While zk-SNARKs is a cool piece of technology, their source of funding[1] doesn't inspire confidence.

In addition to that, even the few people people who do use Zcash, don't use it's privacy features. 99% of their transactions aren't private and are fully traceable [2]. Why would you want your transactions to stand out?

[1] http://zerocash-project.org/about_us [2] https://news.bitcoin.com/not-so-private-99-of-zcash-and-dash...

A couple of years ago on reddit, someone issued a challenge to find the destination of their private Zcash transaction. Someone won the challenege, not by tracing the transaction itself, but by recognizing it was the only transparent to private, and private to transparent transactions with in a timeframe. That's why privacy needs to be mandatory like it is with Monero.

This is quite outdated, I believe. With the launch of NU5/Halo2 in a couple of weeks, all transactions will be private by default. Plus, even without that change, the shielded pool is way larger these days. Finally, a fairer comparison with Monero would have been to trace a shielded to shielded transaction. This should be literally impossible with Zcash.

Private transactions by default sounds good, glad to hear. I guess that's why they extended their 20% dev tax past the initial first half of emittance like they originally advertised.

Although ZCash is arguably built on better fundamentals (zk-SNARKs vs RingCT), ZCash's history is slightly more fraught than Monero's and that's enough to keep many people in the XMR camp.

Opt-in privacy has some serious flaws, not to mention the trusted setup that IMO makes it untrustworthy as a currency.

Both of these are no longer a thing with NU5 / Halo 2

Zcash is well designed but in practice I have yet to see any services accept it but many that accept monero.