Just a quick point about ZSA’s
In the right conditions—a big if, which looks like a “no” right now—in the right conditions, an excellent implementation of ZSAs would put Zcash directly in competition with Blockstream for one of its major B2B products. (I admire Blockstream—but if Zcash has a better offering, then Zcash should compete on the merits.)
I believe that the current strategy of desperately pursuing retail is pure folly. The niche retail market for privacy coins is already saturated. ECC has already achieved one of the key requirements for absolutely dominating that niche: Getting rid of the “trusted setup”. And it is not a market that will be expanded by advertising on social media. With the exception of some public figures (such as Snowden), people who really care about privacy eschew social media!
Retail will be brought in by B2C, if there is a better strategy for showing retail businesses what they have to gain. Bring retailers to see the value to themselves of accepting Zcash, and then let them deal with their customers. (Yes, I have ideas for how to do this.) Outside of the privacy coin niche, one of the best approaches to retail is indirect: Sell to the middleman. Another is to build whole new horizontally- and vertically-integrated platforms for this purpose (more ideas…).
And look beyond that! There is big money in B2B and in other sophisticated, high-value financial usages.
As a part of what I call the “privacy elephant” in a yet-unfinished essay, my vision for Zcash is to position itself to compete head-on with Blockstream Liquid. Bless their hearts, most retail BTC sat-stackers don’t even know that Liquid exists.
Requirements:
- Stable ZEC economics. Any major change of coin economics (including, but not limited to POS) destroys confidence in the ecosystem and its long-term stability.
- A Bitcoin-friendly ecosystem. Big talk about replacing BTC is a fantasy—and it is self-defeating. Hostility towards Bitcoin drives money away. This forum didn’t have that type of toxic culture in 2017. For comparison, note that although I mentioned somewhere here my dislike for Ethereum, in the same breath, I praised the Ethereum Foundation for working with ECC. Unless it were to be contextually relevant (e.g., perhaps in a discussion of “switch to POS” rheoric), this is not the right place for me to be nursing the grudge that I’ve had against Ethereum since their “irregular state change”.
- An excellent implementation of ZSAs. Needs to be designed and reviewed for suitability for business use cases, not only flashy retail stuff. I will take a look soon. Not to restrict use cases, but to make sure that use cases aren’t missed, a point-by-point comparison with Liquid should be done.
-
A trustless or trust-minimized 2-way pegged bridge for zk-BTC, plus other trustless bridges. Preferably built with zero-knowledge proof technology, like the
=nil;Foundation’s project for a trustless bridge between other blockchains. Hey, are there any world-class experts in zero-knowledge proofs here?
Not to beat a dead horse, but I think that catching the node up to parity with upstream would also help. Also, maintaining API and protocol ecosystem compatibility with Bitcoin is critical. Being a Bitcoin-like coin with strong L1 privacy is a Microsoft strategy: Embrace and extend. I’d thought that that was Zcash’s original design.
Beyond that: What do exchanges do, if they want to settle between themselves a large block of BTC without inciting Twitter speculation about an impending pump or crash? Sometimes, I wonder about that—and about other Liquid use cases not discussed on “crypto Twitter”.
I recall that long ago, I saw a quote from Greg Maxwell explaining that a lack of privacy is a major deterrent to business adoption of Bitcoin. (Spent too long searching for the source, in support of intended essay about the privacy elephant; cannot yet find.)
I myself observe that the majority of ordinary individuals do not care about their own privacy. Proof: Google and Facebook exist. Proof: Most people accept doing KYC. Proof: After the Snowden revelations, nothing really changed. Proof: PGP is over 30 years old, and most people still don’t use it. Proof: …I could continue all day.
Businesses care about their privacy. Money talks. Commercial espionage is a thing. Leaking your financials (and your financial relationships!) to competitors on a global public ledger is bad for business.
I think it’s is no coincidence that Maxwell invented Confidential Transactions, and that Blockstream originally adopted that for Liquid.
I think that would be a great position for Zcash—if Zcash wishes to choose that direction. And though I don’t imagine that ZEC will ever replace BTC, I think that a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship between the two ecosystems would bring a flood of value into ZEC.
To suppose that people would embrace Zcash for high-value financial uses without buying into ZEC is an unrealistic concern, in my opinion. Not even for fees, which I advocate should be kept low as practicable; I disagree with the comparison to ETH gas. Just because people who come to depend on the Zcash ecosystem for high-value usages will probably wind up buying ZEC—even using it as money!
In addition to the benefits of such an arrangement in itself, I also see this as one of several ways to push for real privacy in Bitcoin, as Zcash establishes itself as the privacy leader. Win-win. Good for Bitcoin, good for Zcash—and it makes the world a better place.
No. Before that: Community fractures over the so-called “Bitcoin Foundation” starting around 2013 (Zcashers take note!), which devolved into the Fork Wars from around 2015, etc. By the way, I think it’s likely that if the so-called “Bitcoin Foundation” had not served as a vehicle for Mike Hearn to sow anti-privacy, anti-fungibility memes, maybe Bitcoin would have strong privacy by now. Many, perhaps most Bitcoin maxis love privacy. Hearn is long gone, but Bitcoin is still a battleground between pro-privacy and anti-privacy forces.
Speaking for myself, I like a few altcoins that made their own tokens and their own chains from genesis—but I have an unlimited hostility towards all of the scam-forks and attempted scam-forks: BU, XT, BCH, BSV, S2X, “Bitcoin Diamond”, “Bitcoin Gold”, et al., ad nauseam.
Many (not all!) Bitcoin “maximalists” have their own special altcoins that they dearly want to succeed, like me with my ZECs; many are more or less privacy-oriented. For instance, the Bitcoin Forum’s administrator is publicly known to have some sort of affinity for GRIN. GRIN has enough privacy that unless I am misremembering, it’s suffered some FUD delistings for “oh noes, untraceable money!!!”
Way too many do BTC+XMR. I think that some of them would be more receptive to Zcash now that the “trusted setup” is dead. Discussing privacy coins with people in those circles, the one and only argument I could never entirely answer was “trusted setup”. Now, it is gone—but POS is a dealbreaker! That is Zcash shooting itself in the foot—in so very many ways.
This is all relevant to ZEC and to the Zcash Foundation’s long-term strategy, for reasons that should be obvious—plus one that is too easy to ignore, as I mentioned in my prior post on this thread, and elsewhere: Bitcoin is the one and only coin from which Zcash has taken so much MIT-licensed code in the open-source spirit, without ever yet giving anything back.