Coins do not need the government or its approval to succeed.
If there's a demand for Zerocoin, it will succeed.
Except if a particular coin is ruled illegal because it is a security risk...it will NEVER be accepted by your neighborhood coffee shop...Overstock...or ultimately some place like Amazon.
So its "success" will be limited to the world of a "Silk Road 3".
Black market was very early adopter of Bitcoin, right? Being adopted by black market will be huge success for Zerocoin, it prove that the coin have real benefit of usage and real potential. Majority of altcoins will be dead because they have no users, no merchants and no customers, they have only investors and miners. They talk something fancy about ASIC resistant and 'cooler temperature' to trick more GPU miners come with them.
Or perhaps Darkcoin once it's made open source? (don't think it is yet...)
Darkcoin use CoinJoin method, much like Shared Coin service of Blockchain.info. We can still practice CoinJoin within Bitcoin system, therefore Darkcoin offer nothing new. CoinJoin doesn't hide your transactions completely, it just make harder to trace your money flow. With proper data mining and data analysis, your transactions might still be traced. And federal agencies have more than enough human & technology resource to do that. Zerocoin is another story, i'm excited to see what Zerocash will bring to crypto world.
But isn't darkcoin decentralised whereas blockchain.info is a centralised service that could easily be compromised? (or rather Darkcoin
will be decentralised once open sourced).
CoinJoin itself is already a decentralized mixing method. Centralized mixing services are something like Bitcoinfog, Bitmixer, Bitlaundry.