I agree. First, starting with zBTC and zETH, I think zUSD needs a lot of thought and review regarding regulation. Spending large amounts of money on uncertainty is not necessary in the current situation.
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How much of the grant will be liquidated to pay taxes, salaries, and other expenses and how much will be held in ZEC for the longterm or circulated without selling it for other assets?
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I want to clarify that I do believe that if granted the ZEC, QEDIT would be able to carry out the work that they are describing here. They are a really important and capable org in this ecosystem
Although, it should be first focusing mostly on deployment and finishing the last mile of ZSAs as we know them now so that people can start actually using them.
This is a lot of work too! and QEDIT is the one org that knows the most about ZSAs its underpinnings and has the knowledge to help everyone to understand and implement whatâs needed to support them.
The information that will come out of this deployment process is an important input for the work they are describing here and today that is not available. Iâm sure the outcome of carrying the work described here would be much better with it than without it.
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Strong agreement here. Why over spend resources on the private USD idea, when weâve already got sufficient crypto native equivalents like DAI.
ZSA users will probably warm up to launching private memecoin ZSAs quicker than zUSD. Private stable coins are a huge feature, but they also have huge risks/ unique technical challenges.
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Launch the ZSA standard and tokens will show up. Itâs not this communityâs responsibility to decide which tokens exist. I think itâs our job to make sure the standard is solid, deployed, and widely-supported. Then thousands of tokens will launch, some good, some bad. Some centralized, some decentralized.
An L1 shouldnât have opinions about how it is used, only about its tech standards.
(personally Iâm all about wrapped stablecoins, especially DAI. There are many other projects already wrapping stablecoins prone to censorship, see THORChain USDC LPs and synths. Release âour ERC-20,â ZSAs, then let the open market do its work.)
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100%.
Without a market based ecosystem, stablecoin, ZSAs, programmability, and fees (among others), ZEC is probably dead as an L1 tblockchain. I donât like wrapped stablcoins because without the float its hard to keep costs down; but its a start and better than nothing.
This would be another mistake, similar to thinking that âZcash is moneyâ
Have you guys thought about who would use the zBTC and zETH feature?
The privacy pool of zETH would be small compared to the one from Aztec and it will be more expensive to bridge these assets from Ethereum to Zcash. Who would bridge BTC to Zcash? If there arenât a lot of people doing so, it will be better to use a mixer - so i donât see the added value here. And again, WHO WILL USE IT?
We need to build a blockchain that will add way more features than these wrapped tokens. Anyone observing the markets outside of the Zcash bubble understands this! Stablecoins are a huge market, do we really want to miss this opportunity?
I will not bridge my ETH and BTC to Zcash, i donât see any reason for this. It will make everything more complicated, it will start with exchanges putting higher risk on my coins, and will give me a hard time with explaining this to my bank and their money laundering agency. Why would i want to take the risk?
BUT, i would use private stablecoins for everyday purchases. I truly believe that this is THE usecase!
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This, exactly. Wrapping other tokens would be at best a niche market, IMO. I would use a private stablecoin. You would use a private stablecoin. Hell, practically everyone I know would use a private stablecoin over existing alternatives if presented with the option. Itâs easy to explain even to normies and the utility is close to self evident.
ZEC itself as SOV - easily portable private gold or better yet a Swiss numbered account in your pocket. Shielded stablecoin for daily transactions. Thatâs the dream.
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we need to move away from âzcash is private moneyâ to âzcash offers private moneyâ ⌠and much more
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People want freedom. We just disagree on how we get there.
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@dismad my sense is you have absolutely no idea how capital markets, money markets, or even currencies for the financial system works. just a hunch. zcash has really faltered in the consensus mechanism for determining what gets built and how to help legacy infrastructure transition to the blockchain,
Thank you.
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sorry @dismad. it gets frustrating when i hear the talk of freedom and these macro ideas and the actual execution is the opposite of freedom. we all lose money, we have a 20% dev tax, we have no zec holder voting, its very hard to build on zcash and no programmability, the actual ground level doesnât look anything like freedom to me. you can say well sell, and i have been. ideally before i sell out i can hear or believe things are changing and there is a new vision. but for now the vision has not changed as far as i can tell based on spending and the roadmap. it might change in a year or two, but until thenâŚitâs a sell zec vision.
Iâm not dropping in here to debate my friend, but it seems we have different visions for Zcash and how we get there. Thatâs fine. You donât need to explain it further. Iâve heard you.
Bitcoin maxis lost the plot and Bitcoin has been captured. I donât believe this community will. Your drumbeat sounds similar to what theyâve devolved into.
While I donât claim to speak for everyone, this is why I am here:
For ECCâs part, weâre focused on building a new system, one that embraces access to secure, private and uncensorable payments.
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They may have âlost the plotâ, but at least they didnât go broke in the process, and the community in general is way more exciting than this one.
Zcash = IBM
ECC is doing this. Zcash Foundation is doing that. Transparent addresses here. Shielded addresses there. Unified addresses over there (kinda).
Ywallet, Zingo, Zashi, Nighthawk, Zecwallet (RIP but not because many people still use it and find themselves stuck and coming here for help).
User research studies being funded, but decisions already being made from the âpowers that beâ (PoS et al).
Decentralized! ⌠wait how many miners and lightwallet servers are there? And why does the Zcash Foundation always have the final word? 
Zcash has a personality disorder. Should it be spent? Should it be held? If itâs to be spent, itâs not an investment, since âcashâ is not an investment.
Weâre true cypherpunks
But at the same time youâre lobbying in Washington (no offense to Paul, he seems fine)
@joshs you need to find a more compelling reason to get people to hold these garbage bags.
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as much as i hate what you write, there is a lot of truth in your words!
this is one of the main problems, there is no incentive for anyone to hold ZEC, the old vision lead by zooko is done, and currently nobody knows where we are going. we are moving slow, and those receiving ZEC from the dev tax are trading it for coins like BTC and ETH - or even investing it in startups, similar to an investment fund ⌠and meanwhile i am down 96% in terms of BTC 
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These are exactly the points iâm trying to make; especially when i say joshâs and zooko vision is a âsell zecâ vision
- miners sell
- orgs sell
- and the use case for spending is inherently a sell zec vision.
The longer we wait to deprecate zcashD the further behind we get.
The Foundation has been a strong proponent of programmability and making the blockchain useful for many years, itâs ready, Qedit is ready, and the end user markets are ready for the products that get created when we have programmability. ECC wants to talk about freedom and i think we want to see blockchain development prioritized.
ECC clearly states they are focused on payments. That is great for processing transactions privately. the elephant in the room is we donât have a currency. We have an asset (like gold). But their concept of privacy is blinding them to both empirical evidence and theory when it comes to a currency and what attributes it needs to have⌠the logical and rational conclusion is we need stablecoins for payments and it just falls on deaf ears.
I donât think itâs a controversial statement to say that if you need to spend zec inside of a 6 month timeframe and you are risk averse, buying zec to spend is a very bad idea. you are probably more than 60% chance going to lose money (eg you wonât have enough money to buy your coffee or said another way, you better be prepared to pay $4.5 for a $4 coffee). So if someone has no excess income (which is probably 90% or more of the world) above their weekly costs (like rent, food, etc), I canât see how ECC with a good conscience can recommend someone buys zec for spending.
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totally agree on everything that you are saying!
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Compared to the status quo Zcash would be better off with half of our developers if their time were solely focused on only privacy, security, decentralization and development for private transactions and private value storage.
We should focus on depreciating transparent transaction, Zenith, Zebra, Arti and enhancing the Zcash lightwalletd infrastructure before spending much more time on ZSAs. Arguably decentralizing control or eliminating the Zcash trademark is more important to Zcash adoption than ZSAs as well.
Would anyone care about confidential assets on Bitcoin if they were not first using Bitcoin as a currency? No and confidential assets wont take off for Zcash and Zcash is used as a private currency by a lot more people than are using it today.
Letâs focus on perfecting Zcash utility as a privacy currency first.
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Developers canât build value storage. That is the 8+ year challenge of Zcash, we have a wonderful L1 with sufficient security and decentralization, ongoing development, and world-class ZkProof privacy; yet the ZEC has been crippling the ecosystem because it canât store/ grow value.
The market is who decides where to put value, not the software developers.
I used to feel the same exact way. Transparent ZEC hurts the project - Yes. But it also helps the project. The good outweighs the bad - if we eliminated the Transparent ZEC, it would force the ECC and ZF (and ZCG) to completely upend their finances because they rely on being able to sell Transparent ZEC.
Making ZEC into a private only network would add some immediate regulatory problems that weâre not suited to deal with right now. (This is why I came to the realization that Transparent ZEC are something that we can all dislike, but also we canât live without them)
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