Announcing: Nighthawk Wallet for Zcash 🛫

[_eric]

@nathan-at-least

BTW- it might be cool to work with paywithzcash.com to provide a “shielded support” filter on the pay / earn options there.

Good idea. paywithz.cash now has a filter carousel at the top so users can select from stores/non-profits that have a z-address. There’s also a dedicated page for this feature at https://paywithz.cash/z2z

[GeorgeMi]

Perhaps I agree with you, if you look at the current situation, it turns out that time is playing in the wrong direction, the longer you wait, the more chances that everything will change.

[mika]

I’m happy to see this great work and the discussion around it.
However - it’s absolutely wrong to use a killing machine as a symbol.

[gcsfred1]

@NighthawkWallet Is the “Shielded User” screen with the big yellow spaceship logo an “About us” screen? It appears so, with the yellow at Nighthawk button. Have you considered adding ‘send’ and ‘receive’ buttons? It’s not clear to me how to send and receive Zcash.

[Autotunafish]

(It’s not a spaceship it’s an F-117 Stealth fighter)

[_eric]

Space Force Episode 1

[ppkarppi]

I am personally not seeing a “killing machine” as a symbol of this wallet software. I am seeing a “defence machine” instead. To me it is bringing an image of something that is protecting me.

[gmale]

. . . and, perhaps most importantly, the concept of being “off the radar!”

[daira]

I’m with @mika here, and I’d like to thank her for pointing it out. That’s a machine for bombing civilians.

[imichaelmiers]

Lets not do this. Names aside, 80s stealth tech is a cool aesthetic for a maximum privacy wallet and better than the green cyberpunk generics someone might have done.

The attribute the F117 is being used for here is stealth, not its ability to drop bombs. It’s a tool.

And finally, it was designed to hit heavily defended military targets, primarily in a conventional ground war in Europe in which the USSR invaded. It’s not meant to bomb civilians nor does it have the payload or range. It was not nuclear capable. So it was used to take out command and control bunkers in e.g. the intervention in Serbia to stop genocide.

Of course, there’s ambiguity in this. In the first gulf war the US accidentally bombed a civilian air raid bunker they thought was a command and control site. But I wouldn’t be so eager to set the standard of “worst possible use” defining something, seeing as we all work on a privacy preserving cryptocurrency and, however rare, it will be used for evil.

You can disagree with the name and are free not to use it, but lets not pile on other people for choosing it or liking it.

[Shawn]

Personally I think name is synonymous with “stealth” or “skunk works” moreso than it being a military weapon.

[ChileBob]

Code is available so easy enough to tweak the theme & change the name to, errm, maybe ‘SneakyPidgeon’ ? Pidgeons don’t bomb civilians… well, yes, they do, but it wipes off.

I quite like the ‘stealth’ connection with NightHawk & think that was the intention. Joking aside, a zebra-stripe-theme would be nice.

(EDIT: Not exactly hard, I’m sure the smart people who hang out here can do way better 'cos I’m just goofing around, here’s my attempt)

EDIT: Here’s a link to the APK if you want it on your phone :-

ChileBob/zECC-Zebra-Wallet

[mika]

Well, some people will surely get less enthusiastic about a Zcash wallet which puts a Chinese or a Russian bomber prominently on its front page. Arguments about its coolness, aesthetics and how that particular bomber didn’t harm too many people will sound very different in that case. Exactly the same applies for this particular US bomber in many regions of the world. Weapons are killing devices, talk to a child who lost her family and her legs after a bomber passed over her head and ask her what she thinks about the aesthetics of bombers. It’s absolutely wrong to use weapons as symbols in peaceful projects.

[rex4539]

+1 for name change.

[imichaelmiers]

First, this isn’t the only wallet, its not even ECC’s wallet. It’s a volunteer effort created by a community member. And they made the choice to go for nighthawk. It’s clever and there are a bunch of cool things about the plane and the aesthetic. It’s not being used because it drops bombs, it’s being used because it’s stealth and stays off the radar. Thee intent is obvious. That saiid, the fact that it drops bombs and that can be bad ( it can also be good, see stoping genocide in the Balkans), is lost on no one including the authors. Which does raise the issues you allude to, but how important that is is a thing people can reasonably disagree on. Lets not pile on them and lets not derail the thread in which they announce the thing.

[Shawn]

Keep in mind that Nighthawk is a project created by a independent group of Zcash enthusiasts, not something released from the ECC or ZFND thereby, it seems a bit rude to badger them about a name they chose because they obviously liked it. They have already gone through the trouble of forking the code, customizing the UI, creating Developer apps accounts for Google and iOS store, secured a Twitter handle, designed the logo, and probably several other things that I’m not thinking of.

If you don’t like the wallet simply because of the name then the code is open-source, you are free to do what they did: Fork it to make it your own.

[daira]

Mika and I are entitled to strongly express our opinions on the logo, both here and to the Nighthawk developers.

[ppkarppi]

You have the freedom to use the wallet or not to use the wallet. What else would you like to censor? I think censorship resistance is good. This wallet app is certainly not going to kill anyone.

[bit]

Great name for a great wallet. Keep up the good work guys. For the brave and the free!

[aiyadt]

Thanks for the encouragement Kevin!

It means a lot for you to recognize our baby steps. And thank you for choosing the best in class architecture which should make this app future proof for the next couple of years before having to rewrite it again!