Financial privacy is the privacy of information about the balances, transactions, loans and anything related to a person's financial information. It is taught to keep this information private, for example, you are told never to share your bank statements, utility bills, loan documents and contracts off of social media.

However, while this principle is repeated to us, it is not treated with the same respect on the corporate level as information is shared quite freely among businesses and organizations.While privacy laws do exist such as the “Financial Modernization Act of 1999” which protects consumer information according to the FDIC. Unfortunately, these laws and regulations are not properly enforced as information of a person's transactions can be shared easily through loopholes in existing financial privacy laws through the use of agreements with third parties, affiliated companies, and service providers.

A solution to the current loopholes in the financial privacy regulations can be found in decentralized blockchain technology which can be characterized as a decentralized immutable ledger. Specifically in the Zerocoin protocol and its implementation Zcoin. Zcoin exists in two states, as the fungible asset can be held as either a regular unminted or minted coin. The unminted coin exists at the same level as Bitcoin with each transactions being traceable in a public blockchain. The other state is minted where each transaction is anonymous using RSA 2048 encryption and a method of anonymizing transactions using zero-knowledge proofs.

While many other privacy solutions exist, Zcoin stands out in that the currency is not only anonymous but scalable. It is also heavily developed upon and includes an audit giving the total of coins in existence, preventing attacks such as a double spend attack where someone spends the same coin twice or having someone create unlimited coins and go unnoticed.

If you are interested in the Zerocoin protocol or its implementation Zcoin I would recommend checking out their getting started video on the Zcoin website here.