Privacy was one of the key points mentioned in Nakamoto's Bitcoin whitepaper,
and one of the selling points of Bitcoin in its early stages. In hindsight,
however, de-anonymising Bitcoin users turned out to be more feasible than
expected. Since then, privacy focused cryptocurrencies such as Zcash and Monero
have surfaced. Both of these examples cannot be described as fully successful
in their aims, as recent research has shown. Incentives are integral to the
security of cryptocurrencies, so it is interesting to investigate whether they
could also be aligned with privacy goals. A lack of privacy often results from
low user counts, resulting in low anonymity sets. Could users be incentivised
to use the privacy preserving implementations of the systems they use? Not only
is Zcash much less used than Bitcoin (which it forked from), but most Zcash
transactions are simply transparent transactions, rather than the (at least
intended to be) privacy-preserving shielded transactions. This paper and poster
briefly discusses how incentives could be incorporated into systems like
cryptocurrencies with the aim of achieving privacy goals. We take Zcash as
example, but the ideas discussed could apply to other privacy-focused
cryptocurrencies. This work was presented as a poster at OPERANDI 2018, the
poster can be found within this short document