People criticizing Zcash on these forums gets censored or banned. Dismantle ZF.
I’m aware of this and as soon as this contract is broken, I will leave Zcash immediately.
What kind of cypherpunks? What are you all writing about? Money can’t walk around in a public blockchain because crypto investors are already being dismembered today and flushing their body parts down the toilet, after torture. They were stupid, so they were screaming about their bitcoins left and right. Zcash is a commons product!
If my departure is the downfall of Zcash, we’ve got much much bigger problems to worry about:)
All kidding aside, I don’t plan to leave the ecosystem. Someone commented about that I panicked and left. Hardly the point, I actually came back to ECC after being gone for a period of time. Leaving this time came down to a rational evaluation of the financial situation in front of me. With the current coin price coupled with the current technical challenges and lack of cohesive user adoption and growth, I have a real concern about the ability of DF-supported organizations to sustain themselves over the next 12-18 months.
When I see posts about the next 10 years… Zcash isn’t a new project… it’s just about 7 years old. It’s not a startup anymore and many of the ideas and approaches that got the project off the ground may not work to take it to the next level. That’s why you tend to see startup founders shift into other roles, leveraging growth-focused leaders to take their organizations forward - everyone benefits then as the product matures. We are not there.
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That’s just our resident Russian bagholder who believes in things self-resolving by simply having faith. Hard to take seriously.
Hopefully you stick around. More people who see what it’s like behind the scenes at the sausage factory and are now no longer bound by the NDA of said Sausage Employer rules are very beneficial.
I assume that specifically for Nick in the here and now is the right decision maybe. Everyone needs to feel confident about the future. ECC have had to resort to layoffs and the developers fund is not guaranteed. That’s what I mean by panic. I don’t know, maybe a good alternative came up and he changed jobs. But you’re making it sound like Zcash (investors) are in trouble. To me, those conclusions are not a big deal.
Can you name me at least one developer from bitcoin core who is now rich? I don’t know that. Therefore, I don’t really care what developers think about investments.
Оh, we’re really not very sensitive here. ))
I don’t even feel things in negativity like pointing out that I’m Russian. In the past even I would have considered it a compliment, but not now that my country has become associated with aggression. Today it is not something to be proud of, to put it bluntly, but I continue to not associate myself with bad things. Yes I’m not at all good on tolerance too and I’m not always prone to good manners, but I’m definitely not the bad guy. I guess that’s why it’s hard for me to be hurt by that characterization. But thanks, anyway.
By the way, since we’re on the subject, I may not know much about Zcash “baseball” in the States, but in Russia right now the coin is lying on fertile ground and is gaining popularity and actuality. Yes, I will not be able to gather in a bar wearing a “I use ZEC” t-shirt, but I feel the growing interest in Zcash not from the point of view of its investment appeal, but from the point of view of its properties, which are beginning to be in demand at a time when free expression of thoughts outside is becoming a luxury and subject to criminal prosecution. This may soon be a big underground movement and I’m a bit excited about it. And @aiyadt won’t let me lie, I’ve written to him many times in private correspondence that as soon as we have that top-notch UX that ECC blogged about starting in 2021, then immediately I will feel free in the way I promote the idea of zcash. People here are not new to crypto and it would be hard for me to fool them by saying that right now out of the box zcash is good. So I would suggest to the topic starter not to complain about the obsolescence of the idea, but to think whether everything was normal for the last year with the technical realization. No offense, but things have not been smooth here, and that continues to be the case, isn’t it?
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Wandered off topic here - maybe move to a different thread?
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Unless there is a widely publicized failure that harms or embarrasses someone famous or sympathetic earlier than that.
I don’t really want someone to be harmed, of course, but I honestly think that would be a larger impact than someone protected.
I’m sure some people get all the way to procuring Zcash and still don’t understand how to shield, but it’s really not that hard, and it doesn’t change the focus of the project.
Even the fact that someone could misunderstand this and think he had private cash but didn’t demonstrates that privacy is the point, whether it succeeded or not.
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I agree that it doesn’t explicitly change the focus of the project, but I moreso am suggesting that we’re in a dangerous fool’s game if we sell new users to a feature set that they’re unlikely to even know how to utilize. (I’m speaking of the majority of Zcash users, who are doing so via CEX wallet custody)
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“Privacy” on a CEX is a paradox whether the coins are held in transparent or shielded pools. The existence or non-existence of transparent ZEC will change nothing about the lack of privacy on a CEX.
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I disagree. If the CEX provides single instance Z-address wallets for their user custody, then there is a massively greater privacy service than without. In that situation, only the CEX and their client would know Pii of that Z-address owner. All other observers of the Zcash blockchain, nor other CEX users, would have no insight into who owns what on a per wallet and per CEX service provider basis.
The current situation is the worst, the CEX uses only transparent features which gives them all of the Pii and it also gives the entire Zcash blockchain the transparent wallet/ transaction info. Some CEX (I’m thinking of Gemini) lump all of their users ZEC into a big single wallet, which provides a layer of obfuscation (better than none at all).
@Dodger this is off-topic, can you merge it over to The Last Swing of The Stick?
Do normal forum users have the ability to merge/ move their comments like this?
So “privacy” on par with a normal bank account. Only the bank knows. Basically the same privacy as the CEX holding it all in one address and keeping track of who owns what with a SQL database. This is more or less how a CEX must be implemented anyways. Matched trades obviously dont move funds onchain. That wouldn’t scale or be fast enough even at small scale.
Giving each user a different shielded wallet would be incredibly expensive unless you know something I don’t. Scanning the entire block chain for each customer… having hundreds of gigabytes of storage and data transfer per customer? Does someone have a handy explanation of a scalable architecture whereby an enterprise can manage 1000s of distinct shielded wallets?
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I completely agree, it is stagnating and nothing is changing, problems from an empty place have remained, there has never been a wallet, but there are useless NFTs, media and a bunch of third-party half-dead wallets… I have long ceased to understand why all this and who needs it… confidentiality is of course cool and necessary, but there is no sense in it… the problem is not in money and its form, but in people and how they use money and for what
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But the Mighty Jaxx NFT drop!! 
Eh, I think this is generalizing and trivializing a lot of history and how complex a working solution has to be for the whole ecosystem. My take is this:
The existence of the transparent model wasn’t the problem. It needs to exist for Zcash to pass regulations, get CEX adoption, and provide a viewable part of the block chain that proved the protocol was working as intended.
However, I agree that the first misstep was not making that super clear to the users. They didn’t know they weren’t making shielded transactions, and any documentation that would explain the details required too much for an onboarding experience (zcash-cli does not a happy consumer make).
And the second one was that it simply wasn’t fixed fast enough or defended with enough confidence. There are clearly defined reasons for every hurdle, and the only malignancy was from competing projects using this misstep in strategy. I like ignoring most flame wars too, but you do have to debunk the funk. The strategy was picked to not engage, so we didn’t, thinking we were taking the high road. It was the wrong choice.
I still believe the roadmap is good. UAs, if implemented across the board, will fix these issues once and for all. However, usability issues with the wallet have created an understandable bottleneck (again, more outside bad actors we are not confidently defending against) and POS/UDAs all sound good. Partnerships for actual usage have to be created.
So in closing, building stuff never built before (definitely not a copy and paste btc my man) is hard, people bitch too much, everyone get back to work, and let’s focus on robust usability.
Nick I am sorry to see you go and thank you for everything you have done. I hope to see you working in the community (as I plan to do as well).
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Yes. We’ve got to walk before we can run. I know this isn’t kosher but I’ll say it. Users place trust in their CEX because it does function like a bank does for all intents and purposes. By empowering the user/ CEX to have Zcash shielding features, it vastly expands the addressable base of Zcashers who currently can’t use the shielding features (taking coins off-exchange and into sell custody is not trivial for most crypto beginners. it is a lot of risk, with minimal relative return of value). Maybe you’re correct, the CEX can spin up per-user shielded addresses on a per-request basis; otherwise keeping all of the ZEC in a custodial shielded address.
The technical critiques of the idea are all valid. I’ll leave responses to them up to the ECC Research and Developers. In my opinion, asking the CEXs (maybe they never will, or maybe Zcash evolves to make the task less complex and burdensome) to do the heavy lifting to help users shield their ZEC is far more reasonable than expecting every individual user to do so.
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