Hello! I’ve been having this recurring thought. Maybe I’m getting ahead of ourselves a bit.
How to build a ZEConomy around light client servers infrastructure?
Problem:
- Wallets make quite a parasitic usage of lightwalletd (and from Zainod in the immediate future)
- The costs of uptime are not huge but they are not free
- ZCG currently funds this infra. Should it?
- Uptime is not a problem now but could be if ZEC grows in adoption 2 or 3x. Currently the user base of mobile wallets is potentially 20-25k users (per Zashi downloads reports + others)
- The incentives of running such infrastructure is not clear for good actors (besides altruism or getting paid by ZCG)
- Bad actors have more incentives run “Free Email” kind of light client infrastructure (learn about users’ IPs and sell that data) than good actors
Ideas:
- tachyon promises trustless syncing servers, but ETA is not clear. ZEConomy of this still not clear.
- PoS Could solve this because validators get rewards and they could also be light client servers since they would run Zaino and Zallet to receive funds.
- there should be some sort of incentivized wallet infrastructure protocol so wallet users pay for what they get and good actors have better incentives to run infrastructure than bad actors.
requirements:- uptime is rewarded
- service provider can handle ZK-proofs to clients to prove they are running the binary that doesn’t log any data.
possible REAL solutions:
- Start researching about this problem and try to find how other cryptocurrency protocols have tackled this
- study how those findings can be applied to Zcash, post NU7 with Hybrid PoW-PoS and Tachyon in mind
What are your thoughts on this?