https://z.cash/technology/paramgen https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/1052999647793504256 It's more the idea that coin privacy is important and required, the idea is more valuable than any past or current implementation, it is the idea that will survive to eventually reach deployment, brought forward by those who follow its requisite nature. Sure people will misapply, oldref, fail to upgrade their evals to current and future tech, bad journo, bash, troll and shill all sorts things and ideas as usual. That's to be expected in the Wild West. With old world adversaries many and powerful. Yet for those who follow new ideas to be playing there, sinking investments in and or falling to those games, is often just a lot of wasted resources, of which they have few early on, and these are still early times... best reallocate them to better use. Stupid coinwars, bitchfights, anything other than cypherpunk cryptocurrency tech application, eval, mashup, integration, and adoption... needs to stop. All things come from a true cryptocurrency, not the other way around, certainly not from all the Fiat-alikes out there. And all the centralized ICO token nonsense, coin scams, their shills... at best a somewhat helpful confusing blitz upon the real enemy, yet one with no particularly profound effect in the end, a weaksauce, yet another misallocation of resource.

bitcoin is getting some privacy upgrades.

They had over 10 years to do that, you'll be lucky if BTC embeds strong privacy in the native protocol anytime within the next 10 years. By that time it may be too late. Even right now today would be precariously close to too late. The longer you wait, the longer you fail to come together to get things done, the more you have to rely soley on the magical properties of a true cypherpunk cryptocurrency to come dig you out and save your ass from the network effects of your past non-true coin deployments. That's incredibly risky proposition, and squanders the extremely rare oppurtunity to drop change and see truth in your lifetime. So much broken shitcoin, pointless token, and Fiat State Control Power Censor and selfish MyCoinFirst think out there in the space, so little cypherpunk cryptoanarchy being applied.

bitcoin is junk

Bitcoin-BTC in its current state today, is not capable of meeting the needs of a global cypherpunk cryptocurrency. Major scaling, fee, txrate, decentral tx mining, and privacy issues including by not evolving beyond storage to an online UTXO db, going down tech development paths that are questionable as to proposed success, big corporate capture and freespeech debacles. And more you can list. As a regulated hardly usable gold maybe, but that's a pointless outcome. As a long term global cypherpunk cash for billions to use even once a week... not at current, not without utter laughing stock position reversal (such as raising blocksize, killing Lightning, etc), or a proper revolt or takeover. The question is not which are junk, 99% are. But which small set of tech and dedicated group of proponents acting globally, will make up the 5 or so coin that will win the real battle, in the true cypherpunk cryptoanarchy cryptocurrency way that is requisite to bring any real change to the world. Else just stick with Fiat. Then you've got the massive education effort of the entire space still todo on cypherpunk cryptoanarchy political economic... that education project got foolishly left behind in the stupid get rich first explosion and corruption. And got exploited by the "we have to be regulated and central" FUD propaganda. So that now many new people who see the light are afraid to speak, and old school visionaries have retired. That activism must return to the front lines. There's even possible todo on the right spin and partnering of your own to fake out the States and Statists giving you more time to drop change. There's also so much coin tech out there now as to make finding actual good candidates among them for an ideal cypherpunk cryptocurrency to be a major project in itself. Feel free to start such a project, create your criteria, and suggest your own finds. 10+ years, nearly an entire working generation gone by. But how many toward actual cryptoanarchy freedom for all... 3? How many stupidly invested waiting dancing around false hopium solutions, creating fakes for greed, etc... 6+? Yet there's still time... the entire space really needs to refocus, refactor, combine, and launch the real war to get it done :)