I think the tooling will improve significantly this year and you should see people able to build protocols with zkSNARKs soon -- without spending days figuring

I think the tooling will improve significantly this year and you should see people able to build protocols with zkSNARKs soon -- without spending days figuring out how everything works. Ahmed Kosba has been working on jSnark (https://github.com/akosba/jsnark https://github.com/akosba/jsnark). I'm building something in Rust called bellman (https://github.com/ebfull/bellman https://github.com/ebfull/bellman) which should make it easier to construct circuits safely and build these proofs easier, but it's in its early stages.