I look forward to being able to mine for Zcash. I like the egalitarian approach to the PoW that I hope will help it remain well distributed, but I expect that with my 1 PC I will not be able to mine many coins so I was thinking: When people’s need for the coins is greater than their ability to mine, they will need to use an exchange, so how will those exchanges requirements to comply with Anti Money Laundering regulations and Know Your Customer requirements affect Zcash’s intended anonymity?
That will depend on the exchange operators, but note that even if exchanges are not anonymous, you are still able to make transactions that are not correlated with those exchanges.
To avoid leaking connection-level metadata, you can connect your node to the network over Tor. We are likely to add some measure of integration to make that easier (after 1.0), but you can already do it in the same way as Bitcoin if you know how to set up Tor. This is complementary to the payment-layer anonymity, and protects against attackers with different capabilities.
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maybe Bitsquare would be an option.
I strongly suspect that shapeshift.io will pick up zcash early on. If that’s the case then you can just access shapeshift.io via Tor and swap out your btc for (transparent) zcash anonymously.
Then send your transparent zcash to a protected address.
Then send your protected zcash to a second protected address.
At that point any adversary following your original (btc) funds will find that the trail has gone cold. Even if the adversary were working together with shaeshift.io, and even if they had all the computing power available to mankind, they would not be able to follow the funds.
You still have to mind the usual OpSec advice, but as far as coin analytics goes this is the gold standard. There is no “N-1” attack with zcash like there is with CoinJoin.
Bitsquare breathes the same spirit: