ZEC's only chance for long term relevance is if they can massively improve its performance with Zk-Starks or something similar. That may not necessarily be a terrible speculative (I must admit I'm considering it so talk me out of it guys) play but it is a high risk proposition. Monero works right now.
Short term speculation in moderate amounts of ZEC would be within my own risk tolerances, if I found a comparative advantage. Not large speculations or long-term holding.
Fundamentally, I don't see any scenario in which there is a saturating adoption curve for ZEC It is disqualified from DNMs by optional privacy. Optional privacy is compromised privacy. The likelihood of TLA backdoors is high because of the SIGINT background of devs and public statements about backdooring it made by Wilcox and Greene (even ignoring the Bangkok incident). The novelty and complexity of the crypto makes for higher vulnerability, ceteris paribus. Finally, it is gradually choking itself to death even with little or no economic use; try supporting a DNM unicorn on ZEC, I dare you. Scalability problems will bring your business to a crawl, and the work-arounds compromise privacy even further. Although, frankly, I would be surprised if you stayed in business long enough to die from scaling.
No, too much risk for me. If I wouldn't eat the dog food, why would I buy it? Anyhow, I have a cat already, which handles the mice quite well.
