While I like the simplicity of smoothing and the potential for reducing disruption for miners, I maintain that it’s not the right time to introduce this complexity. While SL is solely responsible for the implementation of the ZIP, the downstream effects are consequential and a distraction to the realization of capabilities we need to drive adoption. The NSM is simply not that important in the near to mid term.
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Can you put some concrete thoughts behind this assertion?
I’d dispute the opposite, that introducing the issuance smoothening/ NSM would have net-positive impacts to the broader goal of driving Zcash adoption.
I’ve been a lot less tuned into the priority lists recently, what are the current Top 3-5 items? (that you’re suggesting are ranked above NSM/ smoothening)
Sure. I’ve been leading software teams for decades, and also I know how spread thin the ECC team already is, and the community of people that work with third parties and in social channels. Using the metaphor of a horses tail, it might only seem like a twitch at the top, but the tail swings wide.
Part of this is timing: for crypto generally, its place in the world, and how privacy and self-custody fits in. And more and more projects are coming online that offer, at least partial, levels of privacy. More competition. Now is the time to focus on utility and adoption and wait on things that won’t have a meaningful impact for years or decades.
Things that should have near-term focus across the community include ZSAs, funding mechanisms, PoS and scalability.
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Josh, I agree with your reasoning except for the idea that it’s not a big deal. Anything that can have an additional impact on reducing Zcash issuance will be factored into the price of ZEC. And a properly set smooth upward price trend would certainly do us good in terms of implementing all these useful things you suggest we focus on. It’s precisely because of the increasing competition that we shouldn’t delay these things.
It may seem that the curve and commission burn doesn’t have that much of an impact on ZEC scarcity. But the issue of taking care of the miners definitely does. Yes, the total number of coins will be the same whether there will be 100 miners or 10000 (numbers are notional). But if there are 10000 of them, the reward automatically becomes more valuable for each individual miner. It has always worked this way. The better the conditions for cost prediction, the more willing people are to consider ASICs for Zcash, the higher the hash rate will be, the more scarce ZEC will become for each of the miners and the higher the cost of production will be, the more stable the price will be.
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I don’t see it, but it could be that I’m missing something. Can you do the math on what you think the financial impact would be for a given miner if the issuance is essentially the same?
fwiw, I know one of the largest, if not the largest ZEC miner and how they have been thinking about Capex and the decision they recently made based on a two-year model. I believe this would have zero impact to them.
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Zcash hashrate is so low today that it can be created by a fleet of 10,000 Z15Pro. 25 million dollars, but still not that much.
In comparison, to create the current hash rate of Litecoin network would require 118 thousand of the latest L9s at $11K each. That’s $1.3 billion.
A strategic miner who knows the ultimate scarcity is likely fine with that (status quo).
But the uncertainty is impacting a huge number of retail miners for whom predictability matters and they have been selecting ASICs for Scrypt in 2024. The hash rates speak for themselves. I’ll bring you screenshots of this debate from mining-related Telegram feeds later.
The factor of increasing production cost has always worked in PoW mining:
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Though I greatly appreciate it, I’m not asking for you to do a bunch of work to prove your point. A fixed supply with a halving schedule is predictability. There is more unpredictability in the unknown PoW/PoS transition.
Why does this need to be done in the next 12 months instead of 2 or 3 years from now or around the time of the next halvening, and why this would have more of a economic impact, and an impact to adoption, than other priorities?
I just don’t see the upside in the short to mid term, but see clear downsides.
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Right now and for over a month now, one strategic market participant is buying up Zcash satelite by algorithm. And since this satelite gave up privacy features, their strategy is not clear to me in principle. I hope that miners will be interested in this. Although to be honest I suspect that this is what a strategic market player is trying to achieve in order to take all the dollar catchers away from the main idea. By compatibility, this strategic market participant is a major miner. I have no reason to object, other than some concerns that it will upset the balance of decentralisation going forward.
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This also goes without saying, Zcash is ~dangerously insecure. What I mean here is that there are a relatively tiny amount of global full nodes running at relevant block heights, total hashrate is quite low and trending in the wrong direction, and hashrate is quite centralized. All of these known factors negatively impact the Zcash project’s brand integrity. I find it a bit to hopeful to think that utility/ adoption efforts will drive value, I see it the other way around - value creation leads to more utility/ more adoption. I’m convinced that NSM is a value focused initiative, which is why I’d like to see it implemented sooner than later.
This is a conundrum for sure, I respect all opinions here.
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ZEC holders bought into the privacy, the supply cap, the halving schedule, the T addresses, the proof of work security, and the permanence of a ZEC.
I believe that once people buy into something, it’s not okay to change the rules of the game.
Especially if there were no prominent disclosures that such a change might happen in the future.
If there were disclosures in Zcash’s whitepapers that these foundations might be modified in the future, it’s possible that some people may not have purchased ZEC or its mining equipment.
Our upcoming features which bring more utility to Zcash will be huge! They don’t change the rules of the game.
I do not support eliminating halving, deprecating pools without recourse, removing opt-in transparent addresses, or (completely) removing proof of work.
These are the pillars that ZEC holders bought into.
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Yes guaranteeing a fixed max supply and a robust security model with the NSM is something that very few cryptos can pretend to achieve and something of great value (all the rest appears superfluous in comparison).
As for the halving events, apart from the pump and dumps adepts, I don’t see any relevance for them.
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Agree. Not to mention this is the reason exchanges require so many confirmations before crediting ZEC to a users account. This leads to a poor user experience vs other coins.
NSM is something that I can see for long horizon benefits, but in the shorter term (if both efforts were equal) I would prioritize the PoS/PoW transition before NSM.
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There appears to be some confusion regarding the discussion around priorities. The NSM is developed and ready to be merged. Crosslink hybrid PoS is a project that we started working on late last year. There is absolutely no reason to prioritize the transition to Crosslink over implementing the NSM.
The discussion about priorities revolves around what can be included in NU7 based on the engineering teams’ available resources and complexity budget.
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CMIIW but implementing PoS and keeping the supply below 21m will be much easier with NSM, including ZIP 234, right?
Since the NSM is ready to be merged and the community (based on the NSM polls I have seen) are receptive towards NSM, we should implement them in NU7.
Pools deprecation have already happened, also based on what I know, there was no fork that wants to keep running and maintaining the Sprout pool. On the point of halving, it comes from Bitcoin code. Zcash did change issuance with the “slow start” mining and the block time halving in the Blossom upgrade. I am also not aware of any fork that wants to keep issuance and block time unchanged from Blossom upgrade. So, Zcash have experienced change that you reject but Zcasher still hold ZEC. I don’t think your point stands in this case.
If Zcash doesn’t get rid of PoW before the end of 2030, I will convert all my ZEC into different assets. You don’t represent me, a ZEC holder.
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I absolutely would have supported this 5 years ago. We all like stability and clear rules of the game for years to come. But today many loud voices are discussing abandoning the 21 million coin limit in bitcoin.
Because things didn’t go the way Satoshi willed, instead of a p2p payment system, Bitcoin started to be seen as collateral for paper ETFs. People with money and huge influence don’t understand Bitcoin. They don’t take into account the many technical aspects that create future limitations for bitcoin to work. The crowd even more so does not understand Bitcoin and will obediently change the narrative that is forced upon them.
The deeper reason for these consequences is that Bitcoin’s early developers chose short-term stability over long-term stability. And when the threat becomes imminent instead of increasing the block size, they will have to abandon the 21 million coin limit.
We at Zcash historically study all aspects of Bitcoin and make decisions based on not allowing mistakes to be repeated. We can’t just say, ‘OK, we have better things to do today.’ No, all things are important, especially when we haven’t gone that far yet. How do we know that in 2-3 years we’ll even be able to convince the community for any improvements at all? The percentage of technical heads will shrink and the percentage of ‘we don’t want to change anything’ will increase. So I certainly wouldn’t want to put this issue on hold.
When in 2014-2016 the team was thinking how to create Zcash, of course the most sensible solution was to make a complete clone of the bitcoin economy. And that should have attracted a primary audience and it worked. But in January 2025 this advantage is already lost due to huge competition, it’s not enough to attract the user. Now it’s important to be flexible and think long term.
"The deprecation policy / End-of-Support height set in the code has no direct consensus effect. All it means is that if you are choosing to receive your compiled binaries from the Electric Coin Company, you are choosing to follow their support policy, which is that each release will run for at most 16 weeks.
Users are welcome to obtain full node binaries from other entities providing different support policies, or compile binaries themselves with a different support policy (e.g. with the EoS logic disabled). Some users indeed do this. But then the node software they are running is not supported by ECC, and those users are responsible for staying aware of and keeping up-to-date with changes to the network, including Network Upgrades."
I don’t need to explain why this was done, do I?
Not because we don’t want to change anything.
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Here’s example of how changing patterns in a process favourably changes the economy:
Note that Ethereum has had virtually zero inflation for over 2 years in a bearish and multidirectional market.
And please note that all the big changes have been favourably received by the general community and have had a positive impact on the ETH price.
Because the head developers were not afraid to make deep changes if the market demanded it. But they don’t have a weighted coin voting. But in Zcash it will probably be after 2-3 years, and we will never be able to bypass the decisions of large holders who are also strategic miners 
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From a user and investor perspective, this is my simple understanding 
:
- PoS – Enhance coin utility & Eliminate 51% attack
- ZSAs – Enhance coin utility & Bring more users
- Funding Mechanisms – More decentralized & responsible community
- Scalability – Enhance coin UX & Bring more users
- NSM – Improve revenue allocation model & Improve network economy model
5 is important, 1-4 are more urgency.
Except that 1 depends on 5, issuance smoothing will give the least amount pains for miners who are still mining ZEC but expects to not be able to in next few years AND ensures there will be still some ZEC to be issued in the future while respecting the current 21m ZEC limit.
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I’d like to address a couple of points @joshs made yesterday.
One under-appreciated reason why the NSM is urgent is that it allows us to proactively address the importance of network sustainability. As illustrated by the Twitter posts below, there is an ongoing conversation about Bitcoin’s security budget and concerns that revenue from transaction fees will not be sufficient to sustain network security as the block subsidy continues to decrease. The NSM presents an opportunity for Zcash to improve on Bitcoin’s design and address this issue.
Implementing the NSM in NU7 allows us to stay ahead of the curve and prevent unavoidable issues down the road. Additionally, this move sends a strong signal to the market that we are aware of these issues and are actively working to secure the long-term health of the network. I strongly believe implementing the NSM will help inspire confidence in Zcash holders and users and positively contribute to the broader goal of driving user adoption.
As I’ve previously mentioned, Eiger is contracted to handle the integration of the NSM into a network upgrade. Our agreement covers both the zcashd and Zebra implementations. Since only Zebra is relevant, we have resources available to review new consensus features and help alleviate the workload for ECC and ZF engineers. The various organizations working together is a net positive that will allow us to make improvements to Zcash more quickly and efficiently.
As @nuttycom eloquently stated:
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It needs to be done now before Zcash is hijacked.
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