January 25, 2019 - Weekly Update (Community + Comms)

This is our fortnightly community and communications update; last week’s engineering update is available here.

Please feel free to peruse and work on the “Encouraged Community Work” GitHub board for things that the Company can’t get to in the next 4 months that people in the community are likely to have the context to work on.

From the blog

We kicked off a new blog series to profile the people behind Zcash technology; this week we featured Daira Hopwood, Engineer and Protocol Designer.

Alejandro Machado and Jill Carlson wrote a guest post on the blog this week, researching the practical viability of cryptocurrency as a tool to overcome economic repression and hyperinflation in Venezuela.

Events

Mark your calendar! Zcon1 will take place June 22–24 in Split, Croatia. The Foundation will announce additional details in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

Spotlight

This week Least Authority released details about the Private Periodic Payment Protocol, or P4, which aims to define the way in which subscription services can be funded using end-to-end private cryptocurrency payments. P4 incorporates the use of Zcash shielded transactions for private payments and leverages the Tor anonymity network’s onion services to radically reduce the amount of personally identifiable information (PII) available to merchants. In addition, P4 introduces periodicity to cryptocurrency payments by bootstrapping a secure channel between customers and merchants (using the SPAKE2-based "magic-wormhole" library) through which invoices can be delivered and paid.

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I’m glad to hear about Zcon1. I’m planning on going. I couldn’t go to Zcon0 last year, even though I lived 2 hours from Montreal. @elisehamdon I would like to ask for the organizers to consider some things.

  • Please remember that some people are still new to blockchains and zk-proofs. Please considering having tutorials and review of basics, specially zk-proofs, SNARKs and similar theories, even as pre-event training sessions.

  • Please note that I, like other people, do not currently work in the field of cryptocurrencies & blockchains, but we would like to transition to the field. That is, we’ll take vacation and pay everything out of our own pocket to go. Please consider some form of registration that is fair and considerate of that.

  • I don’t know how this went in Zcon0, but consider some setup where people can put their hands on software and try it out, mixing experienced developers/users with newbies.

Looking forward to meeting many people from the community in Croatia.

Best regards

Gustavo C. S. Frederico

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Thank you for these suggestions, Gusvato! I will share them with the Zcon1 organizers at the Foundation. See you in Croatia!

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Hey Gustavo, your name caught my attention! Do I have a Brazilian friend over here?

I was lucky enough to go to Zcon0, and it kinda had everything that you pointed out and more. It was incredible.

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Hey @adityapk00, is periodic payments still on the table for zecqtwallet? Looking forward to it! And, I want to invite patreon users to try it!

Hi, @tloriato, I’ll be at Zcon1 in Croatia. Yes, I’m Brazilian too. Let me know if you’ll also be there. Cheers