December 6, 2019 - ECC Weekly Update

Ecosystem Updates Weekly Forum Updates
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Hi everyone! Here’s your update for 12/6 (with updated links, including Fellowship of the ZEC).

This week in privacy, Brave Browser crosses a big milestone in terms of growth, 10 million monthly users. Remember when Apple released all those ads celebrating its privacy policy? Well, they might have to backpedal. KrebsonSecurity discovered that Apple iPhones still track location for certain customers even when location tracking has been turned off, according to a report from Fortune. TikTok, the latest social media craze popular with GenZ, settled a $1.1 M class action lawsuit for violating children’s privacy laws. This isn’t the first time TikTok has been fined in the US. Earlier this year (Feb 2019), TikTok was fined $5.7 M on a similar violation. Learn more here. Have you heard about COPRA? It’s a new consumer privacy bill introduced to Congress by Washington Sen. Cantwell. The last two weeks I’ve been following mostly US privacy laws but if you have any suggestions on legislation around the world, please drop it in the comments.

Over Thanksgiving, I spent some time reading up on privacy issues around the world. Internet freedom around the world has declined in 2019 according to a Freedom House report in November. Amnesty International released a 60 page report on surveillance and privacy. I learned about the arrest of Ola Bini, privacy activist and friend of Julian Assange. He was arrested in Ecuador the same day Assange was evicted from the Ecuadorian embassy in London. I also read up on a bit of privacy legal history. In 1890, Warren and Brandeis wrote The Right to Privacy article in the Harvard Law Review. This essay is one of the most influential articles in history of American law. Check out the full article here.

Here are the latest updates from ECC:

  • ECC has posted its analysis of the community sentiment. According to the updated timeline, later today Zcash Foundation will publish their analysis on the Dev Fund community sentiment and board discussion. Follow the discussion thread and updated timeline.

  • Blossom activation is right around the corner! Mark your calendars for Dec 11.

  • ICYMI - the Crypto Community Project was featured in the New Yorker, zcash got a few shout outs.

  • ECC got into the holiday spirit this season with our new tradition, Fellowship of the ZEC.

Core Team: Previously the Arborist team, this team focuses on the development of the zcashd client, librustzcash and protocol upgrades. Follow along with team discussions in the Community Chat #public-community-arborist

  • We reviewed and merged the Merkle Mountain Range (MMR) crate into librustzcash, which is a big milestone on the path to Flyclient support which will provide massive performance benefits.

Development Infrastructure Team: The Development Infrastructure team ensures developers have the tools and infrastructure they need. Join this team in the #dev-infrastructure chat channel.

  • We have completed initial phase of CI updates to allow code to merge into zcash master. Currently we have coverage for Debian 8, Debian 9, Debian 10, Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04, and Ubuntu 19.04. In the coming weeks we intend to fully update the entire Python stack to Python 3, while adding in build support for CentOS, Arch, ARM, Windows cross compile, and Mac cross compile.
  • We are also continuing work on GitHub - zcash-hackworks/zcashd_exporter: Prometheus exporter for zcashd to leverage much of our new Docker updates.

Wallet Team

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Nice work.

404 on these links fyi.

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thanks for the heads up - I’ll see if I can find the updated links or else just remove them.

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Can anybody tell me what the transaction capacity of the Zcash network will be after the Blossom upgrade (transactions per second), please?

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Without any garantee i think the current transactions per seconds is somewhere 15-25 (that’s what i remember!), halving the block time in Blossom alone shouldn’t increase the transactions per seconds but the transactions per hour for example.

If there are no other improvements in Blossom than halving the block time the transactions per second should stay the same but due more blocks per hour it would increase of course the amount of transactions per hour. I didn’t read any technical paper about it, just following logic and common sense + some guessing, lol.

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Everything you said sounds right to me… But wouldnt more TX per hour imply more txs per sec because you can always divide an hour by number of seconds? I cannot however find the flaw in your logic, but I am also working so I am distracted.

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I’am myself still thinking if my comment and guess is correct as i’am working too. I’am not sure myself, hence why i wrote without garantee.

I as well would appreciate an quality answer here from one of the devs or someone with better technical understanding than both of us, lol.

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“Transactions per second” isn’t a directly-meaningful quantity in any block chain that has a block interval larger than one second (e.g. Zcash, Bitcoin). It is simply an indicator of throughput, by taking the expected rate of block production, and multiplying by the expected maximum number of “average” transactions that can fit into a block. Because Blossom halves the expected block interval, it doubles the expected rate of block production, and therefore doubles the “transactions per second” that Zcash could theoretically sustain.

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If I wished to compare transaction capacity of lets say BTC and ZEC how would I do that? And also how would I compare it to something traditional like the Visa network (If only to order of magnitude degree)? Daily transaction capacity?

Edit: All this disregarding second layer scaling.

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If i remember right the average transactions per seconds for Zcash right now is in the range of 15-20.
At a block time of currently 150 seconds this would mean the maximum capacity for transactions per block is around 2,250 - 3,000 transactions, is this correct?

You would have to know the block capacity and block time and than divide the capacity versus the block time in seconds to compare them if you want to make a comparison on transactions per second level. At least that’s what i think is the only way if you don’t have the technical details ready for each currrency.
Maybe it would be even possible to make a calculation based on block size in MB, max. transaction size in byte and block time in seconds.

Just my opinion: Comparing to Visa for example should be quiet easy:

Visa transactions per day: 150,000,000 (150M)
Visa transactions per hour: 6,250,000 (6.25M)
Visa transactions per minute: 104,167
Visa transactions per second: 1,736

If you want to compare this to ZEC or BTC for example just convert it into the same time span:

For example as i was just reading that the all time high in a BTC block was 2700 transactions, block time on average is 10 minutes, means 2,700 / 10 / 60 = 4.5 transactions per second.

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