re: only 3.5% of traffic using z-addrs:

The dirty secret of crypto is that there is almost no economy that exists for any of the altcoins, and relatively little even for Bitcoin (which functions as the reserve currency due to its lions' share of the economy).

Effectively, by volume most altcoins are held by either miners (who sell immediately), or daytraders who will pump and dump. A very small fraction is held by true believers (who will HODL under all circumstances), but they don't contribute to the economy either.

Such people don't care about anonymity, they're not actually using the currency, they're just traders, and traders mostly don't need to be anonymous.

Really? I've bought many things with bitcoin and now a few with etherum ( although its client software is good awful electron bloat ). I see this line repeated and it just isn't true. Computer parts, everything on overstock, gift cards, vpns, Vps, domain registration, nootropics, etc are all there for multiple cryptocurrencies. People who say this have their head in the sand. If Bitcoin core hadn't destroyed btc, steam, Newegg, tiger direct and dell would all be available.

It's not a secret. It's pretty much the opposite of a secret actually.

That’s not a secret, evidenced by the relentless reminders in every HN crypto post comment section.

I can’t argue with the value of these reminders, though.

You're making big generalizations about lack of usage and economy, and you've provided no citations or verifyable grounds. For example, did you know about https://www.projectcoralreef.com?

In regards to bitcoin I believe he is correct. About 97% of the activity appears to be people on exchanges:

https://seekingalpha.com/amp/article/4122695-bitcoin-series-...

This mainly appears to be due to transaction times and high fees.

I’d be interested to see a similar analysis for monero but that’s probably not easily doable due to its privacy features.

All i see are various online "stores" for buying kitsch band tshirts.

> traders mostly don't need to be anonymous.

Not sure I follow -- you suggest exchanges should send out who placed an order in the book, in addition to the price, amount, order type, etc.? Wouldn't that be a massive breach of privacy? Or are you not talking about exchanges?

I think GP is saying that many/most people just trade Monero/Zcash for profit, they don't actually care about concealing their own transactions.

But they DO need privacy, they're more at risk of targeted theft than regular users. ZCash fails at this by making it impossibly hard for an exchange to allow z-address withdrawals, and impossibly hard for a mobile app / hardware wallet to support them, which means large holders withdrawing from an exchange are painting a target on their back.

On the linkability of Zcash transactions - Jeffrey Quesnelle

Zcash is a fork of Bitcoin with optional anonymity features. While transparent transactions are fully linkable, shielded transactions use zero-knowledge proofs to obscure the parties and amounts of the transactions. First, we observe various metrics regarding the usage of shielded addresses. Moreover, we show that most coins sent to shielded addresses are later sent back to transparent addresses. We then search for round-trip transactions, where the same, or nearly the same number of coins are sent from a transparent address, to a shielded address, and back again to a transparent address. We argue that such behavior exhibits high linkability, especially when they occur nearby temporally. Using this heuristic our analysis matched 31.5% of all coins sent to shielded addresses.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01210

"Still, Princeton University researchers recently developed a tool that helps them analyze Zcash transactions at least to some extent -- but they haven’t been able to crack monero. "