I almost fell for Stone, watching Manta closely, and adding Azulik to the list.

Wanted to write why i think byteballs black bytes are not the best way to implement this:
1. It's peer to peer and not stored on the graph, and needs to be exchanged later.
2. To keep them 'yours', you need to either back them up or use multisig wallet to keep them synced.

Neither is ideal.

In one of the messages you mentioned 1. instant transactions OR privacy.

Privacy must be default - this is monero's approach. I concur. IN the end state, if cryptos become the default way of doing payments, not many people will enable privacy, and those that will will be under scrutiny.

Zcash does zkSNARKS but your claim is it's not easy to apply it to DAG (i am not sure, didn't think deeply, and haven't yet read the paper fully). With Zcash there are t- and z- wallets, which are kind of interesting to work with. Didn't look ideal after getting used to monero.

You mentioned privacy would reduce throughput and increae transaction time significantly, by how much?


As for practical aspects:
1. Do you expect to implement light node/wallet (this is on raiblock list) so some reuse may happen.
2. Even with zkSNARKS/etc there's still risk of leaking IP. Monero will be using Kovri for this (and they have explanation why TOR wont work), will you add this to your roadmap?
3. Distribution is still not clear, I Want to get some, either through whatever mechanism is used or through donation - can you make donation percentage allocation clear at some point soon?

Also:
How can I help? I am a SWE in one of the FANG companies with good opensource experience. I find less and less free time after working on my side project, but this looks sufficiently interesting to pause them.