ZCash Will Be a Truly Anonymous Blockchain-Based Currency

* The founder is Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn, creator of Zooko's triangle, the BLAKE2 hash function, Tahoe-LAFS, and former employee at MojoNation (an early attempt at cryptocurrency/P2P filesharing where another employee, Beam Cohen, went on to create Bittorrent). He knows a thing or two about decentralization/P2P.

* This project is NOT a trivial Bitcoin clone with only a new proof-of-work swapped in. The Zero Knowledge Proofs they use to keep transactions private is state of the art crypto. Also their PoW is actually memory-hard (many currencies have used PoW functions which they thought would be memory-hard and ASIC-proof, such as Litecoin with Scrypt, but it turned out not to be the case).

* Their "Founders Reward" is less like a premine and more like startup vested equity (it pays out to them gradually over 4 years to incentive themselves not to pump and dump).

* The team is extremely helpful in the Zcash Slack and are a relief after dealing with the pedantic, difficult Bitcoin developers.

I agree that it is very important for people to be able to conduct financial transactions without having to disclose them to third parties. It's also important for people to be able to use a mutually-agreed-upon trusted third party to mediate transactions where neither party knows the other's identity. But I'm much less convinced of the wisdom of enabling people to conduct financial transactions with no possibility of knowing who they are doing business with. That seems to me to be fraught with all manner of moral hazard.

Some advantages Cryptonote has that come to mind:

- They are private by default. Zcash requires two states, a state analogous to bitcoin, and the anonymous zcash state which has to be explicitely opted into. Shadowcash also has this, but opted for ring signatures for the anonymous state (like cryptonote coins use by default) instead of the zkSNARKs. The market hasn't focused much attention on Shadowcash.

- Cryptonote projects have proof of work algorithms that are durable and so far ASIC-proof. Cryptonite, Wild Keccak still are CPU and GPU friendly. But I'd have to read their respective papers before I say "ASIC Proof because memory hard"

- Cryptonote are also auditable if a user wants to reveal information about a transaction. But even then the information is limited, it will show that payments came in and out of specific amounts, but it won't show the sending/receiving address along with those transaction IDs.

- Cryptonote projects have nonthreatening names. Many privacy centric projects have names like Dark- Shadow- Anon- whereas noteworthy cryptonote projects have names that at worst simply wouldn't be taken seriously by a "powerful establishment" until so much capital and infrastructure is already built. I think ZCash or "Zerocash" isn't going to get smiles and congratulations from FinCEN. Hyperbole, but I don't think it is an advantage for the project.

Its one thing to be optimistic about the founders and their company, but for you to say "long" something that doesn't seem like a better investment, makes me wonder what you see in comparison to some other existing technologies.

Looking forward to your thoughts

all of those things improve the resilience of the implementations

exactly as the original white paper suggested