Zcash launches on October 28!
"Wilcox, who regards privacy as a right, argues that there are important, legitimate reasons why someone would want to use an anonymous currency.
“There are regulatory and commercial and moral reasons for privacy from all sectors,” he says. To give a commercial example: Apple wouldn’t want Samsung to be able to track its transactions and gain valuable competitive intelligence.
Or the motivating factor could be regulatory compliance. Multiple laws in the United States and the U.K., such as the data privacy rules of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 , require companies to keep consumer information hidden from view, a feature ZCash can reliably offer.
There are also strictly technical considerations that make strong privacy a necessary feature in a digital currency. Ideally, for the system to function, coins should be fungible, which is to say, each coin should be indistinguishable from the next. When a coin carries the history, and potentially the smear, of every past transaction—as bitcoins do—this can be difficult to achieve.
“The laws of economics are almost as immutable as the laws of physics. And good money means that every unit of that money is the same as any other unit of that money. The only way to have that be the case for digital currencies is to have it be private,” says Roger Ver, a ZCash investor for whom fungibility is a central concern."
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/networks/zcash-truly-anonymous-blockchainbased-cryptocurrency
"Wilcox, who regards privacy as a right, argues that there are important, legitimate reasons why someone would want to use an anonymous currency.
“There are regulatory and commercial and moral reasons for privacy from all sectors,” he says. To give a commercial example: Apple wouldn’t want Samsung to be able to track its transactions and gain valuable competitive intelligence.
Or the motivating factor could be regulatory compliance. Multiple laws in the United States and the U.K., such as the data privacy rules of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 , require companies to keep consumer information hidden from view, a feature ZCash can reliably offer.
There are also strictly technical considerations that make strong privacy a necessary feature in a digital currency. Ideally, for the system to function, coins should be fungible, which is to say, each coin should be indistinguishable from the next. When a coin carries the history, and potentially the smear, of every past transaction—as bitcoins do—this can be difficult to achieve.
“The laws of economics are almost as immutable as the laws of physics. And good money means that every unit of that money is the same as any other unit of that money. The only way to have that be the case for digital currencies is to have it be private,” says Roger Ver, a ZCash investor for whom fungibility is a central concern."
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/networks/zcash-truly-anonymous-blockchainbased-cryptocurrency