The ZeroCoin stuff was just not really technically viable as it was. Also as evidence by the fact that no altcoins have picked it up. The trusted initialization requirement was also kinda lame.
ZeroCash improves the performance from the network's perspective greatly (at the expense of client performance), so it might be easier to make work. It also greatly improves the anonymity by hiding the values, at the same time it makes the trusted initialization worse. Mixed bag.
("My initial read of their paper was interesting, but it was two to three orders of magnitude more resource intensive than would be required to make it actually viable ... On the plus side— approaches can only get better")
I do hope that cryptographic privacy improvements are themselves not too controversial to deploy. Bitcoin as it is, is basically a privacy disaster which is only mitigated by the fact that Bitcoin is a niche thing that no one is forced to use. If you felt compelled to use Bitcoin in your daily personal and business life the current state of privacy there would cause a lot of harm. I cringe a bit at people trying to promote Bitcoin to 'authorities' with the "it's not private" argument, I think that stems from a misunderstanding of what authorities should want (e.g. they shouldn't want people to be made vulnerable through a loss of privacy), and a lack of knoweldge into how to discuss that privacy isn't incompatible with the public interest (quite the opposite), and that trying to deny privacy seldom reduces privacy for criminals (since they can buy their way to privacy) but mostly for innocent individuals... but I guess we'll see how things pan out.
Right now the proposed privacy technology has to little maturity and too many tradeoffs to consider it in Bitcoin, but when that isn't the case I hope we can adopt them, but even without doing so the privacy techniques that can already be used in Bitcoin and cannot be stopped (like CoinJoins and CoinSwaps) can help a lot if they become more widely used.
ZeroCash improves the performance from the network's perspective greatly (at the expense of client performance), so it might be easier to make work. It also greatly improves the anonymity by hiding the values, at the same time it makes the trusted initialization worse. Mixed bag.
That said— I don't know about 'contempt', here was my response: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175156.msg1826596#ms... and I don't recall anyone else with pull in these things being more negative than I was.
("My initial read of their paper was interesting, but it was two to three orders of magnitude more resource intensive than would be required to make it actually viable ... On the plus side— approaches can only get better")
I do hope that cryptographic privacy improvements are themselves not too controversial to deploy. Bitcoin as it is, is basically a privacy disaster which is only mitigated by the fact that Bitcoin is a niche thing that no one is forced to use. If you felt compelled to use Bitcoin in your daily personal and business life the current state of privacy there would cause a lot of harm. I cringe a bit at people trying to promote Bitcoin to 'authorities' with the "it's not private" argument, I think that stems from a misunderstanding of what authorities should want (e.g. they shouldn't want people to be made vulnerable through a loss of privacy), and a lack of knoweldge into how to discuss that privacy isn't incompatible with the public interest (quite the opposite), and that trying to deny privacy seldom reduces privacy for criminals (since they can buy their way to privacy) but mostly for innocent individuals... but I guess we'll see how things pan out.
Right now the proposed privacy technology has to little maturity and too many tradeoffs to consider it in Bitcoin, but when that isn't the case I hope we can adopt them, but even without doing so the privacy techniques that can already be used in Bitcoin and cannot be stopped (like CoinJoins and CoinSwaps) can help a lot if they become more widely used.