My cont thoughts on today's chat - Related to real world usability goals

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My cont thoughts on today’s chat - Related to real world usability goals.

To be clear Im in no way trying to attack, insult or offend anyone. The work, effort to better humanity by all involved it amazing.

App
A real world example:

Bee.com Crypto app simply paid me a very small amount for allowing it to run on my phone.

Once a day I click a button and got an extra bonus.

So… users have app on all the time. Users get paid very little to open each day. More days in a row, more payout. Check in each day get more. get rewards for more streaks.

Use that earned crypto to buy stuff in the in app store…

Has 100plus million users.

My friends and I used it as a simple checkin app to make sure everyone was verified alive each day for 2 years.

Simple, easy sale to friends and family. 10 seconds a day time demand.

Had to stop using because they started forcing you to watch unskippable ad daily… and got more and more scummy.

Regardless 100 million users because they gave a little back for a click.

Mining:

I mined Eth for many years was making 200-300 a month after electric, profits. It paid for my game development rig, 3090 and countless others. I was holding Eth, buying stuff with it and getting other involved and paying bills with it. It made life better.

Since Eth PoS Ive made Maybe $15 total stacking, not a month… total. I hold no Eth. PoS made life worse.

I have 8 GPUs non mining zec… Could be atleast getting some there. I agree with many who said there needs to be zec going to normal people to increase usage. Miners and devs dont create an eco system got to have customers. Sadly most in crypto have never sold a thing or even a sales person. There is no Director of sales… Which is why I say its too academic. Without profits its just a hobby is what Mr Wonderful says on shark tank.

Usage:

Even a private messaging app would increase usage. Easy sale. 2000 Private messages for $25. 2000 Ad messages for $25 is a steal. About the same as email cold marketing.

I equate it to stamps for snail mail. I dont mine paying alittle for private messages. I like it better than free in fact.

Marketing and Corp Profitability

How about opt in marketing where I opt in to get ads. The ads pay me a small zec each ad. You call it spam, Id call it an anonymous and private marketing network. With the nightmare that google has become a private option would be epic. A real honest advertising system were you time is paid for and the customer gets a cut of the profits not just google…

Low banking access Population

Imagine how many people in low income areas with a phone who could be using zcash to get advertised to or messaging or clicking daily. They would use that to buy resources and trade creating ecosystem. Im sure countless governments would like to communicate with these people privately as well. So easy supply demand loop.

Check point Question

If I cant after all these year have a product that uses zcash that I can sell my friends on other than a wallet or privacy religion, then I think its clear something is wrong.

User Demo focus

Normal users dont care about privacy ime. Sorry it sucks but its true. If zcash is to be adopted by masses it has to IMO be wrapped in a pretty easy to use focused package with a bow that my 85 year old mom and 26 year old daughter can both willingly and happily use.

Can you say thats true now or even the focus?

First to your family, then your city, then your country…

Has anyone in ECC been able to get their parents or kids to uses zcash as it is now? If you cant get your own family on board, there is no way the masses will adopt.

Are wallets the hold up to adoption?

IMO wallets arent the issue and fixing them will be great but wont help adoption, price or transmission rates.

Us cases are. Facebook, twitter, ig, tiktol are all trash apps…But they are used. Perfection wont bring usage.

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Well, we had someone who wanted to build one (Zemo) but it kind of didn’t get any traction/funding denied.

I agree that it’s an easy “product” to sell. Privacy obviously sells (ProtonMail, Guardian, NordVPN, Mullvad, Express, etc).

I don’t think the ad network model makes sense. Too scummy, and off-brand, IMO. We need less ads. Not more. I don’t think Brave is exactly killing it in the advertising dept. (as an anecdote).

Totally agree. Privacy is for nerds (for now).

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There are plenty of free end to end encrypted messaging apps, what would be the added value of a zcash based one?

If you want the messages to be stored on the Blockchain, it would take ~75s between each message and bring back the spam.

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Well what about one that pays me to use it? Signal, iMessage, Whatsapp, etc. don’t do that.

As far as the messages, then why even have the memo field in the first place?

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Delay isn’t really an issue, email has delay so do most apps of some kind. I don’t really need an instant response is not a phone call. It’s a pager message.

My point is NOT build this app. My point is I can’t sell zcash to my friends and family as a privacy… “place your sales pitch here”, I can’t make profits with zcash, I can’t use zcash for anything other than privacy… “place your sales pitch here”

My point is there must a use case and app “I” can sell my friends and family on. Doesn’t have to be rare, or unique, it does have to be easy to use and on point.

Once I have an app they can use daily/weekly where they charge the app with zec to fund sending message or anything… I can much easier sell the idea of privacy from there.

You’re trying to make the normal person jump over a river without giving them a bridge to get across. Make a bridge for normal users and they will slowly adopt it.

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On the idea of Zcash as a private/anonymous messaging platform, I have a few thoughts:

  1. A few years ago, I saw anonymous messaging as a potential “pivot.” Private messaging was a flagship product within the privacy community, while at the same time there was tons of resistance to cryptocurrency within that community, due to to the scammyness and speculative nature of cryptocurrency. My idea for a “pivot” was to associate ourselves closer to the anonymous messaging goal and distance ourselves from the speculative world of crypto, and by doing so earn the goodwill of that crowd (Tor, Signal, EFF supporters, ppl who go to DEF CON), and from them build a base of users. Part of my belief in that strategy came from seeing projects like Zbay trying to use Zcash to fulfill a private messaging need (which ultimately didn’t work because of performance problems). The pivot I imagined would have also brought increased scalability and performance to Zcash.
  2. Anonymous messaging—that isn’t vulnerable to global passive adversaries like Tor is—is still an unsolved problem and is something Zcash could help with. I feel like Nym has taken up that torch; they have a technically-impressive solution, but we still might be able to make something more practically-usable because the ZEC token is more accessible on exchanges, and I’m sure our cryptographic engineers could create something with even stronger privacy properties for message-receivers (“if you know someone’s address, can you find out who they are?”), which is something the Loopix protocol that Nym is based on isn’t the greatest at.
  3. The key determining factor for whether Zcash can be used for private messaging is performance. Nobody using a messaging app is willing to wait more than a few seconds for their message to be delivered, let alone the 75 seconds it takes to mine a Zcash block. Even fewer are willing to let their messaging app exhaust their phone’s battery scanning for messages. So I’ve argued that solving the scanning problem is necesary not only for messaging, but is also necessary for any scalable private payment product.
  4. The complexity of building a messaging app using existing Zcash libraries is just too much. To reasonably expect any developer to want to do it, we’d need libraries that are far simpler to use and available in far more programming languages. (Eliminating the scanning problem is a prerequisite for this, because the complexity of running a background process to sync and scan is just too much to reasonably expect developers to cope with.)
  5. I think the market for anonymous messaging plus anonymous private payments is far larger than the market for either on their own. For example, the online sex work industry—legal in most countries—needs both: they need censorship-resistance for their payments and they need privacy for their content and their interpersonal communications.

So, what are my ultimate thoughts on Zcash as an anonymous messaging layer? (1) I still think there’s value in this kind of product; it could help us find support from crypto-naysayers and expand our market beyond crypto, (2) our current offerings aren’t good enough, we need massive performance improvements which are all also necessary for making Zcash-as-a-currency a viable product, (3) we need a protocol that lends itself to making usable libraries possible, and (4) our strategy should be to find a market that needs both censorship-resistant payments and private messaging, and we should invest in tailoring our products for that market’s needs.

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I feel like private messaging on L1 zcash is like trying to fit a round peg in a square hole. It is much easier, faster, user friendly etc to do it p2p, while using zcash as an authentication layer.
For instance, something like wallet connect

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In my opinion we need a zcash stablecoin to work alongside zcash. needs to be Ultra fast. One way to speed up payments may be a AMP like collateral mechanism built into zcash (is this possible)?. if the community funds the collateral pool, the transaction cost may be close to 0 and we could get instant clearing. Back the stablecoins with short term treasury bonds, where interest received flows directly to owners after small transaction fee which helps support collateral pool and where transaction fees also go to buy zcash for the ECC/foundation treasury to fund future development and/or pay out to zcash holders so zcash and zstablecoin becomes yield bearing.

  1. privacy - seems like this is fairly solid technology
  2. stability - it’s hard to see z cash ever being stable enough to get people to use it for everyday transactions. bitcoin other positive attributes are outweighing privacy
  3. speed - need instant clearing. we don’t have this.
  4. yield. zcash would benefit from being yield bearing in some way. either by transaction fees; burn mechanism or stablecoin with backing by yield bearing government securities with flow through mechanism and zcash benefits by more transaction fees on network
  5. network/reliability - useability. not great. seems reliable but very complex UIUX and not user friendly.

There is a saying “cash is trash”. There needs to be some incentive (yield) to own zcash, privacy alone won’t be enough. and it just wont work for everyday transactions because who wants to hold something like zcash to pay rent when it might go down by 10% or more. most people live paycheck to paycheck. the average person is not the ideal zcash owner because they need their money to be stable first and private second. people with money need stability and yield in my view. otherwise it’s safer in a bank.

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  1. is something I’ve been asking for weeks. Thank you no one up until now would tell me why we can’t have services running in the background.

However, it does seem odd to me that the people who can solve zk proofs can’t get services to run on mobile platforms. Another example is why I think hiring an app developer 3rd party who does this already is a better option than trying to learn it in-house and be an app expert.

I once was a cannabis grower and ran a very large LEGAL cannabis greenhouse in Colorado. 6k plants at a time.

I learned some very very critical lessons that apply here. We were selling to be blunt, drugs, the easiest thing to sell on the planet right? everyone wants it…

A) We grow only the best, organic cannabis. I mean the best soil, sun, microbial life… We have a biologist on staff. We had a custom 3 million dollar state-of-the-art greenhouse with full automation for the ecosystem… It cost 40%-60% more per gram to produce organic than non…

(Problem) Only 1% (if that) of Colorado consumers care at all about organic cannabis. 60% don’t even know the difference or risks.

(Just fix it…) No amount of education, no amount of marketing, no amount of passion was going to change whether consumers in Colorado cared about it at that point. I feel privacy is the same way right now. You can’t educate or perfect a product to solve this issue.

Our solution was to wrap the organic cannabis in blunts and pretty packaging to help sell them to the consumers who were looking for blunts and it worked for a while we sold millions of them. Sadly the move was too late and the company after 5-8 million spent collapsed. They sold millions of blunts and had countless happy customers… but over all it didn’t matter because the focus the entire time was on the tech “organic” and not on the custom. The best “products/tech” are still useless if there are no customers.

Many many developers think that if I build it, and build it really well they will come. This is 100% bullshit. I blame Field of Dreams. Among us took 4 years on the market failing before a youtube influencer did a video on them, only 6-8% of games on steam make over $10k ever doesn’t matter how good they are. Today Among us is a household name because of that 1 video. Most likely if that person didn’t do that video you would have never heard of them. No matter how good the game was.

I learned very very clearly you can’t change consumers quickly regardless of how much you try. You must pivot and find a way to meet them where they are. (IE Make a product they want to use on top of zec)

They will not come to you in any short period unless you are investing Mr Beast money, who has launched credit cards/apps, when he does it he gives each person who signs up a $1 if they connected a bank, to get them to adopt, and a chance to win 100k or something. Regardless of how scummy something might seem, those apps are getting used. If you build it they will not show up. They don’t know about it, they don’t want it because it doesn’t help them or meet them where they are.

There should be a directed focus IMO to make a product that users want to use in the large demographics you want to target outside the fanboys.

  1. You must own the custom and the customer relationship. As a grower we had to go through other stores to access the customer. When times got hard they survived because they owned the customer relationship. We did not. Having Binance or exchanges own and be the main interaction point for your customers is a major issue in my mind.
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You cannot run a service in the background that does synchronization because the Android and iOS operating systems stop it. It has nothing to do with the skills of the mobile devs.

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I agree that implementing anonymous messaging by mining every single message into a blockchain doesn’t really make sense, given alternative p2p methods for communication and data storage with equivalent privacy properties. The key challenge is giving those p2p alternatives the same kinds of privacy properties we’d expect for Zcash transactions.

A crucial factor of my argument is that scaling anonymous messaging and scaling anonymous transactions are really the same theoretical problem, because of the following argument. (This will sound ridiculous to anyone who isn’t familiar with the computer-science concept of a reduction.)

Imagine you have scalable anonymous transactions. Then you automatically have scalable anonymous messaging (up to constant factor overhead) because you can encode your messages into the transaction values. If I want to send “HELLO”, I just send you transactions that encode the ASCII message into the values: 0.0072, 0.0069, 0.0076, 0.0076, 0.0079.

OTOH, if if you have scalable anonymous messaging, then you automatically have scalable anonymous payments (modulo blockchain latencies for confirmation/authentication): just use your anonymous messaging layer to send the note ciphertext to the recipient, and then they only have to wait for the note commitment to appear in the blockchain, no need to scan.

Because of this connection between the two problems, scaling one scales the other, and the privacy properties of one determine the privacy properties of the other. The problem with just sending messages p2p (e.g. over Tor) is that it gives up on the privacy properties that Zcash is known for (e.g. it becomes vulnerable to global passive adversaries).

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Well… We don’t have scalable private transactions… I agree that if we had them, the rest would go along.
But to me, it is the same argument as “if we had fusion, we wouldn’t have an energy crisis.”

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@hanh already noted the issues with running background services on mobile devices, but also consider, just in terms of usability, the experience of any developer using almost any library that’s out there. A Python developer just runs pip install <package> and then can immediately begin writing code; a quick import <package> at the top of their source code file and immediately they have fast-performing functions for all the functionality they wanted. If you’re a PayPal or Bitcoin dev, you have the same available to you, because transaction data is available through fast requests over the web (but it’s not private).

Consider also the plight of a WordPress extension developer: you can either expose an API whose calls encompass all of the syncing and delay page rendering by hours (or more likely run into request response timeouts) or somehow shoehorn-in background syncing into WP hosts that don’t support full access to the server (e.g. by using crontab).

In a lot of environments—mobile, web, and more generally just in terms of usability—background syncing just isn’t viable.

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Sure, the dev experience is far from ideal. I am actually considering exposing the ywallet core in nodes but it is complicated. I am afraid zcash is much more complex than BTC though.

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Edit to add this tl/dr: A scalable private payments design derived from Zcash may enable new high-bandwidth applications including micro or mini-payments; but while I’ve brainstormed and am excited about the possibility, I don’t know if what I imagine is possible.

I still believe there’s an important under-explored design space at the intersection of L1 scalability, private messaging, and data availability.

For scalability, as much as we can restrict data to only being stored or transmitted between the parties that directly need it, the better. A counterexample is note contents and memos in current shielded Zcash: only the sender and recipient need to ever see those, but all nodes store them and they are transmitted to every current and future node (lots of duplicate bandwidth).

Meanwhile, for privacy, as much as we can restrict data to only being stored or transmitted between the parties that directly need it, the better. As a cryptography-happy crowd we’re often fine with ignoring this and just relying on cryptography to protect confidentiality, but another way to protect confidentiality is to just avoid sending the data to the wrong people in the first place.

So it really seems like there’s a deep connection between scalability and privacy to me, since achieving both involves limiting where data is sent to only necessary parties.

This is the kind of thing I have occasionally brainstormed about as a side-hobby. The last time around (a while ago) I had written up thoughts with the name Modular Scalable Payments Architecture. (I haven’t updated that since I last pinged you about it @earthrise .)

The key idea is “can we shift around data availability concerns safely so that data that only needs to be seen between specific parties only needs to be stored/transmitted between them and no one else”. It’s not an easy trade-off, because currently wallets rely on the network to store all their private baggage, which is great for restoring from a seed or storing-and-forwarding new incoming transfers to wallets that have been offline an arbitrary amount of time.

So the two big UX challenges with that approach are: (a) how can we ensure offline wallets can still receive transfers, and (b) how can wallets restore safely from backups?

-plus all the privacy and consensus challenges. :wink:

However, if there were a good solution, then presumably it would work well for higher bandwidth p2p usage. If the storage/bandwidth for the overall L1 did not grow linearly with what users send to each other, and/or if the latency of those messages weren’t bottlenecked by consensus, then generic messages, media, API calls, etc… could be bundled together with transactions within the same (idyllic/unicorn) system.

That’s the dream. :wink:

ps: One other reason the idea excites me: a lot of the scalability research across the crypto industry is focused on general programmable systems without privacy. This is way harder!

General programmability means it’s not clear up front which parties need access, and a lack of privacy means there’s not even precision or clarity on who that is. For example, DEX last-trade-prices may be consumed by many completely off-chain actors!

By contrast, if we have private transfers from senders to recipients, the number of parties is relatively small and completely explicitly defined by the privacy constraints. So maybe the design space is much easier than the rest of the industry’s scalability goals.

So it may be that no one is looking at this particular niche of design space, and Zcash could lead in this niche. I would guess that layer 2 payment protocols, especially lightning are the closest in the use case and adoption here. (The idyllic/unicorn MSPA would not have the liquidity constraints that lightning has, which seems like a major advantage if a real unicorn MSPA could be found.)

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There is also an anti-connection between privacy and scalability: whenever an adversary can be sure that Alice did not receive a particular message, they can be sure that Alice wasn’t the intended recipient of that message (or the messaging system is lossy). This is one of the key reasons network-level anonymity is so hard: learning that a bunch of people didn’t receive a message gives you information about who did receive the message. This is ultimately why decoy-based systems don’t work, and the engineering challenge is to make it look like anyone could have been the recipient of the message as efficiently as possible.

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Couple of quick points:

  1. adding anonymous messaging to zcash is an interesting idea who’s time might be now (in the past I’ve thought it wasn’t worth focusing on)
  2. you’re going to need to do it at the mempool/ p2p layer.
  3. There’s no deep link between anonymous payments and anonymous messaging.
    Payments require consensus on who pays who. Messages do not. You can’t build payments out of messaging, there’s no double spend prevention.

There is a link between anonymous payment notification and anonymous messaging.
And in fact, it’s pretty trivially clear that for zcash to scale, at some point we have to move beyond nodes scanning the blockchain and decrypting every ciphertext. Zcash payment URLs were intended to address this by using existing messaging systems, but could be used in a purpose built one.

TLDR: you need a separate anonymous messaging layer. Development/ dependence wise, its mostly seperate from Zcash. They can be tighlty integrated (e.g., have a mixnet where the nodes are PoS nodes, though thats a security nightmare), but the designs are distinct.

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I agree that theoretically, scalable anonymous messaging ⇏ scalable anonymous transactions (but it does ⇒ modulo the cost of syncing the note commitment and nullifier sets and checking PoW, which I don’t see how we can avoid). The reverse direction of the implication, that scalable anonymous transactions ⇒ scalable anonymous messaging, does hold, which I think we both agree on, and that’s what’s really the key here. I think that fact should guide our protocol development strategy going forward.

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My point is precisely you can avoid that cost for anonymous messaging and you are going to need to for any practical design. In fact, since payment notification itself is a scaling limitation, you are going to have to even just for Zcash without general purpose messaging.

Design an independent anonymous messaging system and then integrate it with zcash. Don’t try and design from scratch some blockchain specific thing, you will get stuck.

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Afaik, all zk based scalability work use the account model, not the merkle tree utxo approach. It seems that even if the problem seems to be of a smaller scope for zcash, the large anonymity set presents a real challenge.

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