In my opinion Zebra is critical to the decentralization of Zcash, it helps fulfill the need for muli-sig governance. If ZF were to drop it or shift focus elsewhere who is going to publish a different implementation of network nodes to compete with ECCs version?
One of the reasons for engaging Parity to build an alternative, consensus-compatible Zcash implementation is to create leverage for an intentional chainsplit, should that ever become necessary. If we have a network with lots of nodes that are running non-ECC software, that defends against unilateral control by the people who maintain the first implementation (or any given implementation).
For those of you who followed Bitcoin during the Segwit activation drama, itās very similar to the situation with BIP 148 and the idea of a user-activated soft fork. Thatās a powerful, powerful tool to have for governing your protocol. I will admit that there are certain tradeoffs in having multiple implementations, but I think the benefits are worth it
I agree with @PhusionPhil here. While I appreciate his support and enthusiasm, what @SexDrugsAndZcash is saying does not represent my intentions. Iām not trying to ārestructureā the Foundation or do anything āradicalā. I just want it run more efficiently and in line with its mission and values.
So in other words, we have created something worth fighting over and dont want to let someone with the wrong mission lead our cause.
I agree to the extent radical change would be nice, but I really dont want to politicize Zcash yet, as the climate science debate could be fatal to this community about POS. I live in Alberta, you wont find anyone here responding to the Paris Accord with anything but pure hatred and calls for civil war. We are down 100,000 jobs plus the pandemicās damage, and completely dependent on oil. If i were to take a serious political stand like you, I would have to start seriously engaging that issue which I feel vary passionately about, but would be sad if it broke the community over the climate science debate.
The foundation is literally making the foundation for this currency and future governance applications, thatās a lot more than other coins have, I am happy.
ZCAP Members: The ZCAP poll has been sent out. Please recommend the Foundation re-open nominations for the board. This is your opportunity to help replace at least one of the incumbent directors with a new member who can help the Foundation (1) operate with increased efficiency, (2) honor its commitment to transparency and accountability, and (3) better serve Zcash users and the Zcash ecosystem.
Please help this post get the engagement it deserves. Your input matters. Whether you agree or disagree with me, comment below. Iād like every active ZCAP member to read this letter before casting their vote. Letās get a conversation going. Thank you!
The results are in and ZCAP voted to re-elect the incumbent board members for another term by a wide margin. Congratulations to Andrew, Matt, and Peter.
Thank you to everyone who voted to re-open nominations. It was a long shot, but I hope it brought much needed attention to important issues, such as transparency and accountability, that need to be addressed. I hope the Foundation takes the issues I raised seriously and works to improve them going forward.
(Speaking for myself and as an engineer working on zcashd, not for ECC and not in my ZIP Editor role.)
Perhaps you should be looking at it from a lower altitude.
I read updates on ZFās GitHub projects almost every day. To me the project seems to be making robust progress toward measurable goals. Iām confident in the competence of the Zebra team and their ability to deliver a working consensus node compatible with zcashd in the near future.
Implementing a Zcash consensus node is incredibly difficult. I must confess that something I was very worried about, initially, was that the Zebra project would end up producing a node that would have many consensus incompatibilities with zcashd, such that it wouldnāt be safe to rely on it for mining blocks. Iām much less worried about that after following the project closely and observing their attention to detail in consensus compatibility and security issues. (There obviously will be bugs, but few enough to be manageable.)
Itās also clear that the Zcash consensus protocol has been a moving target, with NU5 delaying the Zebra teamās ability to reach consensus compatibility. This was always going to be the case to some extent, even if NU5 had been a less ambitious upgrade. As it is, I think that the feature set of NU5 is important to the future development of Zcash and is worth the delay it has caused to Zebra. I wonāt attempt to speak for ZF about their schedule, but Iām very optimistic about Zebraās progress.
(Speaking for myself and as an engineer working on zcashd, not for ECC.)
I second Dairaās comments in entirety.
To me (as someone who is at best ambivalent on the need for completely independent full node implementations for multi-sig governance), one of the most beneficial aspects of the Zebra project has been the improvements to the overall understanding and specification of the Zcash protocol as a whole. Most of this has come from writing most of the stack from scratch; in particular, reimplementing all of the code that zcashd inherited from Bitcoin Core. Itās hard enough to properly estimate the time required to build and deploy cutting-edge ZKP tech (ask me how I know!) - itās even harder when youāre trying to precisely replicate the consensus rules and required network behaviour encoded in a tech stack with over a decade of incremental changes, implemented in a language that doesnāt make precision of behaviour easy to achieve.
I do not envy the task that ZF took on, and while plenty can be said in hindsight about the path taken to reach here, I think Zebra is in a good place now. I personally look forward to a future where zcashd and Zebra devs can spend more time collaborating on shared dependencies and less time reimplementing them, and Iām hopeful that this future is near!
Thanks, @str4d and @daira, for weighing in. Itās heartwarming to hear your praise of a ācompetingā project. Not to mention the super-productive technical collaboration that you and others at ECC have had with ZF engineers, to help make that possible. And your updates to the protocol spec to reflect lessons learned.
I would definitely like to better understand how and when Zebra converges to a useful user-facing MVP (and beyond), but itās great to hear your strong technical approval of the foundations laid for that.