^ Yup. This is the real deal indeed.
I forgot to include this coin on my "next mega pump" list.
I have been waiting years for this coin! Although, their disclaimer for the alpha is kind of scary... I guess we should wait for the beta?
No seriously. The tech their team is trying to develop will make Dash and Monero look second rate.
Yup, its proper anonymity. As in direct anonymous payments, no mixers, no 3rd parties, nada.
There are no mixers or third parties in Monero. You construct the transactions entirely on your own (can even be done offline). Dash does use a masternode to coordinate coinjoin transactions, which is sort of like a mixer, although it can't steal your coins.
Functionally the main difference between Monero and Zcash (esp. after RingCT is integrated) is that Zcash has a larger anonymity set at the level of individual transactions (all previous users) than Monero (some randomly chosen subset of previous users). In practice the difference is likely somewhat narrower, but difficult to fully characterize.
The trade off for that difference in anonymity set is a wide gap in efficiency, a wide gap in cryptographic complexity and maturity, probably a gap in implementation maturity, the trusted setup, some functional limitations, and some stronger cryptographic assumptions (meaning more ways it can break, but not necessarily to a degree that is a huge concern).
Anyway given that Monero already uses cryptography rather than mixing, the option to swap out the cryptography with zerocash exists, just as regular ring signatures are now being swapped out with RingCT. There are no current plans to do so for the above reasons, but if zerocash techniques become more mature and trusted (and perhaps efficient), and it becomes clear that's what users want, it could be done at some point.
tldr, these are both serious, credible cryptographic techniques to deliver private transactions, with different advantages and disadvantages.
What about having to trust that the people who generated the initial zcash parameters really didn't keep the data? I know it's very unlikely, but having to take the founders word for it rather that cryptographically proving it kind of defeats the purpose.
