What are the designs?
Zerocash (the improvement on Zerocoin) for one where even the payer, payee, and amount of every transaction is blinded on the block chain (the entire block chain is a fog) which is to be announced with great fanfare at Oakland crypto conference May 18. My guess is the open source code is likely not be production ready then.
However, I don't like Zerocash for these reasons:
Zerocash has other weaknesses which I think are unacceptable, e.g. if the setup was hacked you have no way to know if the coin suppy is being increased more than allowed and thus the money supply is always unknown and the 9ms (111 transactions per second) verification speed per i7 core means it might not scale well for micro payments. One thousand i7 cpu cores would be required to process 100,000 transactions per second, not including denial-of-service attacks transaction spam. That would probably force centralization of mining.
I've seen another design which has similar anonymity on the block chain which doesn't have the above weaknesses. It might even already be implemented (studying the code as we speak).
I am not encouraging anyone to think the
BTC price is going much lower. That is not my point.
For me the sign that something was out-of-whack on the expectations was when I saw Goats making plans to run the world. I realized reality had been transformed into fantasy. I don't say that to ridicule anyone, but really I don't believe radical change can come from a small group of masterminds who don't actually program daily. The future is really high tech driven. The future is not just about ideas, but also and perhaps mostly importantly about many minute technical details and implementation.