How can ZCash be superior to Monero?

General
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To my current knowledge ZCash and Monero are the to best and most well-known Cryptocurrencies in terms of real privacy currently.

According to the Monero website they are going to be the winner of this battle (Why Monero is Better than Dash, Zcash, Zcoin (Even with Lelantus), Grin and Bitcoin Mixers Like Wasabi (Updated May 2020) — LocalMonero). I mean of course there may be co-existence, but after some time most probably one of them will be way more accepted than the other.

The Monero community states the following weaknesses of ZCash (this is opinionated but …):

  1. Privacy: Most transactions are “public”.

I guess this is not a problem as long as you have the choice.

  1. Traceability: There is a backdoor in ZCash which enables traceability.

Do you think this is true?

  1. Fungible: There is a way to “blacklist” coins in ZCash.

Do you think this is true?

  1. Decentralized: ZCash is a company and required a trusted setup therefore no, it is not.

Most probably it is decrentralized according to the information I have got so far.

So imagine the following case study (this is totally fictious):

A friend of mine lives in Fantasycountry. Fantasycountry is very restrictive and has forbidden its citizens to transfer any money out of Fantasycountry. Not physically, not via bank transfer and not via cryptocurrencies.

My friend has 10000 cash which he wants to transfer out of Fantasycountry in October 2018. However as he heard that the value of cryptocurrencies is likely to rise within the next year, he wants to invest instantly and is hoping that the value of the Altcoin he is choosing will be 20000 one year from now.

My friend has met two Traders in his country:

Trader 1 is offering to take the 10000 $ and send the equal value in Monero Coins through the Tor network to the private wallet (trusted exit node) of my friend. One year ahead he can send the money out of the country via the Tor network to his other friend in Utopialand.

Trader 2 is offering to take the 10000 $ and send the equal value in ZCash Coins through the Tor network to the private wallet (trusted exit node) of my friend (private address). One year ahead he can send the money out of the country via Tor network and private address to his other friend in Utopialand.

Trader 1 already has brought up his arguments for Monero. How and/or using which arguments could Trader 2 convince my friend to invest in ZCash instead of investing in Monero? And which of both currencies would be less of a risk for him in terms of privacy?

2

The Monero community has more than its fair share of toxic people. This is not helped at all by the character of the lead developer. I suspect that whatever FUD they’re spinning now is just leftover butthurt from this - https://monerolink.com/

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I join topicstarter in willingness of seeing feedback from ZEC guru on this subject.
replies are appreciated as I was diiging into undestranding which one is better and found only that comparison table at monero site (which looks a bit biased for me).

4

There are people much more qualified than me to respond to this thread, but I will reply to one point… the first one, privacy. Most transactions are public because people have the option to do so, you can make either public or private transations using zcash.

When the developers will optimize the shielded transactions (for them to require less RAM) then you will see much more private transactions.

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5

Zcash is good…
But buy at super cheap …
Below $100 would be fine…

6

Written for your questions:

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Very well written article… thank you…