Do we want ZSAs?

[zancas]

@nuttycom mentioned here that zcashd deprecation is blocking ZSA release. He also mentioned that the ECC team was working on it. I believe that the ECC team under the influence from the core ECC engineers, made a miscalculation when opting to focus resources on lightclient production.

I have strong biases because I want Zingo to flourish. I think that makes me a reasonable person to present the following argument in the form of a series of pointed questions.

I have some questions about ZSAs, lightclients, and zcashd.

Is it the case that the @ZcashGrants ’ largest project, the ZSA implementation is blocked?

Is it the case that it’s blocked because of technical work that is within the specialized domain of the ECC core team?

Is it the case that there are at least 4 non-ECC shielded lightwallets under active development, with full-time teams?

• eZcash
• edge
• YWallet
• Zingo

Is it the case that while working on a pay-for-results grant ZingoLabs allocated resources to zcashd deprecation which:

• contributed to the zebrad regtest mode implementation
• produced a pure Rust lightwalletd implementation
• is close to validating zebrad support for lightclient operations

HINT: The answers to the above is yes.

What should the @ElectricCoinCo core team have as its highest priority?

Do we want zcashd deprecated?

Do we want ZSAs?

[battbot]

I personally want to see ZSAs more than anything else currently in the pipeline.

Edit* actually I want to see hardware wallet support for shielded zec even more than ZSAs

[Shawn]

@zancas

What should the @ElectricCoinCo core team have as its highest priority?

Do we want zcashd deprecated?

Do we want ZSAs?

Yes and Yes.

Zcashd gone is the first step towards getting ZSAs running. There’s no point in building infrastructure for ZSAs on Zcashd if Zcashd is going to be depreciated.

I’m a big fan of adding use cases and attracting users to Zcash. IMHO, ZSAs are a win-win-win situation for Zcash holders, Zcash users, and ZSA users:

Zcash holders benefit by adding demand for ZEC to issue/spend/burn ZSAs.

Everyday Zcash users benefit by increased activity in and out of the shielded pool, thereby increasing privacy.

ZSAs users benefit by having assets in a massive private pool: ( x.com)

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Digging up a few previous posts about ZSAs (previously called UDAa) :

Basics of blockchain economics (and how it should guide protocol changes)

I think a better whale question would be “should I transfer my BTC to ZBTC so I can gain some privacy?” How about my ETH to ZETH? As a whale I can take a dip in the Zcash private pools to gain privacy for my coins and take advantage of Zcashs much lower fee structure to transact with my new ZBTC before I convert it back to BTC sometime in the future. Is there a need for UDAs to somehow use real ZEC to pay transaction fees? Thereby the more transactions using Zcash UDAs the more Zcash…

The Future of Zcash

(The following is my personal perspective and does not represent the view of ZOMG as a whole). I believe that in the long run the two things that will help Zcash gain adoption and strength is a transition proof-of-stake and the inclusion on programmability at some layer. I believe that ZSAs are a great step in the right direction and should be put as a high priority for the 6th fork. There have been some questions and discussions around the economics of ZSAs. My general view on this is that: …

Shielded Assets Discussion

I’m really excited broadly about ZSAs - I think they bring a lot of good attention and expanded use cases for Zcash. I also get the feeling that a lot of people around these parts are, or at least claim to be, price agnostic, which I think is a mistake. The use case for ZEC as a private store of value/means of exchange relies on parties wanting to hold ZEC, as no one is going to feel comfortable about storing their savings or accepting payment in a depreciating asset, regardless of the other a…