deteriorate faster and faster, making Zcash the hedge against AI and quantum in the crypto world. They also offer a simple and blunt valuation framework: ZEC currently has a market cap of about 2% of Bitcoin's. If privacy value reaches 10% of Bitcoin's market cap, ZEC has 5x upside, with a per-token price easily exceeding $5,000, and a clear path toward $10,000.

Guests: Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss (Gemini co-founders, early Bitcoin investors, founders of Cypherpunk)

Host: Maxime Desalle

Podcast source: YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fezWpms2z3I)

Original title: Zcash Is Encrypted Bitcoin - The Winklevoss Twins

Release date: October 20, 2026

Key Takeaways

• The 2012 investment thesis was "digital gold": The twins compared Bitcoin with gold across nine characteristics one by one. Bitcoin won across the board on scarcity, portability, and divisibility; the only category it did not win was privacy, and at the time they did not give that enough weight.
• Led Zcash's seed round in 2016, and the investment thesis has never changed: Financial privacy is a necessity. Ironically, wire transfers and cash are both more private than on-chain Bitcoin transactions. Satoshi originally wanted to write zero-knowledge proofs into Bitcoin, but the technology was not mature at the time.
• True "separation of money and state" must include privacy: If government panopticon surveillance can see through every transaction, decentralization is only half done. Privacy is the boundary where "the state stops and the individual begins."
• AI and quantum are accelerators for Zcash: AI fully exposes the public nature of Bitcoin's chain; quantum computing's Shor algorithm will threaten Bitcoin's elliptic curve signatures, while Zcash is naturally quantum-resistant because "what you cannot see, you cannot break."
• Valuation framework: anchor to Bitcoin's market cap: ZEC's market cap is about $25 billion, only 2% of Bitcoin's. If privacy value reaches 10% of Bitcoin's, that implies 5x upside, with ZEC above $5,000 per token and a path toward $10,000.
• ZEC's cycle does not follow halvings; it follows AI breakthroughs: Zcash's catalysts are technological milestones like transformers and quantum computing, not the four-year halving. Bitcoin's story has only just begun, while Zcash's story is "very early."
• The privacy war will definitely come: Governments only move in one direction, which is acquiring more power. But decentralized private money cannot be shut down unless the entire internet is shut down. The analogy is the crypto wars of the internet era: the government once treated encryption as munitions, then made a complete turn toward HTTPS.
• Rebuttal to "I have nothing to hide": Satoshi released Bitcoin anonymously, Einstein wrote the theory of relativity while working at the patent office, and academia broadly engages in self-censorship. All of this shows that privacy nourishes not only personal safety but the entire society's marketplace of ideas. Privacy should be the default; publicness should require an active choice.

II. Key Quotes

• "Privacy is where the state stops and you begin. Your individual freedom, your self-sovereignty—these boundaries are crucial."
• "Encryption is the peaceful, non-violent version of the Second Amendment."
• "If you are bullish on AI, you have to be bullish on Zcash, even if you don't realize it yet. Because the more AI accelerates, the faster your financial privacy deteriorates, and Zcash solves exactly that problem."
• "You cannot break what you cannot see."
• "Zcash did not start from zero; it stands on the shoulders of giants. It is a fork of Bitcoin—private Bitcoin, encrypted Bitcoin."
• "Bitcoin is HTTP, Web 1.0: you send your credit card information in plaintext when buying a plane ticket. Zcash is HTTPS, encrypted SSL and TLS. The government resisted encryption back then, then made a 180-degree turn and required all government websites to use HTTPS."
• "The question about the war is not 'whether it will come' but 'when it will come.' But decentralized money is nearly impossible to stop unless you shut down the internet."

III. Main Text

1. 2012: An Investment Thesis for "Digital Gold"

Maxime: You first bought Bitcoin back in 2012. What was your investment logic at the time?

Cameron & Tyler: The logic in 2012 was one sentence: digital gold. We laid out Bitcoin and gold's properties side by side and compared them item by item. On supply, gold is scarce, but its total amount is not fixed, and it is still being mined every year; Bitcoin has a hard cap of 21 million coins and will not inflate no matter how much demand there is. That category was a tie, or even favored Bitcoin.

Maxime: Besides supply, what other dimensions were there?

Cameron & Tyler: Portability. Gold bars are heavy—this is what we call the "hard problem": in theory you could go seize the Federal Reserve, but you would need trucks to load it and then figure out how to move it out of the city. Moving large amounts of gold is actually very difficult. Bitcoin is far lighter. Divisibility is also stronger with Bitcoin. We drew up a table at the time listing nine characteristics, and the conclusion was that Bitcoin comprehensively beats gold.

Maxime: So which category did Bitcoin lose on?

Cameron & Tyler: Privacy. If you hold a gold bar in your hand, no one knows except you; Bitcoin is not like that. Back then we did not attach enough importance to this point, and it is precisely the starting point for everything that followed. Also, one long-standing misunderstanding needs to be clarified: Bitcoin is often described as a tool for criminals, but it is actually a public ledger, auditable, permanently recorded—one of the least suitable places for doing bad things.

Maxime: From a technical perspective, what makes Bitcoin special?

Cameron & Tyler: It works like email; it is the first currency born for the internet. Bitcoin is actually two things: a capitalized protocol and a lowercase asset. It is completely different from wire transfers and ACH. It is internet-native, and that was our aha moment: this is "the internet of money." And money is the largest social network in history.

2. Leading Zcash's Seed Round in 2016: Financial Privacy Was Always the Norm

Maxime: Four years later you participated in Zcash's seed round. What was the investment thesis that time?

Cameron & Tyler: Exactly the same as today: financial privacy matters. And there is a counterintuitive fact: the privacy Bitcoin offers is actually worse than traditional finance. If I wire you money, no one except the bank, you, and me can see the flow of funds—far more private than an on-chain Bitcoin transaction; cash is even more private. That is the key problem Zcash is meant to solve.

Maxime: Why is privacy worth treating as a core issue?

Cameron & Tyler: Because it is a necessity for a free and open society. I believe that if zero-knowledge proof technology had been more mature at the time, Satoshi would certainly have written it into Bitcoin's original protocol. He did talk about zero-knowledge proofs, but the technology was too new and too large to fit into blocks at the time. It is like how, if an IP money protocol had already existed when the internet was born, TCP/IP would probably have come with a native payment layer.

Maxime: So you see Zcash as the unfinished part of Bitcoin?

Cameron & Tyler: The whitepaper abstract says "electronic cash," but Bitcoin is not strictly cash, because cash leaves no trace. Cash is centralized but private; Bitcoin is decentralized but public. Zcash completes the arc: decentralized and private. That is the true electronic cash, and it is also what fits the core spirit of the cypherpunks.

3. Separation of Money and State Must Include Privacy

Maxime: You often mention "separation of money and state." How does that relate to privacy?

Cameron & Tyler: Governments have a very long history of using money to manipulate the people; capital controls and hyperinflation are both tools, so separation of money and state matters. But if you only decentralize money while the government can see through every transaction with panopticon surveillance, then the separation is only half done—you have just moved into a glass house. True separation means the money is also private.

Maxime: How do you define privacy?

Cameron & Tyler: Privacy is the boundary where the state stops and you begin. Your individual freedom, your self-sovereignty—they are all built on that boundary. We can see it in property rights, and we can see it in the Fourth Amendment: the government may not unreasonably search and seize your property. It is also the difference between a citizen and a subject.

Maxime: You have a phrase linking encryption to the right to bear arms.

Cameron & Tyler: Right, encryption is the peaceful, non-violent version of the Second Amendment. In the founders' set of values, privacy, self-sovereignty, and property rights—including the boundary around your money—were all extremely important. And government power expansion only moves in one direction; it never retreats on its own. Friedman said nothing is more permanent than a "temporary" government program, so you have to stay vigilant at all times.

4. AI and Quantum Are Not Threats but Accelerators for Zcash

Maxime: With the development of AI and quantum computing, has your conviction in Zcash changed?

Cameron & Tyler: My phrasing is: they are accelerators. AI will fully expose the public nature of non-private public chains like Bitcoin, effectively installing an engine for all on-chain analytics tools.

Maxime: What about quantum? Many people think quantum is an existential disaster for crypto assets.

Cameron & Tyler: Advances in quantum will only make Bitcoin less secure, because it does not have Shor resistance. Shor is a quantum algorithm that can accelerate the breaking of RSA and elliptic curve ECDSA signatures, and Bitcoin's underlying cryptography is exactly that kind. Zcash is different; it is quantum-resistant to Shor, because what you cannot see cannot be broken. As long as you use the shielded pool—such as the pool after the Ironwood upgrade—no matter how strong AI gets, it cannot monitor that data.

Maxime: So what is your conclusion?

Cameron & Tyler: If you are bullish on AI, you have to be bullish on Zcash, even if you don't realize it yet. Because if you believe AI will keep accelerating, that means your financial privacy will keep deteriorating, and Zcash solves exactly that deterioration. I never treat Zcash as a trade; it is the other side of the AI coin. The steeper AI rises, the scarcer privacy becomes. If you want an AI hedge or a quantum hedge in crypto, that is Zcash.

5. Bitcoin's Place: Public Auditability Is Sometimes a Feature

Maxime: If Zcash exists, what place does Bitcoin still have? Some say that if Bitcoin had come after Zcash, no one would use Bitcoin.

Cameron & Tyler: In some scenarios, public verifiability and auditability are features, not bugs. There will be institutions willing to say: this is our Bitcoin address, go look at the balance, don't take our word for it, look on-chain. So when central banks or certain institutions hold assets, they may actually want that transparency. And Bitcoin will most likely not disappear; it started the whole revolution and has a track record of nearly twenty years. For many people, being able to access a fixed-supply store of value is already enough.

Maxime: Then how do the use cases divide up?

Cameron & Tyler: If you really want to use it for transactions and as cash, the path will most likely be to convert Bitcoin into Zcash, complete the transaction, and then convert back. For many people, Bitcoin's story has only just begun, while Zcash's story is very, very early.

6. Valuation Framework: What Percentage of Bitcoin's Market Cap Should ZEC Be Worth

Maxime: Where will Zcash be in five or ten years? Will it repeat Bitcoin's cycle after cycle?

Cameron & Tyler: Bitcoin's first big moment was the Cypriot bank run, when depositors with more than 100,000 euros had their deposits "haircut"—the money was simply taken. At that time many people did not hold Bitcoin, but they understood why non-government-issued decentralized money matters. Zcash will have a similar moment: some event that makes the importance of financial privacy very clear.

Maxime: Will it still be a four-year cycle?

Cameron & Tyler: I'm not sure. Zcash is more likely to be highly correlated with AI progress rather than halvings. The four-year block reward halving may be far less important than breakthroughs in AI models. In 2012, 2013, and 2014, transformers had not yet been invented; neither the AI catalyst nor the quantum catalyst existed, so it is hard to simply copy Bitcoin's chart. We are now in no man's land: over the next five years, frontier labs will spend on the order of $1 trillion on data centers, more than the commercial internet's fiber buildout, more than railroads, more than the telecom