Could we ask community via poll iff they are willing to support t-address deprecation once technical hurdles & exchange support is addressed?
@dontbeevil watch this one, its relevant here and much more recent than that post
Zero Knowledge Privacy in Regulated Financial Transactions (Part 1) - YouTube
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I don’t buy the argument that transparent addresses have any usecase within the Zcash network. The only thing they do is hurt all our users’ privacy.
If someone wants to use transparent addresses, there are many chains that do it much better than Zcash. If someone has a specific rare usecase that requires fully transparent addresses, they can opt to use another chain, and that’s fine.
Zcash is all about protecting users’ privacy, and the longer it takes to get rid of them, the more we are knowingly hurting our users’ privacy.
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And don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that we are ready to abandon transparent address today but we are definitely in a position to do it in a year, if we put our focus on it.
There are missing pieces like shielded support for hardware wallets, shielded multisig and a few others, but it’s possible to have all those (and many others) in the next 6 months, if we actually focus in doing that.
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I disagree. It is more important for us to get rid of Sprout first before talking about transparent address. We can make it harder to use t-addr but it would make a very bad UX for the majority of users.
Also, do you really think that both of these will be solved within a year?
From my understanding, removing Sprout will actually make development easier compared to removing t-addr. Depecrating Sprout is more important at the moment.
We can do a poll, but I think everyone already knows the answer that will come out of such a poll: T-addresses need to be depreciated.
However, the main disagreement I have seen is regarding timing: most arguments so far fall into two camps:
- We need to depreciate T-addresses now, to heck with the tradeoffs.
- We need to depreciate T-addresses ASAP, when X and X and X for Z-addresses is available.
It seems to me that the most productive way to move forward is to have a hard look at precisely what changes/sacrifices we want/need to make to get there.
But to prove my point, here is a quick poll:
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This seems like one prudent requirement, but I also don’t consider that sufficient.
I personally would like to see extremely robust criteria along these lines:
“In every key sector enough leading products/services already support shielded such that X% of users in that sector are covered. Key sectors should include at least well regulated exchanges, in as many jurisdictions as possible, wallets (mobile, fullnode, hardware), custodians, apps (ex: Zbay), and vendors/services/products (ex: vpns, shwag stores, …).”
That would ensure that regulatory support is already well sorted, for example.
We might imagine a dial we can turn between conservative and aggressive retirement of t-addrs. If we set X% to say 95% that would be extremely conservative. If we set it to 5% that’s extremely aggressive.
The risk of being too aggressive is a potential loss of support, like @mason describes, which can have a pile-on effect (more exchange delistings → fewer projects deciding to continue zcash support & harder to find ZEC → demand curve drops → repeat).
OTOH, “just the right amount” of aggressive might spur upgrades. This seems like it would only work when there’s already substantial adoption momentum for ZEC and services/vendors have FOMO and don’t want to drop support.
Just to repeat my thinking that leads me to use the term “leap frogging”, it goes like this: let’s aim to achieve the above criteria for X% = 95% no matter when/how/what the plan for retiring T-Addrs is. In other words, let’s hit X% = 95% because exchanges, regulators, wallet vendors, and users want/need to use shielded and it’s easy, convenient, and safe to use rather than because a protocol change forces them to.
Yes, maybe a protocol change can nudge some folks in a good direction, but at the end of the day Zcash is only successful when it provides valuable features that users need and want.
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Develop a direction with z translations and when they become really better at everything, T will go away by itself and you don’t need to try to find meaning where there is none, you don’t want to use T addresses, but for the dominance of z even further than before zcash at all used in real life every day.
The fact that now there is a choice is 100% justified
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I had an idea in the back of my head that would solve it. Instead of hard-depreciating t-addr, how about limiting the block size for t-transactions? This will create a fee market and z-addr adoption pressure.
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I think the simplest and least disruptive way to encourage more use of z-addresses is to introduce a linearly climbing (over time) fee rate for relay of transactions involving t-addresses, that will end in a few years in a significant amount, like 5 milli-ZEC. People who insist on using t-addresses will still be able to use them, but at a non-trivial expense, which will drive most people to migrate.
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All games with commissions can induce people to micronize not to z addresses but to other projects, who is sure that users will stay no matter what? There is no need to invent anything new, everything is invented for us, a person is looking for comfort, where it will be better there. Despite the best technical base, and all the advantages that are presented in the zcash project, it is less popular than others, and if you still deal with the complications of use, then the last several tens of thousands will simply stop using it. You need to search for how to attract more users while maintaining the existing ones and not think which is better and which is worse, let users decide what to use.
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That’s … too high. It would take a decade or more, effectively making deprecation impossible.
Question is how do we get to 95% or that X%? I know ECC/ZF worked with Gemini.
Is ECC & ZF going to work towards that X%?
There is a difference. In one, funds are destroyed. In other, funds can move.
This seems to be the biggest issue. Can ECC/ZF reach out to exchanges they are connected with this question:
Zcash community is interested in avoiding t-address in X time. Would you add support for z-address? If no, why?
At a minimum, we can start with t2t as part of deprecation strategy if some preconditions are met. Then go further @secparam
These are Sprout payment disclosures. As noted here there isn’t a ZIP for Sapling payment disclosures yet. None of the block explorers support view keys do they?
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Hm, good point!
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I like this kind of idea.
I think this sort of proposal could get sufficiently wide support that it could activate on Zcash mainnet without the chain forking into two chains due to some people refusing to run it. I do not think that “turn off taddresses entirely” could, at least not within the next few years. Beyond a few years my crystal ball gets hazy.
For a fleshed-out version of this sort of proposal, see PRINCE — “PRivacy INCEntives for ZEC” — which has some neat ideas in which people who shield their ZEC get a bonus:
https://www.reddit.com/r/zec/comments/c70fzz/privacy_proposal_for_zec_incentives/
And relatedly, here is my proposal that the Zcash network charge a fee to maintain old utxos and old notes:
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