Hello friends,
@fabacab , @cos and I just got back from DWeb Camp, the Internet Archive’s decentralized web gathering, held in a German forest for the first time. We joined about six hundred people living in a field together for the better part of a week. It was a nice break from the traditional city venue conferences, and a chance to slow down and connect. There is some irony in the builders of decentralized technologies coming to a centralized place, but we need human handshakes and laughter just as much as Ethernet and DNS to connect us.
We met a woman day one, as tenting neighbors, we exchanged brief “So what brings you to camp?”. We mentioned financial privacy, but didn’t expand in the moment as we both unpacking our bags and headed to dinner. But each day we saw her again and again, at breakfast or at the pool, our paths crossing between workshops. At some point we exchanged numbers, as we wanted to keep the connection alive and soon she got curious about zcash. She came to Vi’s workshop, and I sat right next to her as we walked through ZODL download and each step of the app. She loved the slow, step-by-step instructions and clear explanations for WHY we were using zcash over other coins. She needed a personal connection to trust, and steady reassurance each step of the journey. This is our WHY for doing what we do. There is no way to rush this, and the woods of Germany was the place to do it.
We were not trying to hand out the most swag at the party. We are trying to build relationships in a community, and expand the community over time.
Violet @fabacab gave a 10 minute lightning talk and then a 1.5 hour practical Zodl workshop; hands on, wallets out, recorded by the ZK AV Club run by @ryan.taylor . The workshop kept picking up people who wandered past and stopped to listen, which is the best possible signal at an event like this.
Stats
- 81 new contact cards saved across the team, meaning phone numbers exchanged to stay connected
- 37 reconnections people we had already met somewhere on the circuit
- 21 attendees at @fabacab 's 10 minute lightning talk
- 10+ attendees at @fabacab 's 1.5 hour practical Zodl workshop, growing as people stopped on their way past
- 23 new Zodl downloads, hands on during the workshop and beyond
- ~150 Zcash condoms handed out, always inside a conversation
Small disappointment: @squirrel and @kenzo ended up not making it to camp, and so we did not get to connect with them in person.
The 37 reconnections should not be dismissed merely as repeats to our outreach. These are people we had met once before and now actually know: shared meals, long walks, an argument about proof of work that ran past midnight. Berlin was 900 people through the door in three days, many of whom we saw again to deepen those relationships. Camp was five days of bumping into the same people over and over until the conversation got past the introduction. This is community building.
Our method: We sat at a new table every single meal, which put us in front of 2 to 4 new people per sitting across 3 full days and 2 half days. The camp then does the compounding for you. Meet someone at breakfast and you will see them again at a session, at the fire, or in the coffee line. We also attended workshops of our peers and after-dinner social events.
Impact Summary
I have written in past reports that it usually takes about three touchpoints before someone changes their mind and acts on it. What I want to add this time is that a touchpoint is not a pitch, it’s a person getting to know us.
Rebecca was hired to help us check guests in at the Zcash Privacy Späti. She had never heard of Zcash, and she thought crypto was mostly a scam. On our way out of Berlin, we reconnected for one last dinner before our flight…
1. Before the Späti. Hired help. Crypto is mostly a scam.
2. After the Späti. She has made friends with a few crypto educators. Fine, it is not a scam, but she has no interest in engaging with it herself.
3. After dinner in Berlin, the night after camp. She listened to us talk, excitedly and at length, about camp, the workshops, and the people we met. She starts asking questions. She sits down for a short Zodl demo, and now she was ready to listen and learn.
4. What she still needs: Probably one more connection point, or a concrete reason to onboard, like splitting a check with one of us, before she actually downloads and tries it.
She did not see an ad for a private payment processor, or an encrypted money meme that changed her mind. She made friends, and then got curious. That is the whole mechanism, and it took three days of Spati and a dinner out to get her from “scam” to “show me”.
The mechanism is normalization, not persuasion. An attendee at @fabacab 's workshop said he was far more willing to use Zcash now that he knew other people use it *daily*. His fear had never been technical; it was that being the only Zcash user in a room signals you are up to something. Hearing that ordinary people transact with it every day made it feel safe. You cannot deliver that with a pitch. It only comes from watching a community exist.
Reputation travels ahead of us now. Pascal walked up to @fabacab to ask about a friend who cannot get a German bank account, before he even knew who she was, because he had already heard she was the person to ask. Somebody vouched for her when she was not in the room. That only happens once you have spent enough time with people that they talk about you to their friends. He got useful, practical, expert advice from a person who relies on her own expertise to financially exist, and her advice did in fact point him and his friend-in-need towards a solution they were not previously familiar enough to explore. This is the invaluable virtuous circle of adoption fueled by in-person relationship building that no amount of code or online exposure can replace.
Connections of Note
ZK AV Club: They recorded @fabacab 's workshop, and we spent real time talking about how our work fits together. They archive the field’s major conversations. We build community and relationships in person. The two efforts run alongside each other well: showing up to the same events means our work has a record, and their archive gets another good conversation. We talked through their upcoming plans, Zcon in Cancún especially, and we both want to keep finding the events where it makes sense to show up together.
The Internet Archive (major sponsor of the camp): @readymouse shared a long conversation about the quiet crisis in archiving technical knowledge. The discussion: if Discord is where a community chats, fine, nobody needs to archive small talk. But Discord is increasingly where communities *solve technical problems*, and it is login-gated and hostile to crawlers. So as scientific and programming communities drift off open forums, wikis, Reddit, and Stack Exchange, into these walled spaces, we lose the ability to archive, query, and surface the record of how problems were actually solved. A generation of debugging knowledge is being written into rooms that cannot be indexed and will not survive. This is very much a self-reliance problem, and it is the sort of thing this camp exists to notice.
Other builders of the free internet: We enjoyed meals with developers from Nym, Nostr, the AT Protocol, and the Decentralized Identity Foundation. These are the people building the rest of the stack we depend on. Zcash is the money layer of a decentralized internet; it does not work as an island, and these are the folks laying the roads around it.
Two Amsterdam locals: I met two people who live in Amsterdam and are happy to point us at the real spots when we get there, the cafés and restaurants locals actually go to rather than the tourist traps. One knows a tour guide they could recommend. Nothing formal, but it takes some of the guesswork out of the guided tour idea in our Amsterdam proposal.
Ethereum Foundation: @cos spent time with Felix, tech lead on the official EF wallet. Felix agrees that the tradeoffs of programmability may make it a poor fit for Zcash, which is a useful data point given the ongoing conversation here. They also covered algocoins, how AI has reshaped Ethereum’s development process, and the EF’s recent turn toward privacy, including plans for private attestation of blocks. I see these conversations as friendly, water cooler conversations between technological neighbors, not working on the same project but we certainly live in the same ecosystem.
Bluesky: @cos talked with John (CTO) about the recent money printing bug, and about his view that metrics ruin events. His read was that we threw a good event during Berlin Blockchain Week Späti in spite of less wallet downloads than expected.
Zcash Foundation: @cos connected with John, who compared and contrasted the EF’s private attestation plans to Zcash’s private mining. @cos, John, Felix, and Enrique also got into Enrique’s multiplayer game emulator running on ATproto, and John explained how Arya is borrowing netcode from the game he is working on to improve Zcash. Felix floated using ZK proofs to validate high scores, which is either a joke or a grant application.
BREAD Cooperative: Both me and @cos connected with Josh on a partnership with Bitrefill and Blockspäti, and on our mutual friend Connor, who is working with Tachyon Labs on the Tachyon upgrade. Post-quantum came up here too, as it did in several other conversations of @cos 's over the week; it seems to be genuinely top of mind for people right now.
We deeply appreciate the @ZCG community grant committee’s support of our work and contributions.
A note on the “Z”
Not really a DWeb finding. It is a pattern I keep hitting at European events, and DWeb is where I heard it stated most plainly.
The Problem: The Latin “Z” was painted on Russian military vehicles in the invasion of Ukraine, most likely as a unit marking to prevent friendly fire. It did not stay tactical. Pro-invasion Russians adopted it as a civilian emblem, on billboards, merch, and social media, and the Kremlin folded it into official propaganda. Opponents of the war call it the “zwastika.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z\_(military_symbol)
Reactions:
1. Pro-war Russians. To them the Z is *positive*. It is a badge of support for the invasion.
2. Ukrainians, and anti-war Russian and Belarusian émigrés. To them it is the mark of an invading army, and the reaction is visceral.
The second group is large, they live in the European cities where we run events and they have an acute, non-theoretical need for censorship-resistant money. They are close to our ideal user base, and they flinch at our letterform.
In Zcash’s defense: Zcash launched in 2016; the military association dates to February 2022. The problem is collision, not intent, we understand this.
Our Response: I am not asking for a rebrand and I have no complete fix to propose. One mitigation is simply to ensure that European-focused events adopt a fuller design of “Zcash” rather than the “Z” money symbol on its own. Using “Zcash” in full may reduce the instinctual flinch that occurs with a plain “Z” collision. The propaganda “Z” is also sometimes in a square box, so Zcash should avoid encasing it as such. For now, I want it on the record that this comes up unprompted, from people who otherwise like the project.