Public blockchains create a privacy problem. Paying from a visible address can expose its balance, previous transactions and links to other addresses. A shielded Zcash payment hides the sender, recipient and amount from the public record, allowing a customer to pay without handing the merchant or anyone watching the blockchain a searchable trail into their finances.
Zcash block times
Blocks are batches of transactions that miners add to a blockchain, and a payment receives its first confirmation when it appears in one. Cutting Zcash’s target block time would let an exchange or bridge that waits for a fixed number of confirmations release ZEC in about one-third the time.
At a shop counter, it would still be slower than tapping a card, but the shorter wait makes a direct private payment more practical, in the view of Zcash’s developers.
Producing three times as many blocks would not create three times as much ZEC, however. The
