In Bitcoinland, we have a motto: Not your keys, not your coins. Multiply and exponentiate that for a privacy coin! I would file “trust me” hosted Zcash wallets in the same product category as pre-perforated condoms, fishnet parachutes, and the Emperor’s New Clothes.
Calling a normal wallet “unhosted” is like calling a living person “undead”. It is nonsensically twisted, backwards, upside-down, inside-out thinking about a natural, normal, and desirable state of affairs.
“Self-custody” is less offensive; and thinking about it now, I realize I have taken to using it sometimes. It is descriptive, factually accurate, and to my mind, a positive: It stands in contradistinction to custodial services, i.e. abnormal and unwise usage of cryptocurrency.
But now that you mention it, @zlawyer—good point. You may be right. Do you have any better suggestions, for communicating with people who do not understand the concept of a normal, ordinary crypto-wallet? Language is, after all, for the purpose of communications; and I would not want to self-marginalize with some sort of cypherpunk political correctness that obstructs communications rather than improving them.
^^^ This.
An aside on Realpolitik—
Excluding the types of people who become privacy activists, Zcash early adopters, and die-hard Snowden fans, businesses generally care much more about privacy than individuals. Money talks. Commercial espionage is a thing. Sensitive financials leak inside info to competitors. The transparent blockchain is actually a major deterrent to business adoption of Bitcoin; some Bitcoiners are painfully aware of this. (IIUC, this was one of the major reasons that pushed Maxwell to invent CT, which is used in a B2B sidechain product from Blockstream.) Insofar as I can see, I infer that much of the Ethereum Foundation’s interest in ZKP seems to be motivated by a similar understanding. (Even moreso with Solana, a business-savvy chain now getting ZK tokens.)
I have been intending to write a separate post about how Zcash could improve its messaging to hit a broader range of privacy use-cases—P2P, B2C, and B2B; a major part of my focus is on business use, where I think that Zcash has missed some huge opportunities thus far. Ideas that I hope will interest ECC, @joshs. TBD.
Here, suffice it to note that in the U.S., businesses have more political weight than individuals. If it comes down to a fight between surveillance-capitalism businesses, versus businesses that want to enjoy the benefits of “blockchain” without leaking all their financials to competitors—well, at least we will have a fighting chance!