Zcash

From a non-TA perspective, Zcash stands out to be the most robust PoW - secure against "consensus attack." And if you look at the 51% attack cost to market-cap ratio, it's substantially more secure than the anything else on this sphere.

I am excited to see how zero knowledge cryptocurrencies like Zcash interact with the extant regulatory landscape. I think it’s important to remember that these techniques provide privacy that (IMO) is a *requirement* for a *business* use case..... With zero-knowledge proofs, privacy and transparency are very much compatible. You can prove properties of transaction flows in zero knowledge.

There are some nutcases out there who are worried about Zcash's trusted setup ceremony, which involved six independent sources of randomness, of which only one had to be correct for the setup to succeed.

The path that Zcash and other next-generation blockchains (Tezos, DFINITY, etc.) have taken is to set up incentives and off-chain governance processes to align early contributors and help guide the project from infancy to adulthood. While this trades off early on with decentralization, it allows for independence, time, and resources to be committed to more intensive research questions.

I like Zcash because I think private unmediated digital cash is incredibly important for a cashless society. They have more expertise with zk-SNARKs than anyone in the space (not counting the SCIPR Lab). Worst thing about Zcash is they want to call hard forks "network upgrades."

If I was doing anything seriously privacy-demanding, I'd probably go for Zcash first.