I really don't think so.  I think this was mostly nothing else but orchestrated market manipulation.  Look at the market cap, and look at the initial investment.  Of course, here and there, there may have been a silly person having bought a fraction of a ZEC for a crazy price, but I think this has been mainly people buying their own coins to prop up the market.

I'm a hard-core libertarian, but this is kind of ridiculous, honestly.   The ZCASH code is open source, the technology is published, and we all know the "troyan horse": the trusted setup.  ZCASH will not overtake bitcoin, and bitcoin will, whenever it starts to get big enough to interest global finance, be manipulated like gold is, simply because TPTB can print as much fiat as they want, and use that to buy and sell bitcoin (and other altcoins).   Given the "sound money" doctrine that bitcoin adheres to (finite supply), this makes this manipulation much easier for TPTB.  Their central banks can buy as much bitcoin as they want (with their own printed fiat), driving the prices to heaven and making people give up a lot of goods and services to obtain the few bitcoin that are not in the vaults of central banks ; when people have spend a lot of goods and services on it, central banks can dump bitcoin on them, buying all those precious goods and services for whoever is with the central banks (like states and big financial institutes), getting back the fiat that they printed.  To start a new cycle.
If you master the fiat emission, you can manipulate the course of every other collectible.  That's what is done with gold and (to a lesser extend) silver, and that's what will happen to bitcoin and other crypto too, if it starts getting worth while.

There's no need to intervene in the protocol or using back doors.  Fiat can manipulate crypto as much as they want, and the funny thing is that bitcoin enthusiasts will be dancing of joy if central banks start "accepting" bitcoin, not realizing that this is exactly how it will get manipulated.

No collectible can resist manipulation by a fiat-printing entity.

This is why a multitude of altcoins is in fact the best protection against that.  If people start hopping from coin to coin, and if new coins are regularly invented, then this kind of manipulation doesn't work, because there is then an elasticity in the money market which compensates the manipulation technique.  If a central bank has accumulated a lot of bitcoin, and then people leave bitcoin for what it is, and start using another coin, then the central bank's manipulation has failed, and is now a bag holder of a coin that nobody wants any more.

I don't know why people say so.  Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency, and yes, because of its mysterious creator that has disappeared (and is maybe dead by now), and because it was the first of which nobody could know that it would ever take on some value, it has the great advantage of being mostly free of the suspicion of "designed to rip you off".  So yes, bitcoin is probably the sole crypto currency of which there is no suspicion of scam (if the Satoshi addresses are never used).  Also, because the crypto scene is still young, bitcoin being the oldest, it also has the highest market cap, and the biggest quantity of proof of work.

But on the other hand, bitcoin being the first crypto, it has the worst technology.  It failed *miserably* at being distributed concerning mining (because of the naive PoW scheme and the ASICS with their entrance threshold and their economies of scale), and it also failed concerning privacy.  It has a terrible emission scheme, with halving shocks.  It has too long block times.  And it has other problems with its finite supply, its hard block size limit.  In other words, bitcoin is a very very well succeeded prototype.  It did get amazingly many things right from the start, but it also ran into problems which have found solutions in altcoins.

What is great about bitcoin is its distribution, exactly because of the "no initial scam" suspicion.  But what's bad about it are several technical and economical aspects, which are however now part of the "frozen-in consensus".

I think that the main problem with altcoins is not so much their often improved technology (on the contrary) but the fact that they *start anew*.  I think that a successful alt coin shouldn't start with a new genesis block, a new emission scheme, and hence (now) a suspicion of scam and get rich scheme by the devs/investors, but should be a FORK of bitcoin, where the current bitcoin distribution is taken as the initial coin distribution of the new coin.

There wouldn't be any suspicion of "initial scam" in such an approach.

Apparently the rate of anon transactions over total transactions is more or less constant:

180 pages on 2767 have shielded values which is 6.5%.

Namecoin and primecoin *were* good ideas.  But the sad truth is that they would only rise above a joke like dogecoin if crypto were actually USED.  It almost isn't.  Crypto is an "investers" (gamblers) business mainly, and is not something that is actually used much.  The actual use market cap of crypto is a tiny fraction of the market cap made by demand for "investing".
By use, I mean: use as currency (to buy stuff with and to sell stuff with) ; use as a genuine smart contract (to make deals with, other than deals about crypto itself) ; use as a store of value in the long term (without hoping for price rise) ; and indeed, block chain use of immutable ledgers, like name systems, and using PoW to do sensible work instead of heating up ASICS with mindless hash calculations.  Anon coins the same.  They are very important to privacy *if you do a lot of real transactions with them*.  But anon coins are useless if they are just, like the rest of crypto, mainly betting tokens on exchanges.

You could compare it to, say, cars.  If cars are actually used to travel, then the market will select those car producers that make good working, comfortable cars at decent prices.  But if cars are only used to speculate on, and to show off in one's garage, without ever having to drive somewhere, then shitty cars can take over the market from good running cars, if they have a better buzz behind them.  People putting a lot of work in good working engines will then never be rewarded as compared to people hyping nice looking, but totally bogus cars with engines that overheat if they go over 50 km/h, because almost nobody is actually driving them.

Crypto is essentially a car market where people speculate on cars, and very rarely use them to drive somewhere.  They still take the bus or the train for that.  But they speculate a lot about how they potentially COULD drive cars.

amen.

No, that's backward.  The cost of production of something doesn't determine its value.  If I dig deep holes in the morning, and fill them up in the afternoon, and spend $10 000,- on that, then these filled holes aren't worth $ 10 000,-.

With mining, normally, the cost of mining is the dependent variable as miners join (and increase difficulty, and hence cost of mining) as long as it is profitable, which depends on the price of the currency (and the amount of block reward).  So the cost of mining is a consequence of the market value, and not the other way around.

If tomorrow, and for the years to come, bitcoin's price would fall to $10,-, then the mining costs will also drop by a factor of 70, and the difficulty will go down accordingly.

2.5 years in fact:

18 april 2014

https://minergate.com/blockchain/xmr/block/1

Well, look at this:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1667138.0

The level of anonymity in ZCASH is, unfortunotely, not very high.  It could *potentially* be very high, but because of the fact that ZCASH is not enforcing anonymity, and people are not using it much in "anonymous mode", the ACTUAL anonymity set offered by ZCASH (namely, those people using the anonymous mode) is pretty small.

For the moment, monero is by far more anonymous in practice than ZCASH.   This is because even though the *initial* anonymity set of monero is relatively small, it grows over time, and monero has already a significant user base which ultimately is the anonymity set.

ZCASH uses better anonymity crypto (in principle), namely ZK proofs, but fucks it up by not imposing it on everybody all the time.

Monero uses ring signatures, which start out with a small anonymity set (but drawn from a much larger pool) and increases this set over time (each time your address is drawn for another transaction somewhere).

This (together with the bungled (to be) trusted setup) is my main problem with ZCASH: the fact that anonymity is an option, which is actually hard to put in place.  That said, this is probably due to the fact that the computation of an anonymous transaction is very computation-heavy (takes minutes on a high-end laptop).

It is why, at the moment, I still largely prefer monero as the reference in anon coins.  ZCASH should, as you say, have been compulsory anonymous.

But most crypto is not about using crypto in any case, but just about having betting tokens on exchanges.  I already said that a few times, but for most crypto  "usage", one doesn't even need a block chain, but just an IOU on an exchange.  Poloniex could invent non-existing coins, and have them traded without devs or block chains, just accounts of IOU on the exchange. 

And how does one check that ?

Because if I'm looking at

https://explorer.zcha.in/transactions

then in "shielded" there's mostly nothing.  At 20%, I should on average see one in five transactions with a shielded amount.

EDIT: in fact, if you look at the shielded values, at this point, I see 107 pages of the 1841 or something having shielded values, of which many are ridiculously small.  This puts us rather at about 6% of transactions, and very small amounts.

You can see that on the block explorer by ordering the transactions according to shielded value.

(BTW, I don't understand how one can DISPLAY the so-called "shielded value" of a transaction without telling us how much it is.... but I must be misunderstanding something here).

I'm going to bump this.  Anyone knows how to find out (website ?) ?

Indeed, I call this post-premine.  It is something I think that ZCASH has invented.

The coindesk article about ZCASH says that ZCASH has brought the age of anonymity to block chain (which is a joke: anonymity is considered by several altcoins, and even as proposals on bitcoin, for several years - zerocoin being one of them, as the ZCASH people should know!).

But the true invention of ZCASH has been this post-premine.  Which, as the OP so rightly points out, is nothing else but a genuine premine, but only to be materialized later.  It is for sure a brilliant move to create the illusion of fairness and of scarcity of the coin as we can see with the crazy prices.  If there had been a premine of 2 million ZEC locked up in the investor's paper wallets, nobody would have paid 3000 BTC for a ZEC.

When you look at the post-premine, the initial slow emission rate (mining reward) and the sponsored hype, then it really looks like this coin has been designed for maximum dump profit: a very high initial (scarce) price which sets the belief of high price, and then when the mining rewards start to accumulate in the post-premine, the possibility to dump at very high rewards before the market realizes it and settles for a much, much lower price in agreement with offer.

Very true.  Every monetary asset (that is, a collectible that has no other function than to be acquired against value, to be left later against value) is an infinitely recursive belief system: you accept it (against value you hand over) because you believe that Joe will accept it from you (you obtaining value from Joe) ; and you believe that, because you believe that Joe will believe that Jack will accept it, who believes it because Mary will accept it etc...

So all value a monetary asset has, is pure belief, because by definition, the monetary asset itself has no or almost no intrinsic value (that is, without it being able to be exchanged against something else, you cannot obtain much satisfaction from it: you cannot eat it, you cannot fuck it, you cannot enjoy it, you cannot use it to produce goods or services: you can ONLY trade it for something else).  Not all collectibles are totally devoid of intrinsic value: gold is shiny and you can make jewels of it, and it has some technological use ; paintings can be nice to decorate your house with, ...

But fiat (apart from burning in the stove as a fuel) is almost intrinsically worthless, and crypto (apart from serving as an immutable ledger) is also almost intrinsically worthless.   Which doesn't mean that it cannot have high monetary (belief) value.

The monetary belief value exists, because the function of *store of value* (in the short term: currency, in the long term: savings) is economically very useful.  There is globally (and locally) a certain demand for store of value, which can be variable according to circumstances.  People want to store a certain amount of value for a certain period at a given time and location. The actual market value a monetary asset will obtain, will be given by how much will be its market share in this market of demand for store of value.  If you want to store the value of a car for say, 6 months, you have several options to do so: you can use fiat, stock, paintings, bitcoin, altcoins, gold, ....
The different monetary assets will have market prices according to how much value is to be stored, and what share of that stored value has been elected to be in said monetary asset.

Unfortunately, monetary assets also attract another kind of value, which is what I call 'greater fool theory'.  The idea there is not to "put aside value for later" (the economic demand for store of value between two trading acts), but rather to hope for the increase in market value of a given store of value.  That's speculation.  Speculation becomes problematic if it becomes the main demand for a monetary asset, and hence if it determines the price of that asset, instead of "surfing on the legit demand for it economically wise".  If the price of a monetary asset is principally determined by expectations of higher price, then we are in the typical black tulip style of speculative bubble.  My idea is that bitcoin and most altcoins are mainly suffering from that.   
 

I have the impression, looking at the chain explorer, that ZCASH is not being used as an anonymous coin.  Most transactions if not all are "standard bitcoin style" transactions, with open sender and receiver, and amount.

Suppose that I want to use ZCASH to be anonymous, am I then the only member of the "perfect" anonymity set of ZCASH ?

How to find out somewhere how much of ZCASH is in notes ?

I'm almost sure that that "buyer" was also the "seller", and just bought his own ZEC with his own BTC, to make a buzz.

At 3000 BTC/ZEC, the temptation not to throw away that key must be tremendous !

Don't you think they bought from themselves ?  If I would have mined 3 ZEC, and I would have owned 10 000 BTC, I wouldn't mind paying 3000 btc/ZEC to myself to obtain my own 3 ZEC.  I would have to pay a big fee to poloniex, but in the mean time, I make the news and I set a very high price for ZEC, which, even if it cools down a 1000-fold, is way, way higher (3 BTC for a ZEC !) than what could have been obtained with a real market.

What moron would have paid FOR REAL 3000 btc for an altcoin that was projected to start out at $15 or so ?

Indeed, it is hopeless.  Satoshi created a free money (free as in freedom, not as in beer) in order to get rid of the corrupt financial world, and 7 years later, the ecosystem is worse than what classical finance ever did. 

That said, the amount of ridicule with ZCASH is indeed so high that it kills itself.  This is people selling the few officially existing coins to themselves at ridiculous prices.  As I didn't see the happening of the "to be trusted setup", I think that the amount of non-officially existing ZEC will be way way higher than announced...  I'm sure that at a few thousand bitcoin a ZEC, the temptation not to throw away the golden key that can make a lot of them must be tremendous...