I’ve been thinking about the competition between Zcash and Bitcoin, and it reminds me a lot of the Betamax vs VHS format wars from the '80s.
Betamax had superior picture quality compared to VHS yet VHS won out nonetheless.
Think QWERTY vs Dvorak, JPEG vs PNG, PowerPC vs x86.
I fear that while Zcash is superior to BitCoin, BitCoin will win at the end of the day because it’s “good enough”. I don’t like that outcome but it’s something worth considering.
Reminds me of the Blu-ray vs HD DVD days.
The thing that really pushed the adoption of Blu-ray over HD DVD was that Sony included it for “free” in the PlayStation 3. All of a sudden millions of people who bought the next PlayStation wanted high quality movies to go with it, HD DVD just couldn’t compete.
If we can make using Zcash privacy as “easy” as using Bitcoin is, then when users are faced with the option of one or the other then I think they will choose the private choice. The issue now is just getting Zcash to be as simple and widely adopted as possible so it’s a no-brainer, and then Bitcoin won’t be able to compete because it’s too reluctant to change.
it will never be “easy” as long as we have all those different transaction types.
shielded only!
In the end there are no winners or losers in crypto. Only competing private currencies in a free market. And you chose those that best suit your needs.
This free market is still in its infancy and subject to very strong interferences from the fiat overlords, that are trying to rig it for their profits and delay the ineluctable (old habits die hard). But this won’t last very long.
We could talk until we’re blue in the face about privacy and it will go through one ear and out the other.
BTC with all its faults is good enough. The push for zcash isn’t going to come from better informed individuals, it’s going to come as a result of necessity when some tool makes it trivial to view an individuals wallet balance and transaction history.
Until then, BTC gets the limelight as far as I’m concerned.
There are a large number of us that agree with you which will become clear with the eventual arrival of shielded voting.
When the masses realize that Bitcoin is critically flawed (due to its transparency) large numbers of users will move to the dominant chain where ALL transactions are shielded by default. We still have time to make Zcash that chain. Optional privacy wont be enough to win over masses of Bitcoin users. They will be able to find optional privacy on Bitcoin side chains, ZK-rollups, already:
Before we the outside world is ready for enhanced privacy we need to convince the decision makers within our own community.
Right now Zcash is trying to be both betamax and VHS when we should be picking sides (privacy)
Privacy matters and Zcash needs to become shielded by default in order to achieve mass adoption!
Signal messenger dropped sms support in part for this reason (because the optional lack of encryption was harmful) and has seen usage grow since.
Help me understand this argument. I’ve never understood how removing transparent transactions would fuel growth. I think it would do the opposite.
I for one wouldn’t be able to purchase zec if it weren’t for transparent transactions. What’s the harm in allowing people to purchase transparently and then shielding it?
Transparent Zcash integrations are easy (similar to Bitcoin). Exchanges (centralized and decentralized) have limited dev hours and/or like to bootlick regulators and chain surveillance software firms so given a choice they will implement transparency rather than privacy. That is why the status quo makes it far easier to purchase Zcash transparently.
The status quo is also slowing shielded DEX development (because we keep funding easier/cheaper DEX development that relies on Zcash transparency.
Could removing t addresses harm exchange support in the short term? Yes. However this is a temporary problem as dev funds can be solely devoted to shielded work. With enough shielded ZEC demand from DEXs centralized exchanges may follow with full shielded support, but they will not be required.
Currently mining (and staking in the future) and shielded DEX support is all we need to access ZEC). We dont need TEX addresses to please binance or T addresses. They are holding us back (both in terms of dev resources) and creating more work to worry about the impact of removing an increasing number of transparent transaction integrations that never should have been created in the first place.
If Monero can fund shielded DEX work, and retain a few major centralized exchange listings (Kraken) so can Zcash.
Optional privacy is creating both technical debt for Zcash and reputational harm. Theoretically perfect privacy loses utility if merchants such as VPNs and encrypted email providers refuse to accept Zcash while accepting our competition (Monero still has inferior privacy guarantees until FCMP++ are introduced).
Zcash will be taken more seriously by the world as practical currency for private payments and wealth storage when we remove the transparent tx training wheels!
I agree that there could be far more shielded Zec. It has been nice that we went from 2 to 3 million shielded Zec rather quickly this year.
I remember as a user of curve . finance that it was easy to switch liquidity pools. Many people do it as there are incentives for doing so (higher roi).
If we do want more shielded Zec then we could implement higher staking rewards for shielded Zec as opposed to transparent Zec?