This is how it should be:
"Max Profit. The most profitable, since there are no constraints. But the two groups have different thresholds, meaning they are held to different standards."
Here's the big fallacy: "the two groups have different thresholds, meaning they are held to different standards."
They are not held to different standards because they're different groups, but because of other reasons that indicate different loan default rates. So you cannot call this "discrimination". This is how things should be.
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You need a ton of space and/or processing power for the zero-knowledge transactions. The anonymity isn't free!
In practice Zcash/zcoin (different tradeoffs) are of no use to you unless you are willing to go the extra mile to hide something (criminal activities and such). There's no point in paying for the extra effort for normal transactions.
Anonymity of the system as a hole is the value. Just like with Telegram and the concept of a secret chat, you should not only use anonymity if you particularly need it. Anonymity and Security should be the default and you should optionally to be able to not have it.
Maybe even if I don't need the anonymity now, maybe in 10 years I will, and then I don't want to start using them because that change provides information.
Sending takes a few minutes of computation on your wallet - but that's not such a big deal as it's comparable to the time it takes for block confirmations anyway.
The problem is verification of private transactions is very slow by cryptocoin standards, and verification is something that every full node and miner must do. Zcash would fail if private transactions were used in large numbers, as blocks would take too long to validate for mining to remain decentralized; Bitcoin transactions are a few orders of magnitude faster to validate, with a 4x more conservative block interval and 2x smaller blocksize, and the Bitcoin dev community has had to make heroic efforts to further optimize validation.
There are ways to significantly reduce the cost of zk proof verification by batching (that are compatible with the existing Zcash protocol without a fork).
Prove it first by actually implementing those ways and having them survive peer review; this is highly experimental crypto so it's not clear what's actually possible.
Again, I don't think it's very responsible to knowingly release design a protocol that in its current form would collapse if heavily used due to a lack of safety limits.
Satoshi's paper is very concise and the best introduction to Bitcoin (or the damn "blockchain technology" bullshit used to raise money for ridiculous startups, if you want to call it that), particularly for the technical audience here on HN.
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Yeah, the main reason, assuming you're a "ML-based business", is you want to validate your market and not spend a ton of money creating something that's not profitable.
Anyway, there are many more obvious use cases. Other apps/games/services that need to detect faces or filter out porn and so on. Imagine a dating site that estimates age and more based on photos, while also filtering out NSFW images.
Here's the big fallacy: "the two groups have different thresholds, meaning they are held to different standards." They are not held to different standards because they're different groups, but because of other reasons that indicate different loan default rates. So you cannot call this "discrimination". This is how things should be.