Respectfully, these tweets (I’ll disregard the motives) are not relevant to Zcash in the near term.
Rushing smoothing and this new economic model into NU7 will dramatically increase the risk that NU7 will be further delayed.
That means that ZSAs will likely be further delayed, and that NU8 will be further delayed.
If NU8 is to include lockbox distribution, all funding for ZCG and other orgs will revert to miners this November.
I don’t think an Aug NU7 activation is achievable as-is. If I’m right and it slides to Nov (even without NSM), this cuts funding for at least three months assuming that we need at least three months between consecutive hard forks.
This community has consistently underestimated the time it takes to implement, test, audit, remediate and launch consensus changes. Something always comes up. We take the time to do things right, as we should, but it always takes longer than we think it will.
I also assert that we still don’t have community consensus on whether smoothing, burning and reissuance is the right solution. It was Nate’s idea while at ECC, and Zooko supported him, but I have not seen it vetted or alternatives considered in enough of a manner to codify it into the protocol. This is a significant enough change to our tokenomics that we should be sure.
Is it worth the risk to rush this right now? No, we have other much more impactful and important things to focus on in the next two years including zcashd depreciation, ensuring ZSAs launch successfully, implementing a new governance and funding model, and making progress toward PoS/PoW.
Josh, thanks for the context. It should all be in this thread so that everyone can know the history of the issue. I will also attach the first (if I am not mistaken) mention of this proposal:
By the way, the article contains a link to a public discussion in the Bitcoin community:
I fully agree with Josh here. The priority right now should be NU7 w/ ZSA launch and transitioning to a hybrid PoS/PoW system. NSM seems promising, but is not nearly as time-sensitive as the others, IMO.
Building all of the wallet, explorer, NFT galleries, order matching UX around ZSA is a whole different animal involving new developer outreach and marketing… that to my knowledge nobody has a plan or budget for yet.
There will be a considerable delay between ZSA launch and any meaningful ZSA usability with the ecosystem’s workload that I see today.
And let’s avoid comparing our security to Bitcoin’s. They can lose X percent of their miners and still be more “proof of work secure” than Zcash’s current hash rate. Anyone here mining on a real scale? It’s disturbing to me how unrepresented miners seem to be here and also in governance polls.
@tokidoki I feel misquoted, perhaps we are missing each other culturally. To be clear I cautiously support hybrid PoW/PoS, because it maintains the “PoW promise” made to early adopters. And I also support deprecating pools, IF we resolve potential breach of contract liability by ALWAYS giving holders of deprecated ZEC the ability to be refunded, even by a manual process run by a foundation.
I’d just like to clarify that I think everyone here should put the arguments on the table.
I see that SL forked Zebrad because I’m subscribed to the entire Zcash GitHub. I see that Nate keeps looking for wording and Jason is in favor of the proposal.
So without digging deep, I’m estimating that they’re ready to bake this cake for NU7.
And then we have a two-fold question:
“We don’t have time for this”
or
“We don’t want that.”
And there is some confusion.
So let all the arguments be made without talking about how we are falling behind. SL are the initiators and implementers of this issue and they keep pushing it forward.
Yes ignoring the elephant in the room doesn’t make it disappear.
Bitcoin took the cynical approach by sweeping all the concerns under the rug, people got fiat rich in the process so who cares when people finally wake up to the long con.
Just hoping that Zcash won’t follow the same slippery slope.
Assuming both were identical in calendar time to deliver, I agree. But if my understanding is correct, NSM is about 1-2 years ahead of pace, as compared to where PoW/PoS is currently. As Zcash has continued to slide through this broad crypto bull market, with essentially no major catalysts to command attention, I tend to think that shelfing PoW/PoS makes more sense than shelfing NSM.
Seems that from the top down however, we’ll be going the route laid out by Josh, which does make sense also if you consider his perspective on things.
This is correct. The NSM is developed and ready to be merged. Crosslink hybrid PoS is a project we began working on late last year and is currently in the early stages of development.
There is no need to shelf either project. The NSM and Crosslink hybrid PoS are separate initiatives, not in competition with each other. Shielded Labs has contracted Eiger to develop and implement the NSM, while Crosslink has its own dedicated development team, with no involvement from Eiger. The resources and budgets for these two projects are independent.
I want to see more disparate development teams working on Zcash and contributing to the core protocol, so I support including the NSM in the next upgrade.
If it does end up delaying things by a few months so be it, at least we’ll get some meaningful data on what works well or can be improved on (from a collaboration standpoint) for the next upgrade.
We don’t want any single team to be a bottleneck in the process and I think this will take us a step closer to that goal.
And its evident in these discussions that the ECC remain a bottleneck in network upgrades. We’re ready for decentralization in practice, which means that perhaps not everything has got to go through a single team at a single organization.
Is it possible currently? Probably Not. But we’ll have to at some point take that first great step into unchartered territory.
Wrong choice of words, I think I meant backburner or something not as seemingly final.
Assuming no NSM, what is your most likely timeline for ZSA activation? I’m getting the sense that we are delayed either way, which is why I think we should considering adding NSM now. Its possible it will never get included otherwise.
Update: After receiving feedback from community members expressing concerns about using the term “burning” in the context of the NSM, we have decided to update the terminology. The ZIPs and source code will be amended to reflect the following changes:
ZIP 233: Introduces a mechanism to remove ZEC from circulation.
ZIP 234: Smooths the issuance curve and enables coins that have been removed from circulation to be recycled into future block rewards.
ZIP 235: Removes 60% of transaction fees from circulation to support network sustainability.
Jason, how many changes would be required to the node code if there was a decision to adopt this for NU7? How much overlap is this with the part that describes the basic protocol cryptography that Qedit worked with?
If you’re asking in terms of resource allocation, I think it might be most efficient if we merged the NSM with Qedit’s ZSA branch. We could work directly with Qedit to resolve merge conflicts and other issues before submitting a pull request to the main Zebra branch. This would help decentralize the network upgrade process and ease the workload for ZF and ECC engineers.
I’d like to better understand why Josh thinks NU7 activation will be delayed until the end of the year. Is it because Zcashd deprecation is taking longer than anticipated, or is there another reason? Regardless, this delay has nothing to do with the NSM. If anything, Shielded Labs’ involvement in the network upgrade process would help streamline the review of new consensus features and potentially keep the release on schedule. I’ll bring this up on the next Arborist call.