You don’t like the title? Me neither, but it’s true nonetheless.
Everyday I do something involving a payment online, more and more places accept crypto, more and more places accept Monero. Zcash? What’s that?
Time to try something different, because whatever we have been doing is not working.
ZEC Stakeholders, get ready to vote!
Yeah, almost all payments accept XMR, but very few accept ZEC.
I’ve been involved with Zcash for over 8 years now and I can attest to a few factors that have lead to the current state of adoption by the broader online community.
The first few years were spent trying to get Zcash from a “proof of concept” academic style code (which took minutes and GBs of RAM to process a shielded transaction) to something now usable on a cell phone in seconds. If Zcash had launched with “only” Z addresses it may have prevented some of the other factors listed below, but would have been wholly unusable for 90% of providers/exchanges. Zcash wouldn’t have nearly as many on/off ramps if that direction had been taken.
Then you have the myriad of addresses: T, Z, U causing exchanges/websites/wallets to have unique tooling/maintenance to support Zcashs privacy features. Plus the relentless (be it often revolutionary) pace of the core teams releases which strengthened user privacy and sometimes required a new pool to take advantage of those improvements. Many times it was simpler for a provider to just add T addresses and call it a day.
Adding onto the issues of transaction processing and address confusion was the fact that the core teams at ECC and ZF were primarily focused on shipping the code rather than building nice UX for wallets. This lead to the “just let the community do it mentality” where ZCG and others would hire outside developers for the wallets. In hindsight this was a major mistake, leading to mercenary developers only being attached to the project so long as it was financially beneficial for them (Zecwallet, Nighthawk I’m looking at you) and once they got bored or didn’t like the rules/milestones attached to their grants they simply left, leaving Zcash users high and dry.
The good news is that address types/pools of Zcash have pretty much settled down so we should not see much more churn in that regard. Also with @joshs now leading at ECC they’re finally focusing on providing good UX for end users. Plus the fact that ZF spent years building Zebra which will allow Zcashd to retire soon. Moving the codebase to Rust will simultaneously make Zcash easier to build on and free up core team resources to better focus on end users.
As the saying goes: “Good software takes ten years, get used to it” is also proving to ring true for Zcash.
Anyway, getting good software over the course of 10 years assumes that for at least 8 of those years, you’re getting good feedback from your customers, and good innovations from your competitors that you can copy, and good ideas from all the people that come to work for you because they believe that your version 1.0 is promising. You have to release early, incomplete versions — but don’t overhype them or advertise them on the Super Bowl, because they’re just not that good, no matter how smart you are.
Absolute truth. Monero is all over the place because no one has engaged in reinventing it for years. Didn’t turn it into something outstanding. The first Zcash took 2 to 5 minutes to calculate a single transaction. How could we even pay with it? Then the protocol improved. In the last 1.5-2 years, Zcash has become really convenient and fast. The reason is clear. It was completely uncharted territory, where the best technologies are worked out by trial and error.
When you take price out of the equation, the facts make sense don’t they 
I’m happy we have choice, the shielded ecosystem needs to keep growing.
Great post @Shawn
“how the tech industry works well you don’t make any money for ten years and then suddenly in year 11 you might have a giant payday”
Naval Ravikant
Source:
I will add that having NU-x that by design break compatibility with every application (specially wallets) is a really bad choice.
You can’t expect everything and everyone to update on your schedule, especially when your coin has such a low market cap.
Automatic deprecation of full nodes every 6 months also puts load on node operators.
IMO, zcash should remember that users care about privacy but businesses care about making money.
The first four years were among the most exciting of any crypto. Back then, the use of the dev fund was even legitimate.
Sure. And to make things better, we have recently added one more to please some exchange. What a great use of the dev fund, what great governance.
Fair. Looking forward to seeing ZF and ECC display an unrelenting motivation with the potential of it not not being financially beneficial for them anymore.
The reality is we’ve spent a lot, and I mean a lot, on bs marketing and getting ZSAs that may never get used. I mean think about it, nobody uses ZEC, what makes people in here think that ZSA would fare any better? It’s just another bet.
Finally, I don’t like other people betting with my money. Particularly not when those people are neither good at it, nor legitimately authorized to do so.
“Some exchange” - you make it look like it was an obscure exchange not the #1 exchange for Zcash. Besides tex was supposed to be a quick hack, for me. Others had a different opinion.
I said “Some exchange” because as far as I am concerned it is not an exchange that I use, nor that I see as important in my vision of Zcash. Monero survived right? Well, that’s my vision.
If ZEC holders would have voted to fund yet another type of address, I would have had respect for that. But that’s not what happened. We are led by fearful people and I’m ready for ZEC holders to take charge of the dev fund.
Fair enough. Though it took a couple of hours to implement it in Ywallet. Why did it need to involve the devfund, etc. is what I am more concerned about.
other projects want to implement a treasury like Zcash has,
its crucial for sustainability,
and we already have it..
It is not absolutely necessary, Bitcoin has been doing just fine, Monero has been doing just fine.
However yes, I do believe it can be a very powerful feature that can help us thrive; that is, given a legitimate governance structure.
do you think that will change in the future or are there any plans?
f.e. make it backward compatible or something else, sound definitely sub optimal
I think you are a bit confused. You can afford to not have a dev fund when you are already winning, because there is nothing to do. Since we are intending to catch up and surpass both of these two, we need both strategy and financial energy.
Imagine you were trying to go to space. Your friends are already in space. They tell you that the sky is very black. You then decide to build a very dark room. Inside the dark room the sky is indeed very black. But you can’t seem to find your friends in there.
I completely disagree but it doesn’t matter because I love the dev fund anyway.
I’ll keep my focus on doing everything I can so that stealing from ZEC token holders is no longer an option. We want to be the best, we have to start with being credible and display the best possible values.
What’s the hack?
Agree to disagree on point 3.
Sorry, I don’t understand your question. Would you mind rephrasing?
Can you explain how to get Zcash adopted by more vendors?
Actually.. no.. please explain how to to protect the dignity of more people with privacy technology.. assuming that’s your goal.
