: "I like to map out digital currencies in terms of three properties: trustlessness, privacy, and verifiability. Bitcoin goes hard on trustlessness and verifiability. No other kind of money known to mankind is more easily or perfectly verifiable. Nothing except commodity money like gold is as trustless as bitcoin. On these two metrics, there is literally no comparison. But because of the nature of the blockchain, bitcoin has terrible privacy properties.

Anyone in the world can use a blockchain explorer and trace the flow of money. Once the owner of a bitcoin address is doxxed its entire transaction history and future can be monitored unless the owner takes active measures to regain their privacy such as coinjoins, coin swaps, or other privacy techniques. This was the tradeoff made by Satoshi Nakamoto that makes bitcoin possible.

Ecash, on the other hand, slides the slider all the way away from trustlessness to privacy. Cypherpunks are working to make mints fully verifiable using a protocol called Proof of Liabilities (currently under development). Thanks to the cryptographic magic of blind signatures, ecash has theoretically perfect privacy. Unlike bitcoin, ecash has no transaction graph so even the mint cannot correlate payments between users."