Zcoin has massively underperformed last few months. It does seem to me the problem is the inflation rate and lack of demand. Actually, MTP we'll believe it when we see it. The claims of Eth integration mixing integration - any privacy coin can say hey, we're exploring Eth mixing, we're going to cash in on its rise too without any evidence or explanation as to how they're doing it, who's doing it, and a timeline for doing it. To me that's meaningless.
Again with the incentivised nodes, do we even know how many coins per node will be required? All this stuff about it being to secure the network - what nauseous lies. Master node systems - as Dash showed so clearly - are really about pumping the price by locking up demand. In that sense, I think it is a good idea.
To me the real concrete step of value this month has been the Coinomi wallet. That's great. The Zcoin wallet was a joke, and it shouldn't have taken as long as it has to fix (if it even is fixed, I was lucky to get me coin off the old one and would be scared to use the new one).
Let's see if the devs told the truth when they said Zcoin would list on new exchanges soon, or if that's just another attempt to mislead to raise the coin price to increase their dev cut.
All in all, worth holding some given 10x upside if things work out within next 12 months, whereas downside is probably $4 minimum I would have thought.
For the Ethereum integration mixing. We will show the work in progress soon. You probably missed that we got ourselves a Solidity developer, Tadhg Riordan (@riordant) that has worked on something similar for zk-SNARKs before
https://zcoin.io/tadhg-riordan-joins-the-zcoin-team-as-solidity-developer-for-ethereum-mixer/. This isn't an immediate priority but it is something we are definitely working on and have dedicated some resources to it.
You are right that indeed the Zcoin wallet experience is not where we want to be. The Zcoin wallet issues on syncing we have identified stemmed from three main issues. The first is the old Bitcoin core which we are upgrading right after MTP as our push towards Znodes but to solve the immediate issue we ported some code over from 0.13 You can see the original Bitcoin core issue listed here:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/4353. The second issue is the Zerocoin verification which we believe we have identified the bug and pushed a fix but it's still a WIP. The third is that multi threaded verification is not in just yet so only one core is being pushed so there's a lot of room of optimization here. This can be focused on a lot more after MTP release since it's a prereq for Znodes.
Previously with only Poramin, Saran and Aizensou busy working on MTP which is an immense undertaking since it was coded from the ground up, we didn't have the necessary resources to focus on everything we wanted to. Even djm34 helped us out a lot since his work is dependent on MTP being launched. However with more developers coming on board and Leandro (leoreinaux) joining the team we are rapidly expanding our dev team so that we can deal with several issues at once. The guys who have been following the code on our github on the MTPTest branch can see how much work has been done where whole sections were totally reworked. We understand the frustration but you'll see it soon enough. The team thinks it's pretty soon
. Original development takes a lot more resources and we had to make a decision as to whether to focus on MTP which many people are waiting for or fix the wallet experience so it was a tough call then. We've learned from this especially when trying to estimate time needed for original development as compared to when porting code over from other projects. With more devs on board and people willing to work for us, this should sort itself out soon. Our cryptography advisor Tim Ruffing is also working on looking at libzerocoin.
For the incentivized nodes, it's more about the Zerocoin verification part and providing a layer to build on to work on things like a decentralized market place. Zerocoin verification currently is quite resource intensive and we wanted to offload that to incentivized nodes. This may become more important when we move to Sigma as despite the proof sizes we have yet to see the performance impact it has. The difference between our incentivized nodes scheme and other masternode like systems is that you don't have to trust any single masternode to maintain your privacy due to the cryptography we use. A Znode cannot 'spy' on your mixes due to the zk-proof unlike in coinjoin. We don't deny that it will help to provide price stability but it isn't the sole reason but that will be the easiest part to implement. Why we cannot provide exact figures as to how many coins you need for a Znode is simply because as you have seen, the price is so fluid and we need to cut a balance between keeping the bar high-ish without making it inaccessible. It will only be clearer once we get closer to release then we can make a more educated decision then. There have been some figures thrown around but yeah that's just speculation at the moment.