I'm one of the 5 participants elected to this grantmaking body and entrusted with getting it started.

My background is as an activist for privacy and freedom online. I co-founded the organization Fight for the Future (https://fightforthefuture.org/) and co-ran it from 2011 to early 2018, through the SOPA/PIPA fights, the Snowden revelations, and the net neutrality battles in the US and EU. I got interested in Zcash when I started building an experimental messaging app and marketplace (https://zbay.app).

The main thing I'd want anyone reading to take away from the thread is that:

1. Zcash is one of a very small number of promising paths to the end goal of "HTTPS for money."

2. If you're interested in pursuing that goal (by researching, auditing, and/or building new tech) we are offering grants that can fund you and a small team, at market rates, and we'll strive to be timely and transparent.

3. We fund work related to Zcash, but since the hardest problems are common to all paths, your work will likely advance all of them.

On achieving "HTTPS for money," I think all of us recognize how important a goal this is. So let's look at how to get there.

There are a handful of promising paths. Zcash, Monero, Mobilecoin, and Aztec are mentioned here. Tornado.cash is another. For ALL of these projects, the harsh reality is that they are ALL extremely likely to fail for the exact same reason: by the time they make anything useful, most of the planet will be using Venmo, WhatsApp, or worse, WeChat, losing any privacy their governments don't explicitly mandate and refrain from violating themselves. We've seen this happen to countless theoretically-empowering free software projects; outside the realm of software development tools, it's the norm, not the exception. Regulatory pressure—either through outright bans or death by a thousand cuts—is another likely reason for failure, again, common to all of these projects.

Against that sobering reality, fighting over which of these projects is better right now would be counter-productive even if we were able to have that fight without ideology and tribalism, which is super hard when so many people involved in crypto have a financial or technical horse in the race! The reality is that each of these projects is just a starting point, and each starting point has advantages and disadvantages:

* Ethereum-based approaches like Aztec and Tornado.cash benefit from being part of the Ethereum ecosystem, but it will be difficult for them to address side channel attacks and issues like network-layer privacy (like the attacks described here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.6079) because they share so much of their stack with products and infrastructure that have a much less strict threat model. Privacy coins like Zcash and Monero control their whole stack and can, over time, build against the same strict threat model, though there's a ton of work to do here for both projects.

* Monero benefits from being the first to get traction and fervent supporters, but its approach of using decoy traffic to hide the transaction graph means that at some point, well-resourced entities like governments will be able to start identifying Monero users, and they'll likely be able to do this retroactively as far back as subpoenaed users and exchanges keep data. We know this because the theoretical attack is widely understood (see ian's links above) and the funding exists (see: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2020/09/14/irs...). Once people start getting jailed or audited for their Monero transactions, it will be difficult for Monero (at a product level) to explain to users in what contexts Monero is private and in what contexts it isn't, and Monero will have to switch to an approach like Zcash's, where at a blockchain level the anonymity set is always the set of all users.

* Zcash benefits from using cryptographic guarantees, not decoy transactions, to hide the transaction graph, and from the wide exchange support it gets by allowing exchanges to support non-private transactions that work just like Bitcoin. (One way to think of Zcash is as two currencies, a Bitcoin fork that's really easy for exchanges to support, and a privacy coin, with a seamless DEX for going between them.) It's behind in adoption, which itself matters for anonymity, and its governance structure looks more like Signal, Firefox, or Matrix—where you have one or two traditional nonprofit organizations with prominent leaders pushing the project forward—than something super decentralized and postmodern like Bitcoin. Zcash Open Major Grants is an initiative to address that weakness by opening up a funding stream to outside teams. IMO the biggest weakness with Zcash now (and this is probably true of Monero too) is network layer privacy and attacks at the application layer, and this work is something we're eager to fund as well.

TL:DR; When you look at these leading projects, and the advantages and challenges of each, it becomes much less important which is better now, and much more important how to advance work on all of them before it's too late. ZOMG can fund you and a small team to do that work!