Hi Zcash community. I’ve been reading through comments on various threads where community members have expressed various concerns and questions about the company’s efforts across communications and adoption. I have responsibility for those things. I’d like to open this channel for your thoughts and feedback on that topic. I’m happy to answer whatever questions you have. Please note that I am unable to respond to inquiries related to the price of Zcash.
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I’m curious to know ‘what things you can talk about here & when?’ I’m sure there’s stuff happening that has to be kept quiet until a public announcement can be made, which is normal & fine. Is there a policy that you can share about that or is that on a case-by-case basis?
Are there preferred channels for announcements (if so, could the forum be one?), or is it more of a broadcast approach to tell everyone at the same time? There are all sorts of channels (twitter/forum/reddit/chat/blog)
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Why are there not vector files of ANY Zcash icons or logo’s?
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I can talk about a lot of things. Usually the things that I can’t talk about fall into one of the following categories: under NDA (like we had with Coinbase), where the meeting or event explicitly prohibits it (like a regulator event we attended yesterday), where there is an expectation of privacy by a person or 3rd party, when a meeting is under chatham house rules, etc. Sometimes it’s explicit. Sometimes it’s judgement. But we generally push to be as transparent as possible - example, repeatedly requesting that we can release the results of the Coinbase campaign.
Generally announcements go out via Twitter, Blockfolio Signal and I believe Elise and Paige generally get them out to FB, here, the weekly update, etc. We also started releasing a quarterly newsletter and webcast.
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the svg files are here: Zcash Media Kit - Zcash
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How would you say resources (ie: peoples time) is split between various activites - or better put, what are the top five areas you guys work on & how much focus does each get?
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My team includes Elise (communications), Paige (user education), Ryan (web development) and Brad (half time - bus dev which really means partnership work).
This is a crazy, move fast, complicated, global thing. Time is spent across adoption efforts, partner engagement, legal work, regulatory engagement, web / translations, user documentation, pr, events, comms, research/planning, etc. and varies by week or current focus areas. For example, last week I was in New York. I (and Zooko and DC, our COO) had about a dozen meetings with various crypto thought leaders on our roadmap. I had a few other partner conversations - Gemini, Flexa, Bitso and a vendor meeting. I also spoke on a panel at Consensus. Brad and Paige were also there and led sessions at the conference and participated in partner meetings. I also attended a half day session for Coincenter supporters and a few other things. Oh, and we finalized and released the transparency report.
This week we’re working to split out the ECC website from Z.cash, I’m in California for a private regulator / crypto event that a16z put together, I’m working on a project around reframing the privacy narrative with cross-project cooperation, drafted a trademark proposal that we intend to share with the foundation soon, working on follow-up to our engagement in Japan, etc. In addition to the website, the team is working through some comms prep, helping update data on Messari, etc. Paige put out blogs on 2.0.5 and the migration tool. Also, I’m trying to wrangle in partners / funding on an initiative that reaches a specific population to demonstrate product market fit and generate some positive press.
I hope that helps give you an idea of the range of work…
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Is anything being done about Zcash being re-added to Bitmex(if you can talk about it), and about un-banning Zcash from Japan ?
I haven’t spoken with Bitmex since last year. I need to reach out as they had indicated intent to re-list.
Zcash isn’t banned in Japan. The JVCEA (the SRO) issued guidance with the blessing of JFSA that restricted exchanges from listing coins used for money laundering and in dark markets. All Japanese exchanges delisted coins with privacy features to simplify compliance. We met with the director general of the JVCEA a few weeks ago. It was a positive meeting and we are working toward a positive outcome. We’re on their timeline, however. It will take some time.
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Messaging question:
Recently on another forum I came across a thread where Zcash was mentioned as being backdoor friendly. My thought is that these users equated regulator-friendly with being backdoor friendly, the former meaning that the ECC will explain and communicate with regulators without giving those regulators unfettered access to opaque addresses.
How do you plan to make sure that users have 100% certainty that Zcash’s z_addrs are indeed opaque to everyone, including regulators, from any past and future ceremonies? This is a big hinderance to future users and investors.
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I just want to make sure to ask this question again. With the 2.0.5 upgrade, it is no longer possible for someone to dilute supply of zcash beyond what is suppose to be atm (around 6,589,369 as it says on coinmarketcap) ?
Are we done with that issue once and for all ?
Like Monero, the Zcash protocol supports viewing keys. The code is open source. I think information about the ceremony has been well documented. But I would love to see the community move Zcash to a different form of setup or eliminate it when feasible.
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The Sprout pool can’t go negative. That vuln was limited to Sprout. But this conversation is bigger than this particular thread. 
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Are you able to legally and definitively say that the ECC would never support or comply with any attempt to de-anonymize Zcash users for regulators? The code is public, but the mathematics is complex.
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Zooko has already said he will never support a backdoor, and it’s already existing ECC policy not to do so. https://twitter.com/mineZcash/status/1129415574080106496?s=19
Also https://twitter.com/feministPLT/status/1129090522826641409?s=19
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The privacy in Zcash is guaranteed by encryption… the zk part just makes that encrypted data verifiable. Private keys are private keys, you own your private keys created on your computer (spending or viewing) and the money it controls.
There is no vulnerability to privacy (or access to money) regarding the public parameter ceremonies or the zk-SNARK crypto in Zcash (vuln is related to counterfeiting).
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And btw, the fact that privacy is not dependent on soundness of the zk proving system, is an explicit design goal that will definitely be preserved in future versions of the protocol. Specifically, the proving system has a “subversion statistical zero knowledge” property that makes zk hold regardless of any potential subversion of the trusted setup (and the scope for flaws in this part of the proving system is severely limited). Privacy is dependent on zero knowledge and confidentiality of the note encryption; the latter uses a well-understood elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman based encryption scheme.
(Very minor caveat: there’s an interactive decryption-oracle attack on unlinkability of diversified Sapling addresses; the current protocol depends on soundness of Groth16 in order to prevent this attack. This is proposed to be fixed in NU3.)
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@joshs as I mention some time ago Bitrefill would be a great goal. With a huge impact.
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That would be great! We reached out and Brad spoke with them in Feb. The Zcash volume is too low per their standards and they had some regulatory concerns about accepting a privacy preserving currency. We’ll get back in touch later but you might also reach out to them and request support.
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It’s a circular issue, no volume no services, no services no volume. 
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