It’s all very well and good that ECC is hiring lawyers or whomever to shovel sand against the oncoming regulatory tide.
But to me it’s clear how that is going to end. Governments in pursuit of total control have spent decades wishing they could ban cash once and for all, and now they are salivating at the prospect of Central Bank Digital Currencies that will finally let them do just that. There is no way they are going to sit back and let Zcash get in the way of that goal, not when a formal corporate entity like ECC exists for them to get their hooks into.
At some point ECC is going to be strong-armed into some sort of regulatory compliance that will be at odds with the vision of financial privacy that attracted us all to Zcash. At that time it will be necessary for some new entity to step up, hoist the black flag, and explicitly oppose the whole concept of letting governments have control of cryptocurrencies.
I would love to see some signs that the Zcash community realizes this and is creating tech that is explicitly intended to defeat a hostile regulatory apparatus. Are there any nascent efforts on that front? I don’t notice any. I hope I am wrong, but my impression is that people naively think that the regulatory alligator will be content to just nibble at the edges of Zcash. In fact it wants to swallow the whole thing.