The Chief Executive Officer of Zcash, Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn, has argued Bitcoin enthusiasts should not feel overconfident about the ability of Bitcoin to create meaningful changes in the global socioeconomic environment.

Before taking over Zcash as CEO, he has been an activist advocating the widespread use of strong cryptography and Privacy-enhancing technologies as a route to social and political change.

Being active as a Cypherpunk for around two decades, Zooko is one of the most respected members of the movement.

“I’ve worked on so many things [i.e. DigiCash] where we thought we were so special that we couldn’t lose. It’s never enough. We can always lose,” he told Epicenter Bitcoin in a recent interview.

During his involvement in the Cypherpunk movement, he has observed a lot of good projects that had the potential of changing global finance, but most of those ideas have died in vain after a few years.

“I really feel that there’s a thing that my community has made a mistake over and over, from what I’ve seen for two decades now, which is a feeling of inevitable success based on some argument — like you have a special feature that nobody else has,” he noted.

Zooko also cited the failure of DigiCash, which he initially thought would be the “only game in town” back in 1990s.

As users were more privacy concerned, he assumed that nobody willfully enter their card number in a browser to make online purchases. However, he admitted that he was wrong.

He warned the Bitcoin community that having a killer feature never guarantee that common users will start using it.

He reminded that while a strong data encryption technology like PGP have been around for a long time, people still prefer to use services like Gmail that read user emails to match advertisements.

Zooko concluded that while “[Bitcoin is a] inspiring vision,” “it’s not sufficient.” “We have to try hard to get there, and we might fail, but hopefully we won’t,” he said.

While Bitcoin gains a lot of popularity over the last few years, regular users still prefer traditional banks and plastic cards over using Bitcoin, because it requires a certain level of technical knowhow to conduct transactions with Bitcoin.