It’s fine to note that building for compliance is a mistake, but far better to spend effort building for resilience. What should we build? I disagree with @jelly5649 that coin-weighted voting should be the priority.
Props to @hanh and @ZcashGrants for moving us towards DEX listing on Maya!!!
DEX support is a not-incorrect response to the Binance delisting threat.
The ZCG made the right call, and Hanh implemented. That ought to be where we’re focused.
What are next steps to building effective DEX support?
Part of the outreach @aquietinvestor and I are doing for TEX address support is to encourage exchanges to adopt better tooling by using the frameworks and libraries ECC, ZCG*, and ZF develop, audit and maintain instead of third party libraries they are using to parse t addresses as if they were btc ones.
Shielded multisig accounts have been on my wish list for years. Or even T3 multisigs that dont require a computer science degree to setup and use. I want to make sure I don’t spend some zec unless it is really really me. Im all the m’s and n’s in most of my multisigs for 2fa reasons
This would also enable businesses to do escrow, then magic things can happen.
2nd wish would be for a server client with key vault integration (Azure, hashicorp, gcp, etc) so that businesses can sign without keeping keys hot all the time. Add on for approval work flows would be a plus. Bob and Alice can approve, else Steve can approve alone.
3rd wish would be exchanges adopting UA.
4th wish a road map to sunset sapling.
not a fan of this polarizing thinking either but hey we’re all entitled to opinions. the only way that Zcash can mainstream is buy remaining competitvely accessible, and in the current crypto playfield being accessible on Binance Coinbase Kraken Robinhood etc etc etc is totally critical… hell we’re not even on Crypto dot com or Robinhood yet, so a Binance delisting in addition to previous delistings would end up crippling the project harder.
compromise is part of the winning playbook. I stand behind the great efforts that made TEX come to life and prevented the terrible threat of a Binance delisting
TBH dont know what youre implying there?
the majority of ZEC are totally transparent and thats probably never gonna be a feature that the teams eliminate, so how is there really some kind of problematic compromise by helping prevent more delistings from major CEX. Zcash adversaries probably want to see the coin getting delisted which makes it harder to use …see the Monero story as example
In my view, TEX was more of a distraction than a priority. While I acknowledge that there is a trade-off involved, it is not something we need to address immediately. Furthermore, it’s important to note that Binance still categorizes ZEC as a token at risk of being delisted. Despite our efforts to develop a solution that they find acceptable, Binance continues to place ZEC in the same category as the FTX token.
Who can say that having ZEC under monitoring tags (at risk of being delisted) is better than an outright delisting from Binance? Like it or not, monitoring tags which is prominently shown to users impacts perception of Zcash. At least with a delisting, users won’t associate Zcash in the same “risk” category as with FTX tokens. We would also have the urgency to focus on DEX integration and simultaneously collaborate more effectively with regulated exchanges that respect privacy like Gemini and Coinbase.
I’ve been trying to pinpoint what bothers me about this thread. I think it’s the way it takes a stance against compromises, admitting the compromise was a mistake… but just keeping making the compromise.
I’m not personally fully against the tex address. But I think that advocating on a “No Appeasement” stance while keeping tex support is just empty posturing. If the goal is to actually be “unfliching” then that would require removing tex support.
I can’t speak for Josh, but as I explained, my reasoning for why we shouldn’t have done TEX addresses depends on a combination of principle and practicality. Whether something is a significant distraction to other goals depends on how much it costs, or could have been predicted to cost. In future, we should err on the side of assessing potential costs conservatively, so that we are less likely to expend engineering effort on features that aren’t directly improving privacy or the usability and applicability of the shielded protocol.
Daira-Emma, your reflections and retrospective are a great display of intelectual honesty and transparency. A breeze of fresh air and a horizon to a better future.
There are a lot of Zcashers here that might not be in the Software Engineering scene, so let me tell you folks that most of the IT industry does not have the courage to make such reflections and ownership.They just would invent some excuse for themselves and broom the dust under the rug instead of conducting themselves as Daira-Emma just did here.
Continuing with the retrospective theme of the thread:
Daira-Emma, do you think that TEX address support could have been done in a more “basic” way that it required less engineering effort on ECC’s side but still worked for Binance users at some “cost” on their side?
For Example, I can think of these costs that could have been deferred to Binance users to make ECC’s backlog lighter:
more UX friction and extra hoops that Binance users had to jump through
A. Manual deshielding
B. Fixed amounts to avoid change handling
Less impact on the librustzcash codebase with a more basic first implementation
A. plain t-2-t no ephemeral addresses
B. less history recoverability when TEX were used
Some rationale on these:
1A: Spend from T would have been implemented anyway but the co-dependent transaction management would have been avoided. (Does Ywallet do this @hanh ?)
1B: TEX is such a particular use case that having arbitrary requirements doesn’t sound crazy.
2A: This is as Ledger currently works. (not sure if trezor works at all right now)
2B: For Tax reporting the Binance end should suffice because currently ZEC users can’t provide Sapling neither Orchard payment disclosures to actually declare realized loss or earns.
@aquietinvestor, I wasn’t involved in the very first negotiations with Binance, were any of these workarounds unacceptable to Binance?
This was a wallet feature, implemented in librustzcash (primarily zcash_client_backend and zcash_client_sqlite). It was only ever going to get done if developers with knowledge of librustzcash wallet internals (in this case, primarily me and Kris Nuttycombe) were prepared to do the work to specify and implement it. That’s not “wanting to be jury and executioner”; it’s simply “nothing gets done by magic”.
In the sentence you quote I meant that:
ECC’s engineering team will, in future, err on the side of assessing potential costs conservatively, so that we are less likely to expend engineering effort on features that aren’t directly improving privacy or the usability and applicability of the shielded protocol.
I would personally recommend that other teams working on Zcash do the same.
Maybe, but at the cost of compromising our goals for secure usability of librustzcash-based wallets. And so I think that the alternative in practice would have been to just not do TEX addresses. In particular I’m fairly sure that the consensus of ECC engineers would not have supported the more basic approach, because we would have considered it too great a security/usability compromise.
yeah for sure… and its why I already said it above, unless we’re actually going to eliminate Transparent ZEC and txs then everything is empty words in some context. Again we already know the anti-appeasement outcome… its called Monero. in large part a niche privacy only network thats only accessible to technically savvy crypto natives. I keep believing that Zcash deserves to eventually beat Monero in the privacy war because Zcash decided a long time ago that keeping some optional transparency features is actually good for long term access and compliance to CEX or audit needing entities.
here’s the problem in your binary… statement 1 will inevitably have statement 2 as an included reason for millions if not billions of zcashers in the future.
speaking here as somebody who got screwed when Public dot com removed Zcash just a few months after adding it. I wish that the teams here couldve acted faster to keep Zcash on that CEX it wouldve made things a ton easier for me and the other few hundred zcash investors on there… instead though we all got screwed and basically forced into selling at a loss. Its a huge problem for the project if there is a constant threat of CEX delistings. Id say you probably owe yourself to think a bit harder about why in the first place should Zcash have features to keep CEX and auditors happy… my opinion is that its because keeping them happy keeps users happy
Do not miss the forest for the trees. The goal of crypto is to go P2P and not to keep some centralized entities happy. The more you try to appease them, the more they will abuse you.
And for crypto to really take off and assume its true purpose, people will have to leave centralized exchanges and banks behind for various reasons. But yes the transition could be painful until humans find a way to reorganize themselves as they always do.
lol… sorry to be captain obvious… youre stating your belief about the goal of crypto.
its a global investing sector now where tbh the majority of people getting in are here to make money. very very few are relying on these altcoins for usability features.
if zcash never wakes up and realizes how important investors are
only sticks heels down to try and chase some paper dragons of how to be ideologically pure
then ill hate to say it were dead in the water
ZEC aint designed to be private digital cash. its impossible with a supply cap, its impossible with PoS happening in the future, and its certainly impossible if ZEC cant even compete value wise against vaporware solana memecoins.
nobody here, especially not me, is saying to appease to central powers or governments. all im saying is that for zcash to have a chance to win theres gotta be realistic plan. keep ZEC accessible as possible. try and make ZEC valuable over time. keep adding features that help out users. not contreversial ideas if u ask me
