Zcash questions - timeline and structure

Do you have a date by which you plan to go live or is that dictated by completing more development and testing first?

When do you think I will be able to buy alpaca socks (or anything else) with Zcash?

Can Zcash be a sidechain on the bitcoin network? I know that the bitcoin core devs rejected the proposal to intergrate zerocoin features into the bitcoin protocol, but would they be compatible in another way?

I believe that some thought was put into making a sidechain compatible with Bitcoin, but it was seen to be impractical without a hardfork. I don’t know the details though.