Leap frogging zaddr

General
30

Hi folks, I just saw this thread. I love seeing roadmap / vision discussions like this in the community!

Here’s my attempt to summarize my current position:

In order for shielded Zcash usage to grow, shielded Zcash technology needs to be well deployed, and then users have to use it. So for me, this should be our #1 top priority without a doubt in terms of improving privacy.

I definitely want to see t-addrs retired, and privacy to be default & mandatory, so long as any user can choose on their own which information to disclose about their own behavior. But, in my way of thinking, this is totally secondary to shielded privacy deployment and adoption. So:

  1. If shielded tech is widely deployed and adoption rates are large, then it’s probably a great time to retire t-addrs.
  2. If shielded tech is widely deployed and adoption rates are large, it’s not as bad if t-addrs persist. It is still bad, but if fewer users run across it, it has less of a bad impact. By analogy, it’s still possible to run an http website without TLS https, but browsers warn you and it’s really really easy to run https so they are pretty rare but sometimes useful. So concretely, if <5% of transactions or <1% of users were using t-addrs, I wouldn’t worry too much about their existence.
  3. If shielded tech is not widely deployed, then retiring t-addrs is a complete red-herring, because there’s no usable alternative and retiring t-addrs would very likely decimate Zcash adoption. (We’re already close to overcoming this hump with work on mobile, hardware, and multisig.)
  4. If shielded tech is deployed but doesn’t have significant adoption, then the situation is more tricky because retiring t-addrs might spur existing users to switch to shielded and it might attract new users (which is great!) OR it might prompt users to turn off Zcash support because it’s too much hassle (which is bad!). It’s difficult to know if we haven’t already seen sufficient adoption.

Some people might want t-addrs. That’s a different discussion, IMO, but there is a nuance here for me: in the short term, because t-addrs are so much easier to integrate, they are very valuable for Zcash network effect as a whole (while still being bad for privacy).

So I think two likely areas for disagreement for all of us who want to retire t-addrs is:

  • What is sufficient adoption for case 4?
  • For case 4, will retiring t-addrs spur shielded adoption or degrade overall Zcash adoption?

But I think none of us who want to retire t-addrs would disagree with case 1. So in my book, we should all rally around deployment and adoption of shielded tech, because it’s a common goal for everyone even if they disagree about when/how to retire t-addrs.

I think we’re already pretty much doing that at Zfnd and ECC and across the community with projects like ZecWallet.

1 Like