we hear a lot of talk about bitcoin originally designed to be P2P cash. That’s not true based on this email discussing the topic. the idea was for bitcoin to be a collateral token upon which banks would issue their own cash (Decentralized Cash with BTC as collateral or a mixture of collateral) much like how gold used to back fiat currencies around the world. so USDz, Euroz, etc would be issued with ZEC as collateral (or they could also use other collateral if they choose). this is my reading and very consistent with what I and others here have been proposing for a long time now.
now we all know from real life experience and empirical evidence that ZEC won’t work as P2P cash for spending for day to day transactions. The monetary policy of the US is going to be different than the monetary policy of Japan or Europe. So a one size fits all single global currency (ie ZEC) simply doesn’t work at the customer level (it only works at the central bank collateral level to keep the central banks honest). Hal Finney knew this very early in Bitcoin’s life cycle! The guy was obviously very smart and understood money! This is the way forward @joshs
since it was designed as a base layer for banks, it clearly was also expected to be compliant with regulations. So by going to an extreme version of privacy is actually what’s not in line with satoshis vision.
So Zcash went off track from Satoshi’s vision in two critical areas: 1) believing ZEC was the single global centralized cash for P2P transactions as opposed to a collateral token supporting decentralized cash that meets the needs of each country as they see fit, and 2) believing privacy extended beyond private transactions and into getting around government compliance because without compliance how can it be a collateral token for bank to bank transfers? Even if ZK proofs were invented at that time, it would still have to have been compliant to work as designed and for its use case.
@joshs new reboot vision with USDz, and stablecoins or whatever else a bank wants to issue is actually what is in line with satoshi vision! ZEC powers the network as a utility or collateral (in whole or part or something else) token upon which individual country stablecoins are issued against.