They’re both great experiments and Stallman would be more impressive proposing better solutions than just sniping at the projects.
Monero also has "cryptographic privacy" when it comes to hiding transaction amounts, for example. Describing it just as a coin mixing on chain sounds too simple, something like Dash.
There are also realistic longer-term possibilities for L1 scaling of Zcash, including the possibility of doing a Coda-like succinct blockchain (https://codaprotocol.com/). I've been working on optimizing recursive validation (https://github.com/zcash/zcash/issues/3425) and researching how to find more efficient pairing-friendly curves in order to make this practical. Networking optimizations and other consensus layer upgrades along the lines of SPECTRE/PHANTOM (https://medium.com/@drstone/an-overview-of-spectre-a-blockda... and https://medium.com/@drstone/an-overview-of-phantom-a-blockda...), etc. are also quite feasible.
It's correct that we're not running anywhere near capacity at the moment, and that gives us time to develop these solutions.
-- Daira Hopwood (Zcash developer)
And Coda looks incredible if that can be done
Additionally, I wish Stallman would research for himself instead of asking an expert, but oh well.
Unless they want him to know. Maybe they’re playing mind games.
I find it extremely hard to believe that the US intelligence agencies haven't mastered the art of tapping phones without alerting targets over the decades.
> "Asked what he thought about so-called privacy coins, Stallman said he’d gotten an expert to assess their potential, and “for each one he would point out some serious problems, perhaps in its security or its scalability.”
It would've been nice for the interviewer to ask followup questions in response to this.
> "Taler never rejects a legitimate customer due to a fraud-detection false positive."
This would be nice. PayPal has caused no shortage of headaches for both me and people who wish to send me money. I wouldn't mind something better catching on.