Quote from: gmaxwell on July 22, 2014, 07:38:20 AM

Quote from: ABISprotocol on July 22, 2014, 07:33:50 AM

The short answer is that anonymity as an eventual optional feature (e.g. something you could select for some transactions and choose not to use for others) appears to be favored by developers rather than the idea of mandatory application (which would apply anonymity to every transaction).

I'm not sure what developers you're talking about but anonymity loves company. Good privacy should be a default, if it can't be then it's probably to inefficient to give much improvement. Infrequently used privacy systems which are detectable risk raising suspicion and censorship for there mere use. (One of the attractions of CoinJoin and CoinSwap is that they're potentially indistinguishable from ordinary transactions)

Anonymity does love company. But to clarify, I was referring to this statement...

Quote from: jgarzik on November 17, 2013, 06:43:23 PM

It sounds like ZeroCoin v2 eliminates one major criticism, that of bloat.

But engineering hurdles remain:

2. Any requirement that all transactions participate in mixing is a non-starter. Some payment schemes bootstrap trust by intentionally being non-private, showing their bitcoin holdings and bitcoin payments with provable digital signatures.

Any forced 100% privacy scheme that prevented opt-in auditing would make life difficult for some existing users, who place value in the transparency of the system.
(...)

It would seem based on this and on similar things I've heard, that I might be able to conclude the following:

"if a user wants to participate in utilizing the Zerocash feature (assuming that this would be incorporated into and supported in the bitcoin protocol itself) then that should be an option that would be displayed in Bitcoin Core wallet. (...) conceptually, the idea of having anonymous transactions as an option is appealing for a number of reasons. (...) [(people could choose to make an obvious public record of what their donations are (or not! as it's a choice), and if they did, they could tally up their microdonations for deductions purposes at the end of the year (or not! if they chose anonymity in their transactions under (... http://abis.io )).] Choice and consent should also be an objective of any process which offers something better (like anonymity) to the user. And I think also the Foundation Board, dues-paying members, developers, and everyone can help anonymity happen with bitcoin while preserving that choice."

(( ref. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175156.msg7912447#msg7912447 ))