Since Cryptonote act like a decentralized mixing method, it only make transaction become harder to trace, not completely untraceable as OP claimed.
It's quite similar to Darkcoin which is self claimed to be anonymous currency, but privacy of both is not strong enough for people who crave for a comletely anonymous currency, like myself.
Cryptonote is cool but i think i'll wait till May/June for Zerocash realease.
I never used the word untraceable. That's not what "unlinkable transactions" means -- it's more like automatically generating new public keys for every act of receiving payment. The ring signatures are a different feature.
Yes, zero-knowledge proofs have more anonymity but at the cost of:
- a completely blinded blockchain making it impossible to monitor the economy
- an RSA key to initiate the accumulator that has power over the network and must be trusted to be destroyed
- research-level cryptography that hasn't been subjected to vetting that can only come with usage and time
"It's new and shiny" is not a reason to trust your money with it -- it's a reason not to, in fact. I think decentralized mixing like this or DRK has better prospects than ZeroCash/ZeroCoin. While Green and his team are doing very good work, these are more like academic curiosities right now. Mixing gives robust 99% anonymity (that can be taken to 99.999... with cascaded mixing). By the way, knowing grad students and professors, I'm not holding my breath on a May release.
I agree that Zerocash base code is new and untested. But your concern about security can be said to whole cryptocurrency. Bitcoin once has an exploit allowing attacker to create infinite amount of coin.
Indeed, and with BTC we'd know immediately because we can see generation on the blockchain. A fix would be issued quickly. With Zero, it's game over. As the price decreases with supply flooding the market, maybe someone will eventually guess at it, but it can never actually be known.
