In all seriousness (haha), Zerocoin has the same problem as BitMessage. Sales! But it's selling an idea, not a product, which is more difficult since it's less tangible. People only use things like Liberte and Tails and GPG and Tor and so on, because they assume that somebody else has done their homework. In reality, doing this kind of homework can often be an immensely specialized task and relatively few people do it in practice. Software in general is immensely complicated and invisible to boot. It's not that there isn't enough geeks, it's that its a division of labor thing, you need very specific geeks. It's comparable to constructing a bridge.You build the most awesome bridge. It is feather light but infinitely strong. But without it being signed off on by other bridge experts, you're stuck (unless you get a cult following, which sometimes happens but this is exceptional). Uninformed people will just grouch about it with vague and ill formed ideas and call it a Folly. It's not just in cryptography, lots of inventions have come close to failing because of this problem. Without a supportive community, you're lost. To get people to spend their cognition on something that is not of immediate use to them is a generally hard problem, ask the environmentalists, they practically gripe about nothing else, and this is a much worse special case of that problem.So I am saying that Zerocoin could very easily just fall flat on its face, no matter how clever a cryptographic product it is, it needs users. If users see no reason to use it, it dies. PGP could very easily have suffered the same fate. If some guy not connected to the cipherpunks made PGP, it would have died on the vine. Political and social capital matter. So does business acumen.The concept of public key cryptography was first developed by a guy who everybody has forgotten the name of working for British signals intelligence. He did that that, and it got nowhere. His people thought it was a waste of time, mere esoterica. The people associated with the development of public key cryptography are: RSA and Diffie-Hellman, who developed it years later, but with support from a small number of obsessives that eventually mutated into the cipherpunks. That is what really injected crypto onto Main Street, having that cipherpunk vanguard. It was a water cooler revolution, it definitely didn't come from managerial types. Without that, I am sure those algorithms would be obscure pieces of intellectual property in a handful of corporations and government departments, relegated to the same circle of hell as the One Time Pad. If you're away ahead of the curve and can't communicate the utility of your concepts to others then you get stuck in the Ivory tower and nobody will ever hear of you (like Tesla!). Ironically, being a bit dumber might be to your advantage sometimes.It's funny in the non-funny way, because Green has effectively just completely blown the exact kind of credibility he needs to make this work. We are his stakeholders. In fact we're the perfect stakeholders. Since he's referred to LE agents, he's blown it. Sorry. You'll probably only get the one chance. It really puts a handful of nails on the road when you suck the dick of the exact people the stakeholders want to avoid by use of your tech. It's parallel to releasing a superior version of Bittorrent, and saying you can always install a backdoor for the RIAA. Suddenly filesharers everywhere, including those who aren't sharing illegal files are thinking: "Huh. How about no."There is only one way to recover from this situation, and it's going to be difficult. My duck-bill intuition tells me that people reading this thread may be either associated with the article or the inventors of the Zerocoin protocol, so here goes:You need people like Bruce Schneider and Roger Dingledine to review your code and design. A dozen PhD people are not going to help you, for all we know they are shills. You need people who are ideological about security, people with an actual spine, and that means hackers. That's it.While we're on the subject, the Silk Road is actually a huge coup for the Tor Project, because it validates the use of Hidden Services as a real workable concept. Corporations and other organizations now trust hidden services largely because the Silk Road exists, reasoning that if it's anonymous enough for law breakers, then surely it's anonymous enough for them. Intelligence agents and others study the technical details of how LE agents find data evidence on child pornographers, in order that they may build better protocols for the anonymous exchange of information. See, people can carp about how "privacy" isn't the same as "anonymity" as much as they like. The fact of the matter is that this is utter bullshit, because actually that sort of logic applies exclusively to the non-digital world. In the digital world privacy and anonymity are the same thing, the entire thing is a semantic argument. Nobody with two braincells to rub together deliberately chooses an inferior product so *some* higher-ups can break it! It's like a reverse version of Godwin's Law but for cryptography, good cryptography drives out the bad (albeit with the major caveat I mentioned about political/social capital and business sense).Right now, if kmfkewm built his centralized bitcoin blind signature system, he would have more real users than any implementation of Zerocoin. That's because he has more credibility than Matthew Green right now by a very long fucking shot.tldr; Pine is not a believer in technological determinism. People who think BTC can succeed without the black market are delusional. Bitcoin has no real advantage to the average consumer over a credit card or Paypal if it is regulated by the government. In the anonymity "market", people who suck the governments dick have their projects die. I just can't be more polite than that.tldr2; *stab* *stab* *stab* *stab* *stab* *stab* *stab* *stab* *stab* *stab* *stab* *stab* *stab* *stab* *stab* *stab*