transfer layer privacy should receive much more attention. a primary target is developing, testing and documenting Zcash integration with Tor.
for example, the implementation of routing privacy-sensitive information through Tor seemed like a hot idea before the launch of the network, but has been neglected for the last 5 years:
the documentation of Tor compatibility (and proxification in general) is very sparse and in ways also out-of-date:
more complete guides are scattered over this forum, third-party Github repos and other websites, and often out-of-date.
actually, if things remain this way, compatibility with Tor will soon end. v2 onions will cease working in 10 months. this will also break Zcash on Tor and I see no action plan for upgrading the code base to v3 onion support:
I could go on. we can dream about atomic swaps, scaling and smart contracts, but as long as you can’t easily hide the fact that you use Zcash and violent actors can target you based on your network traffic, using Zcash is little improvement over other coins.
Perhaps just an optional zcashd installation script that automatically installs tor and takes ownership of the torrc file to add the proper lines if tor isn’t already there, I think thats all there is extra to it.
I have has some ideas that I would be willing to do (and have the ability to do) - where do I submit them? I dont want a grant
I dont like grants. I would like a contract for preapproved welscoped work. do you think there is room for that? – where if there is concern that scope needs to cahnge, work is not being done, etc, their is actual recourse.
Ive submitted to contract proposals (I think) and would would like to submit a couple more **BUT ONCE AGAIN THE CONTRACTS PROCESSS IS JUST AS SHIT AS THE GRANTS APPLICATIONS"
You dont pay for done working work, only speculative. - Wlll at least as well as I am concenered from my OSS background ( debliveralty missed of the FF - we have a dev fund)
It would be convenient for quik-starting a fresh build but theres not much to it anyways is what I’m getting at, if tor is already installed (which takes 3 lines) then it only requires adding a few lines to torrc and launching zcashd with a few flags, perhaps it only necessitates a bounty. Doing it this way is more explicit.
I was actually on a call with Tor folks a couple weeks ago about Zbay and invited them to apply. There is a bunch of work on the Tor side that would make integrating Tor easier, especially on the light client side of things!
We’re actually already kinda moving in this direction, as part of our previous Zcash Foundation grant. We’re building an off-chain layer for group chats based on Tor, libp2p, GossipSub, and OrbitDB. We’re testing all of this internally now and messaging is really fast. It feels just like Slack or Discord.
Once we have that down, I’m really interested in using out-of-band message delivery to deliver the Zcash transactions themselves, which will be way faster than sending money using the existing light wallet stack.
And probably before we do that we’ll start sending notifications to users that their payment is on the way.
