TPTB's premise is that IP addresses and other metadata are being spied on. You can't transact in basecoins, even just to move from one mixer to another, without encountering that exposure.
My point is (especially for corporations) all their proprietary data privacy is done in zerocoins and then balances combined into basecoins to cash out of the mixer, which doesn't reveal anything but the agggregate value of the private data that is in the zerocoins. That is a distinct and epic advantage over Cryptonote/RingCT.
Now you're on to this corporate blockchain thing which is probably okay if you are looking for a short term payoff (but you better hurry, as that iron is hot right now).
However, it is largely irrelevant to the question of decentralized cryptocurrency and certainly to Zcash, the cryptocurrency that is being launched (though maybe not the company launching it, as they could potentially get some business building blockchain applications for businesses, as Blockstream an others seem to be doing).
Yeah exactly what I am thinking. They should realize who will butter their bread and it won't be us unless they understand the speculator market which they seem to not understand based on the 11% "premine". Frankly, if they were very astute, they'd do both and move their investor's investment to the corporation and copy/partner with Blockstream, and then launch a fair mined or ICO Zcash to our speculator markets.
As for longer-term user-level privacy markets (after the 2017 - 2032 totalitarianism that will fuck up everything first), that is much too far out for me to work on (I will be age ~70 by then). I've instead chosen to work in the area of combining crypto currency with social networking and go for large scale user adoption which my historic forte.
I wouldn't be a good asset for Zcash, because although I could bring some more pragmatic marketing and business acumen to those math/hacker nerds, and I think I may have better block chain tech than Blockstream (at least for the moment afaik and in some facets), Blockstream has the inertia/reputation with the corporates. So Zcash should go that direction (and Maxwell, Poelstra, Shen-noether have been very condescending to me). Maybe one day in future I can afford to hire a cryptographer who understands zk-snarks fully. I am getting too old to go back to school to study more math courses (I was getting back into it in my mid-40s when my daughter started to show acumen for math, but then suddenly I got so ill and my ex yanked my kids from me any way). I have to make my major career move and try to make my big impact on society now with the skills I have. And my greatest forte is in combining programming, marketing, and user interface design.
When you see the names and concepts I have and am implementing, I am confident there will be many here who realize they made an entirely inaccurate appraisal of my capabilities.
As for you giving me career and financial advice, I'll not comment beyond this non-comment comment.
Apologies (for public statement) I just don't understand and thus it comes across to me as stubbornness or myopia. I guess you are doing it for the love of having your own project, not for any other rational reason. If you want to tell me in private, I can make a promise not to use it against you. If not, fine.
I mean I know (according to you) your opportunity cost. Perhaps one of the differences is afaik you've worked in finance (presumably closed away from the end users) so this is breath of fresh air for you to work with a wider community. Whereas my entire career I was B2C focused and thus always got stroked by the end users.
But you see I want 10 million end users, not just a 100 - 1000 speculators. And I want them to talk about the features they want and love, not about exchanges, shorting, etc..
Different interests perhaps...
Anyway, if you[readers, not TPTB necessarily] want to build other applications based on the technology behind Zcash (the OP asked this), you can ignore Zcash (which is otherwise a rather uninteresting Bitcoin fork) and focus on libsnark.
Yep.
Edit: but there is no way your Aeon nor Monero can achieve the user adoption level I will achieve. Not even within orders-of-magnitude. So as for applying zk-snarks to the user markets, the one with more marketshare will be in the driver's seat. Open source is not typically a product. Those who market products (e.g. Android which is Linux) are in the driver's seat.
Edit#2 (after some hours of sleep): one retort to my prior edit is that there will be products built on top of Monero/Aeon (and perhaps Cryptonote/RingCT coins in general including BBR) such as perhaps (if someone markets a end user product employing) the OpenBaazar fork which drive popular adoption. The fundamental chicken-and-the-egg dilemma of currency is that until the masses have the currency, they can't spend the currency. And if you just airdrop them currency, then they just dump it to speculators if there is no ecosystem that incentivizes them to use the currency as a recycling unit-of-exchange. This is one reason I encouraged the OpenBaazar fork to be currency agnostic even while adding XMR support. Because it is unpredictable which crypto currency will attain a widespread ecosystem. Even Bitcoin is not used by females and general demographics and is rather a young white male Libertarian technonerd demographic. To attain these economies-of-scale and ecosystem across all demographics requires an ecosystem that interests all those demographics. Given what I know about those who are creating altcoins, afaics none of them have the experience and focus to achieve a widespread demographics ecosystem.