Zerocoin offers real anonymity - which we all of a sudden really need.
Anyone have any idea if the devs will add it any time soon (or ever?)
I am not positive what you are referring to when you say "which we all of a sudden really need"?, but:
"Green has said that intent of Zerocoin is not to facilitate criminal activity, and
suggested that a back door or other features could be added to the Zerocoin protocol to allow police, as one example, to track money laundering."
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2013/03/bitcoin-zerocoin.htmlIf you are referring to the recent IRS ruling...my guess is that the government will still consider tax evasion as criminal activity.
Zerocoin's dev denied this rumor about backdoor:
In an attempt to put the issue to rest, Green claimed that a backdoor was impossible, anyway; "If someone did try to build a back door for any reason, the open source Zerocoin would quickly become Zero-adoption."
His sole purpose on Zerocoin/Zerocash project is to take anonymity of cryptocurrency to next level. Why would he do that?
Moreover, Zerocoin will be open source project, which mean anyone, any cryptographer, any software engineer can analyze its source code. If it has a backdoor, we'll know for sure.
If that is true...and I am not at all doubting that you are correct...then I suspect that Zerocoin is dead out of the box because governments WILL certainly make illegal dealing in cryptocurrencies which can be easily used to facilitate illegal activities (which means they will never have a chance of mass adoption).
I haven't followed Zerocoin very closely...but in fact I think that I recall that the developers of the protocol tried very hard to have it adopted into the Bitcoin protocol...but that it was rejected for the very reason that it was assumed that this would create significant friction with moving Bitcoin forward into more mainstream adoption (a smart decision I would say).
It was only after that time that Zercoin developers proposed to issue their own coin.