I would removed ETC from the list and add XMR and DASH. At least one of XMR and DASH seem to have a good future.
What do you think about Zcash as a replacement of the both of them? I was also focusing on acquiring XMR the last couple of weeks, but I've heard that Zcash, when delivered as promised, might be a way better alternative.
I had some enthusiasm for Zcash when it was announced, but looking deeper into it, the more I look at it, the uglier it seems. There is one brilliant idea: that is that *in principle* the anonymity set is much larger than monero IF YOU MIX.
However, in as far as I've seen, these are the main objections I'm concerned about:
- it is not grass roots, but a commercial company (with all the problems of single point of failure etc...)
- the cryptography is new, complex and difficult to understand (failures, golden keys, back doors, ... ?)
- the commercial company has a privilege of receiving the first 4 years 20% of the mining, giving them some 10% of all coins. In order to be able to do so, there must be a cryptographic hole in the system that gives them their privilege.
- there is a trusted setup done by a handful of people of which one has to hope that at least one person is 1) honest 2) uses a non-compromised system. Otherwise, there will exist a golden key from which an unlimited amount of coins can be made (and maybe much more). The incentive to be one of the people with the golden key (or the idea that this key may exist) is a road stopper to me.
But the biggest problem of all is that the anonymity is, as far as I understand, a (costly?) OPTION. That means that people using it will be suspect. Anonymity is only working if it is automatic.
That said, it is new cryptography and it introduces a new concept (like cryptonote introduced the new concept of ring signature), and that in itself is interesting.
