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Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

If Zcash had privacy by default, they would have won against Monero for being the private cryptocurrency. As it stands, any private transaction on the Zcash chain stands out like a sore thumb and the use of de-anonymized transactions around it make it easy to figure out how much money was moved. It was a missed layer 8 opportunity on the part of Zcash.

This attack doesn't seem to work if you run a monero node, though.

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You'd have a bit more credibility if your complaint was more up to date :) Zcash wallets have defaulted to shielded accounts and transactions for some time already.

It took at least half a decade if not a full decade to get to the obvious place and I (and everyone else) wrote Zcash off in that time.

You said

> As it stands, any private transaction on the Zcash chain stands out like a sore thumb

Is that actually still the case or has the change to defaults made anonymity more common?

If you look at recent mined blocks, a majority of transactions are still public. So yes, even if the default is shielded wallets and private transactions for a specific wallet, most of the chain is not using them.

True, but as of this month 30% of zcash transactions are shielded, and 20-25% of addresses are private. That's a fairly large anonymity set. The percentage of shielded transactions is also increasing, at a rate that will make them a majority within a year if the trend continues.

https://www.coindesk.com/research/inside-zcash-encrypted-mon...

> and I (and everyone else) wrote Zcash off in that time

Seemingly in the ecosystem you exists in yeah, but in the world at large Zcash seems to have at least 6x the volume. I guess "everyone else" didn't get your memo. Regardless, I don't really care personally which one is better or which one you specifically use, as long as what we say is being truthful :)

Are you referring to on-exchange volume of a coin that has pumped 10x in a few months? And it's only 6x the on-exchange volume of monero? It sounds like people still don't use it. If you look at the blockchain, you will see very few transactions per block (literally less than one per minute), so it seems the volume is almost entirely on the exchanges. It's probably people speculating on privacy for some reason, combined with some dumping of the pre-mine.

The majority of the on-chain use is also public transactions, so it seems the "privacy by default" setting doesn't really matter.

I know (and many others do as well, it’s not that hidden) of the group that pumped Zcash. Very well executed pump

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