Privacy coins are meant to be private. That's their raison d'être. Strip away the privacy, and they simply become altcoins, and dangerous ones at that, with the potential to deanonymize their users and expose their secrets. A number of recent reports have cast doubt on the privacy features offered by coins such as zcash and monero.

There's Safety in Numbers

Zcash is a controversial coin for a number of reasons such as its "founders reward" that sees 20% of all coins mined in the first four years go to stakeholders. The technology that enables zcash private transactions, zk-Snarks, is widely used by privacy coins within the same family such as zclassic, zencash, and bitcoin private. The trouble with zcash, as far as privacy advocates are concerned, is that shielded (i.e private) transactions aren't enabled by default. In fact, 85% of all zcash transactions are public, and some zcash wallets don't even support private transactions.