Folks, the Overwinter and Sapling trains have already left the station.
I’m absolutely committed to the Overwinter and Sapling upgrades and the accompanying ecosystem-wide deployment of shielded addresses as the highest priority.
I absolutely oppose any change to the schedule or the content of the Overwinter and Sapling Network Upgrades.
We’ve already committed to those ecosystem-wide Network Upgrades and we’ve already told the entire world-spanning, rapidly growing, diverse, sprawling ecosystem of Zcash-supporting projects that they have to upgrade their software in order to opt-in to the new system.
The entire Zcash Company is already hard at work implementing Overwinter and Sapling, including not only the actual implementation of what is in fact an unprecedented breakthrough in cryptography (the Zcash Sapling shielded transaction design which is at least ten times as efficient as the best previous design), and also novel and subtle improvements to the consensus protocol (e.g. replay protection and the new transaction expiry feature), but also crucial auxiliary functions such as network monitoring, emergency incident response planning, providing tech support for third parties, educating the public about the nature and the timing of the Overwinter and Sapling upgrades, managing the independent security audits, etc. etc.
Numerous professional security reviewers are already hard at work vetting the extensive cryptographic changes that go into Sapling. The last number I saw from my team said that we’ve now committed more than half a million dollars of the Zcash Company’s money to commissioning many of the best security experts in the world to double-check our work and look for issues that could endanger the money or even the safety of our users.
Numerous major ecosystem players (mostly not yet publicly announced) are already committed to supporting the Overwinter and Sapling upgrades and have already changed their business plans to prioritise it, allocated the necessary resources, and begun the necessary work to support it.
However the fact that the Zcash Company and the Zcash ecosystem have already made deep commitments to Overwinter and Sapling are not the only reason I prioritise them as the first priority. Even if we were just starting the Overwinter and Sapling processes today, I would still insist that Overwinter and Sapling are the most important things that our community can do today.
I have three reasons why I believe this.
First of all, because Sapling and widespread support of shielded addresses will provide real privacy to more users. This is central to our mission and it is the next critical stepping stone to reaching widespread deployment of Zcash to billions of people. The reason Zcash coins are valuable, and that it is worthwhile to mine them, is that the world believes that the Zcash community can and will do this.
Second of all, because this will mitigate (although not completely eliminate) the threat of counterfeiting in two ways: a. by allowing the public to see whether more Zcash Sprout ZEC was created than should have been, and b. by upgrading to even better cryptographic designs and tooling, even better parameter generation (the Powers of Tau Ceremony), and even more rigorous peer review.
My last reason to prioritise Overwinter and Sapling is that a successful deployment of Sapling and an ecosystem-wide collective upgrade will demonstrate that our phenomenal success at deploying the original breakthrough Zcash “Sprout” a year and a half ago was not a one-off, but instead that our dev team and our community are capable of repeatedly innovating on the fundamental technology while supporting a large and growing ecosystem worth billions of dollars.
I care a lot about the mining crisis. Zcash is worth two million dollars a day, worldwide, in mining rewards. That represents a vast opportunity to distribute Zcash coins to a wide variety of people. Both what we’re going to do about it and how we decide what we’re going to do about it are critical questions that will establish a precedent for our community. We’ll work through the crisis, somehow. A year from now we’ll all look back and say: we experienced loss, disappointment, anger, conflict — no victory was ever won without those costs — but that Zcash is stronger and is better able than ever before to provide economic freedom and opportunity to everyone in the world.