Zcash

Zcash is the second most important project in the industry to me, because it's the only one with close-to-perfect privacy embedded in the core protocol...something we need for both fungibility (for dissidents) and enterprise adoption (for customer privacy). Zcash is also a canary in the coal mine and the front lines for how crypto will be regulated on a global scale. If Zcash is restricted (as is possible in Japan, Korea, etc.), then I think privacy upgrades to BTC will become all but impossible. I'm thrilled Coin Center has been a major proponent of Zcash, and that there are some smart money, well-networked investors backing the project.

I think Zcash is an interesting and valuable Bitcoin testnet. I don't expect any sustainable investment. It may replace Litecoin as BitLaundry.

I like Zcash because I think private unmediated digital cash is incredibly important for a cashless society. They have more expertise with zk-SNARKs than anyone in the space (not counting the SCIPR Lab). Worst thing about Zcash is they want to call hard forks "network upgrades."

Let's face it.

Zcash was an experiment may be way too early for the underlying technology.

No one uses $ZEC for privacy b/c it was too complicated to enable privacy at launch.

Privacy by default is the only way forward but not sure Zcash's current setup can enable.

The reality is bleeding-edge crypto is risky; the counterfeiting vulnerability is the second inflation bug that Zcash has had.

BTC has categorically worse privacy than ZEC on L1,, but the trade-off is a safer system re: total loss. Had this been exploited, it could have easily been a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars.

On BTC, an inflation bug is very likely to get caught quickly, even if exploited, because of the transparency. There might be a few days shutdown at worse: awful but survivable even in the worst case.

The path that Zcash and other next-generation blockchains (Tezos, DFINITY, etc.) have taken is to set up incentives and off-chain governance processes to align early contributors and help guide the project from infancy to adulthood. While this trades off early on with decentralization, it allows for independence, time, and resources to be committed to more intensive research questions.

ZCash has made so many major blunders it’s just a running joke at this stage, literally no chance of anyone feeling threatened except Zooko’s local grocery store.

Zcash is Bitcoin plus three enhancements:

Selective transparency
GPU mining to prevent centralization
Potentially more effective governance

. . . Zcash is the super-set of Bitcoin.

There are some nutcases out there who are worried about Zcash's trusted setup ceremony, which involved six independent sources of randomness, of which only one had to be correct for the setup to succeed.

The Zcash company is actively pushing to make it easier for everyone - users and exchanges - to adopt shielded txs!

There is a bug in Zcash where you can ask a node to relay a malformed transaction. It will get rejected but nodes that own or have view keys of shielded address throw an exception and react differently, which you can see. So you can use it to find out which node owns a zaddr coin

If I was doing anything seriously privacy-demanding, I'd probably go for Zcash first.

I am excited to see how zero knowledge cryptocurrencies like Zcash interact with the extant regulatory landscape. I think it’s important to remember that these techniques provide privacy that (IMO) is a *requirement* for a *business* use case..... With zero-knowledge proofs, privacy and transparency are very much compatible. You can prove properties of transaction flows in zero knowledge.

A lot of people wonder why I like Zcash despite the Founder's Reward. Here's a reason: that tax funds a quality team that catches and kills serious bugs in-house before they get exploited. Some other projects learn about bugs like this only AFTER people have lost money.

I own no Zcash because there's barely any shielded wallet support at the moment :(
It seems pointless to use it for transparent transactions.