Addendum to Ycash Launch Announcement: A Personal Testimonial by @hloo Regarding Friendly Forks
The people that have agreed to help with the launch of Ycash all have different reasons for helping. Some are interested purely in the technology, others are interested primarily in earning development bounties, and still others are interested in trying to achieve viable mining on commodity hardware. The evolving set of collaborators is not all of one mind, and I believe that to be a good thing, because open debate and the free exchange of diverse ideas will lead to higher-quality decisions about how to evolve Ycash in the future. Below are some of my own thoughts about Friendly Forks.
I am a long-term holder of Zcash, and I will continue to hold Zcash even after the launch of Ycash. I love being part of the Zcash community, and I am rooting for a future in which both Ycash and Zcash achieve widespread adoption. I will continue to actively participate in debates about the future of Zcash. I will continue to enjoy organizing Zcash events in the Bay Area, and I am excited about unveiling very soon the Zcash posters that I have commissioned an artist to create (thanks to a grant from the Zcash Foundation). I sincerely hope that, in the future, the work on Ycash funded by the YDF will be beneficial to Zcash as well.
The launch of Ycash would not be possible without the tremendous progress that the Electric Coin Company has accomplished to date with Zcash, and I have deep respect and admiration for those associated with the ECC.
With that said, I simply disagree with some of the decisions made by the ECC. I believe that the ECC should have changed the Zcash Proof of Work algorithm in response to the arrival of Equihash<200,9> ASICs in 2018. Furthermore, I disagree with the arguments put forth by the leaders of the ECC for differentially timelocking coins mined by the so-called Alg-B mining algorithm in the (now-called-off or postponed) Harmony Mining proposal. Finally, although the ECC has not itself proposed extending the Founders Reward beyond the original 2.1 million coin cap, it also has not publicly reaffirmed its commitment to the cap in the face of calls from the community to remove it, thus creating uncertainty about whether the cap will be honored on the Zcash blockchain.
On the issue of the Founders Reward cap, the ECC stated before the launch of Zcash that “90% of the Zcash monetary base goes to the miners . . .” (ECC Blog Post, “Continued Funding and Transparency”). Given this clear and unambiguous pronouncement, the bar should be very high for the ECC to consider supporting a community-proposed increase to the Founders Reward on the blockchain bearing the Zcash trademark. In my opinion, absent a stake-weighted poll of ZEC holders showing that a stake-weighted majority of ZEC holders participating in the poll favor removing the cap, there is not enough community support to justify removing the cap.
In organizing the launch of Ycash, I have been heavily influenced by a series of blog posts written by @nathan-at-least and @zooko (“Consensual Currency”, “Zcash Evolution”, and “A Future Friendly Fork”). Together, these posts put forth a set a beliefs that I like to call “cybercoin pluralism”. (See also Diana L. Eck, “What is Pluralism?” for a brief discussion of pluralism in the context of religious traditions and cultures.) For present purposes, it is sufficient to focus on the following line of thought:
- Within a given cybercoin user community , different “sub-communities” of users may make different “design tradeoffs”, leading to chain splits.
- Chain splits empower users to choose which chain or chains to use. (And nothing precludes a user from using both chains.)
- Because of shared goals and shared values across sub-communities, chain splits need not split the larger community.
- As a user, although it is okay to believe strongly in your chosen design tradeoffs, humility dictates that you must consider that you may be wrong or you may simply have different aspirations relative to other users. The community should embrace and celebrate each user’s ability to choose the chains that they want to use. In the long-run, a community built on choice will be stronger than a community built on lock-in.
In a sense, cybercoin pluralism is the pluralistic rebuttal to cybercoin maximalism. And at the core of cybercoin pluralism is the concept of a Friendly Fork. To a cybercoin pluralist, a split need not be viewed as an “attack” on the existing chain. People may simply agree to disagree, without fracturing the larger community.
Nathan and Zooko have laid down the philosophical foundation for a Friendly Fork. They have also practiced what they have preached by providing the technical foundation for a Friendly Fork (for example, by adding versioning and replay protection in Overwinter). Ycash aspires to build on these philosophical and technical foundations, for the betterment of the Zcash community as a whole.
I aspire to have the Ycash community remain part of the Zcash community. That would make Ycash a true Friendly Fork of Zcash. I hope that this forum will be the primary forum for discussions about Ycash (perhaps organized under a “Ycash” forum category or a more general “Friendly Fork” forum category). We need more people participating in this forum, and Ycash has the potential to attract new people.
I ask you to to keep an open mind and consider supporting Ycash alongside Zcash. We will try our very best to make Ycash worthy of your support. Long Live Ycash and Zcash.