You do know that ZeroCoin is a protocol change to *coin?
It's not designed to be it's own crypto- currency unless the dev team has run out of patience with it being adopted and decided to fork.
From the github page:
Zerocoin: C++ lib for anonymous extension to bitcoin
They stated that they intended it to be its own coin now - zerocash, iirc. Of course it could be rolled into *coin later.
I also saw that their next paper update should be available shortly (end of Feb, supposedly, from their twitter account).
:-)
You are correct. I've just read the article:
Dr Green says that he and his colleagues were unable to gain enough support from the Bitcoin community to allow Zerocoin to operate within the ecosystem. This led them a few weeks ago to create a plan to launch a full-fledged alternative currency. The Zerocoin system will be based on the open-source Bitcoin software code, and will allow both zero-knowledge coins and Bitcoin-style public/private key coins to co-exist.
So they are forking due to lack of interest by Bitcoin.
So do I think that ZeroCoin can replace Bitcoin? No. But they will definitely swallow up SilkRoad like transactions which is good for Bitcoin.