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Comment by erpellan | Hacker News Reader

What about zcash? As I understand it has much stronger privacy, but almost nobody understands it so people are skeptical. I'm surprised it doesn't get more attention.

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This isn't really true. Zcash isn't private by default, which weakens the concept for anyone who wants to use the privacy features. If not many people are using them then analysis of the transactions that are meant to be private becomes easier.

Zcash is also not trustless because it requires the trusted setup. You have to trust that the developers completely deleted the "toxic waste" during the setup, and that their machines were not compromised (which is totally possible given Meltdown, etc). Recovery of this toxic waste can lead to unlimited coin minting. Another problem with this is that future changes to some properties of the currency require another trusted setup.

Private-by-default is semi-dishonest. Many tx on Monero are owned by a few entities that are friendly with LE or may get hacked. Thus all those exchange tx or payment gateway tx that are on the blockchain are in practice transparent to the right people or with time. With Monero they give you a false sense of security with ZCash they are open that those tx are not going to help you.

[ShapeShift does 7-15% at least of Monero tx. Add in BitFinex Binance CoinPayments and some others and where we at?]

I would recommend waiting until Sapling goes live before diving whole hog into Zcash. The performance benefits with shielded transactions will make it more practical for people to opt to use z-addrs instead of t-addrs, especially on mobile devices.

https://blog.z.cash/cultivating-sapling-faster-zksnarks/

There has been similar research into tracing Zcash transactions between their transparent and shielded pool.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16687574

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