My original teasing of the “Super Transparent” address type that should be available to all Zcashers.
It inherits all Transparent features, plus it is restricted to only be able to interact with only S-T or T address features.
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I wish this was sarcasm, but sadly it is not.
Binance Delisting Zcash is an existential threat, unfortunately we haven’t got the luxury (different from Monero for example) of being able to show them our middle fingers.
You can see my remarks weeks ago, which already anticipated and accounted for this reality.
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Has there been any mention of GDPR compliance in these discussions about these super transparent addresses?
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Here’s a quick prototype.
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I think it’s not good to make Zcash confusing for new users. Also, Coinmarketcap, which is connected to Binance, confuses people by telling them about Zcash “token contract address” on Binance Chain. I’ve met people who wanted a “private” Zcash, but when I suggested using well-known Zcash wallets, they actually had BEP20 tokens on Binance Chain.
Binance is not a SAFU partner for Zcash.
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Zcash already has bad reputation (unfairly) of being a “fed coin with a back door” or non-private privacy coin. Yeilding to Binance here and making an exchange only address is not only terrible optics for the narrative but will hamper shieled pool adoption severely.
The industry as a whole is moving away for CEXes (thanks to last cycles implosions) and I think we need to dig our heels in here
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Yes, we brought up GDPR during our first discussion with Binance and explained that Zcash’s encrypted memo field supports Travel Rule compliance for shielded transactions. However, Binance has been more focused on MiCA, which states that exchanges must prevent the trading of “crypto assets with built-in anonymization” unless their transaction history can be identified by authorized service providers. Binance believes other jurisdictions will adopt regulations similar to MiCA in the near future.
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I missed this post the first time it rolled though it seems.
Here’s the thing: Zcash isn’t in the same league as Bitcoin or Litecoin, which are all about UTXO, PoW, and T2T. Our superpower is privacy, and that’s what makes us stand out.
I think it’s key that we don’t lose sight of what Zcash is all about. Changing our whole protocol just to fit into these new laws? That’s not the way. Sure, staying on exchanges feels important, but it’s like a short-term fix that doesn’t really solve anything. Next thing you know, there’s a new rule and we’re back to square one.
We gotta build Zcash the way it’s meant to be – a tech that makes a real difference for folks. Governments and their rules will eventually have to catch up with tech, not the other way around.
So, my take? Let’s not water down what Zcash is for some quick gains. Let’s keep pushing for a future where privacy isn’t just an option, but the norm. The whole delisting thing might seem like a setback, but it’s actually a chance for us to double down on what we stand for.
Make zcash so good exchanges will fight governments to list it. Anything less is a waste of all our collective time
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It is sad, but true. A Binance delisting is existential in the context that it would destroy Zcash liquidity and reputation in a way that would damage the ZF, ECC, and ZCG treasuries to the point of no recovery.
Being optimistic about a Delisting would lead me to think 25-50% less total liquidity, and a similar markdown in the value of ZEC. We’ve already gone on at great lengths here in the forum about the thin ice that the big 3 are skating on financially & productively.
With a new Super Transparent address type, the MiCA problem is solved for Binance, and it solves the similar requests for all of the rest of the big CEXes.
90% of all of Zcash coins and transactions are already Transparent, so we’re really not doing too much damage respectively to build this super transparent feature.
Two months worth of work (the ounce of prevention) to mitigate against the proverbial Pound of Cure (a cascade of delistings)
Scanning through this thread, their silence is deafening. 3 groups whose entire purpose of being is to rally the community, build awesome tech, and shoot zcash to the financial prominence are instead working on how to continue paying themselves instead. No significant return on investment to zcash compared to any other community. let them go the way of the other ico groups.
Embrace the delisting, it proves the thesis the tech is more powerful than government monitoring. This is a victory party, not a pity party.
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I like your earlier post above, but this is bad take brother.
Even before I came back to ECC last week, I was on calls with @aquietinvestor and Binance. Jason has been working hard on this for many weeks - on calls with some of us, and in a Telegram group with them to provide them reasonable options. It’s the opposite of silence. @nuttycom from ECC is also in this thread.
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As a ZCG member who hasn’t (I don’t think) posted in this thread yet, I appreciate and understand the callout. I suppose I’ll give my two cents.
I think @chilebob said it best and most concisely. I too would rather we face the fear, and risk dying as a real privacy coin, than compromise the coin’s core values this time, and next time, and next time, pivoting ZEC development to a likely never-ending game of compliance whack-a-mole.
It’s possible a Binance delisting is catastrophic to the ZEC price, but I don’t think that’s a guarantee. Given that we have a public delisting date posted in a public thread, I’d think it could be priced in already.
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That makes no sense.
90% of ZEC today are Transparent
A similar vast majority of transactions are Transparent.
We’re not a Privacy Coin. We’re a Transparent blockchain with sparsely used, technically challenging, optional privacy features.
These truths, in combination with the financial and reputational damage from a Binance delisting, are why I’ve been yelling about it since day one.
Zcash needs Super Transparent addresses/ transactions.
That upgrade would future proof the project against any future threats like we’re up against currently.
Some opinions above are stunningly bad. We’re already out of the Top 100, and falling further towards irrelevance every day. Flipping the bird to Binance (and by association, to every other CEX) is the worst decision for Zcash.
This project has 0% chances of surviving, let alone mainstreaming itself, by getting removed from Binance.
I appreiciate your liking my eariler post @joshs. What specific efforts are you putting in place to help shape MiCA, VARA, and other emerging regulations to ensure privacy and zero knowledge coins are not relegated to “bad actor” pools?
The only option is that Binance on thier own as a business:
- can hire more technically competent developers,
- they can hire lobbiests to shape regulations,
- they can list whatever they can when they want because they are a for profit.
Challenges I think about when i think of zcash:
No hardware wallets, bloated nodes, there are no working multisigs, pre halo pools are tech debt, zcash is being left out of the golden age of snark/stark tech, post devfund zcash ecosystem, post quantum zcash, successful launch of zsa’s, transitioning a decentralized network from zcashd to zebra, the Miner pool consolidation threat
Problems i tend not to worry about:
- how to create a t2t only subset of utxos
Governments work on long consertive timelines and exchanges list coins when there is demand. Neither of those should shape the roadmap and mission of zcash, both will change to favor zcash with adoption and scale.
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It feels like the real problem is Zcash is for better or worse (and right now sounds like worse) pinned to the USD fiat currency. All 3 orgs depend on that. If Binance delists and the ZEC crashes, then you’re trying to market Zcash as a project to private investors to get the capital to continue operating with the org structure in place currently, or you let the orgs fail and drive the project in a truly decentralized open source manner.
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With the existence of Monero, and dozens of other more successful ZKP blockchains and L2s, we are fooling ourselves to think that we’ve got the luxuries of time, or going even more decentralized (post ZF, ECC, ZCG).
Building on and around Zcash is very complex and very niche. We won’t survive technically without ZF or ECC.
There is already enough Zcash FUD drifting around the cryptoverse. A Binance delisting, and the implied risk of a cascade of CEX delistings, is not what we want to have happen to kick-off 2024.
If users want “Super Transparent Transactions” then they can use Bitcoin. We already have public or private addresses and they serve users for both transparent and private use cases.
I think it’s a bad precedent to set core protocol to try to cater to needs of random exchanges because it implies that compromising privacy is acceptable because some entity asked for it. We have spent tons of time education and showing compliance with things like the travel rule.
What’s next? Some government says “we don’t like privacy coins” so we remove private transactions all together? 
If we don’t have privacy then we are simply Bitcoin, or Litecoin or any other of the million Bitcoin forks, making even more transparent transactions is zero value add to Zcash and damages Zcash reputation.
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It sounds like you know a bit about these regs. If so, you understand that MiCA is quite complicated and how it will be enacted and interpreted in each country is quite complicated. Unfortunately, we do not have the resources to try to affect these kind of regulations on a global scale. Until earlier this year, it’s what Gary (former head of regulatory relations) was focused on. This included work alongside exchanges. Coinbase, for one, communicated that their support of ZEC in the EU is completely compliant with MiCA.
We are still on the ground in DC where @paulbrigner has been extremely effective given our size. He will continue to partner with the Blockchain Association and with Coinbase in 2024. I committed to joining the Universal Privacy Alliance the end of last week, which is an early org, but which does have some valuable connections in the EU and I’m hopeful that it will prove to be a united and mutually beneficial front.
The situation at Binance is more complicated than MiCA, and I have reason to suspect that strong US attention as part of the recent settlement is relevant here. We need more swaps and DEX options.
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Apparently we’re private enough to be threatened with delisting, which is, to me, somewhat heartening.
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