Why is Zcash not really a privacy coin?
Obviously, because privacy is optional in Zcash.
Only a small minority (0.8M of 15M ZEC) of coins lives in shielded pools, and only a small fraction of transactions is z2z.
It seems most Zcash users are not interested in its privacy features, but hope to profit from other people's interest in its privacy features.
Interesting. To be fair, layer 1 privacy upgrades for Bitcoin would always be optional or partial, too - since old UTXOs couldn't be magically 'made private' until they move, right?
But I guess depending on how it's implemented, every new UTXO
after the upgrade could be private by default, without an option to disable that.