https://www.benthamsgaze.org/2018/05/09/the-pools-run-dry-analyzing-anonymity-in-zcash/
When is this garbage coin going to be put out of its misery?
Moreover, the top 1% of the wealthiest users controlled 78% of the total monetary supply, while the richest address of all (with 118,257.75 ZEC) had more coins than the total amount in the shielded pool.
A so-called privacy coin having a rich list is nonsensical and embarrassing. Notice how a CERTAIN other privacy coin doesn't have an identifiable rich list?
We found that the largest four clusters (in number of addresses) belonged to digital asset exchanges, the largest being the U.S.-based exchange Poloniex.
Out of all our clusters, we found one that belonged to a new user (i.e., a user with essentially no previous activity) who sent transactions to the shielded pool with amounts and timings that corresponded to The Shadow Brokers' sale activity. Most of their coins came directly from a cluster belonging to the exchange Bitfinex.
The irresponsibility of the Zcash team promoting it as a privacy coin and THE BEST ONE due to OMG SHINY NEW CRYPTO (this is not a good thing) is going to get people imprisoned or killed. Sure, we may not shed tears for scumbags but what about a dissident in an oppressive regime or someone actually depending on financial privacy for survival?
Out of all the deposits made by the founders, we observed that the majority of them (75%) were of a particular value (249.9999 ZEC), which is equal to 100 block rewards. Moreover, this was a highly uncommon value across the whole blockchain: only five other deposits into the pool carried a value between 249 and 251 ZEC that did not come from a founder address. We thus concluded that any z-to-t transaction carrying 250.0001 ZEC in value was done by the founders.
Not even the founders are safe from their own ridiculous "privacy" coin's stupidity!
In total, we could associate 69% of the activity surrounding the shielded pool with miners and founders, leaving only 31% left as the anonymity set for regular users.
This is why privacy by default (like in Monero) would be a solution to these issues, but unfortunately this isn't possible in Zcash due to the shielded transactions requiring a significant amount of computing resources and time as well as a full node, which makes it inconvenient for many people. Solutions they've claimed would improve this in the future are questionable and unproven at best or only marginally better and not yet enough for default privacy.
Maybe Zcash should just quit while they're (not) ahead...but then how would their cronies get their 20% founder tax?
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