Personally never been a fan of the digital gold narrative. Bitcoin is not fungible, and that will prove to be an increasingly bigger problem over the next decade.
Bitcoin was supposed to be a "Peer to Peer electronic cash system", but now it has strayed far from that original vision. As more and more people realize they are being tracked and traced, there will be a shift towards private coins.
Zcash in particular stands out to me because of the team behind it and the underlying technology. It offers the best privacy when compared to any other coin. Also the team behind it is doing some ground breaking work for scalability that could have positive implications for many other blockchains besides Zcash. I encourage you to take a look at their recent developments with Halo, also ZK-Starks are something to keep an eye on..
Interesting to note: Hal Finney(@halfin) followed 17 twitter accounts before he passed away. One of these accounts is the @zerocoinproject which is twitter account for the Zero Coin Protocol, which is what $zec is built with.
Better privacy than what XMR offers?
When used correctly yes. It really comes down to the anonymity set. Zcash anonymity set for users is much larger than XMRs. The mixing strategies that other cryptocurrencies use for anonymity provide a rather small [anonymity set] in comparison to Zcash. Zcash has a distinct advantage in terms of transaction privacy. With ZEC the more people that use the shielded feature the stronger the shielded pool grows. So right now, not many are using the shielded feature on ZEC, but its about to change soon. With the most recent update ZEC miners are now able to mine straight into a shielded address, before we had to mine into a transparent address and transfer to shielded from there. So this will also strengthen the shielded pool eco system. The problem right now with ZEC is that most people dont know how to even access the shielded address feature, the only official wallet is on Linux. There are some others now for android such as NightHawk wallet, but would not trust it yet with large amount of ZEC. Also Ledger devices recently got an update to the ZEC app to get ready to support the Zcash Shielded address feature, so you should expect it to come to ledger live within the next few months. This will be the first time shielded address are easily accessible to the "average joe" and could make a big difference in terms of ZEC adoption. Like I said earlier, the more people that use the Zcash shielded eco system, the stronger it grows. The anonymity set for users spending with shielded coins is in fact all generated coins. Where as with XMR, its a certain number of mixins and the anonymity set is limited to that.
The developers behind Zcash are world class, and the project deserves much more attention than its getting now. Satoshi (and Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, and the other fathers of Bitcoin) tried to devise other ways to guarantee fungibility but at that time we didn't yet have the necessary cryptographic science) -- Satoshi himself spoke on Zero Knowledge Proofs a few times but at the time it was not possible to implement in Bitcoin as no one had discovered proofs efficient enough yet. Satoshi wrote that he didn't see how to use zero knowledge proofs to prove single-spend. But this was later solved by Miers, Garman, Green, Rubin. They are now working for Zcash and it launched in 2016 making crypto history in my opinion.
Quote from Satoshi:
"This is a very interesting topic. If a solution was found, a much better, easier, more convenient implementation of Bitcoin would be possible.
Originally, a coin can be just a chain of signatures. With a timestamp service, the old ones could be dropped eventually before there's too much backtrace fan-out, or coins could be kept individually or in denominations. It's the need to check for the absence of double-spends that requires global knowledge of all transactions.
The challenge is, how do you prove that no other spends exist? It seems a node must know about all transactions to be able to verify that. If it only knows the hash of the in/outpoints, it can't check the signatures to see if an outpoint has been spent before. Do you have any ideas on this?
It's hard to think of how to apply zero-knowledge-proofs in this case.
We're trying to prove the absence of something, which seems to require knowing about all and checking that the something isn't included."
Source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=770.msg9074#msg9074
Thanks for the link, will check it out.
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Did you read about the IRS offering $620k as bounty to anyone who can crack Monero and other privacy coins?
https://decrypt.co/41411/the-irs-is-offering-you-625000-to-crack-monero?amp=1
Any thoughts?
Like someone wrote on Twitter, if one could hack Monero, do you really think they would do it for $620K?
And even if it is hacked, the community would likely respond very quickly and fix whatever patches were exposed.
I am sure there are many who have been trying to hack it over the years.
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That all could be true. I wonder, @encrypt3dbr0k3r, how the ability to potentially integrate cross chain transactions could affect things. For example, if a Monero or Zcash could tie into a token like Bitcoin, then people could lose the tracking that is taking place.
Charlie Lee was supposedly trying to provide the privacy feature to Litecoin. Based upon news about it, this appears to not have gone anywhere.
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