Resetting Zcash: its about privacy, not scale, econ, dev funds, or governance

[dontbeevil]

@joshs

As one from ECC in the trenches who is daily out engaging and thinking about Zcash shielded adoption, this thread is a little puzzling to me. Privacy is necessary, not a nice-to-have. Either the financial privacy afforded by Zcash is an inevitability, or we and generations to come will be be living in a dystopian panopticon. Some other things are also necessary if its to remain censorship resistant, available to everyone, etc. Otherwise just store fiat cash in a bank vault, which is also private.

@joshs @zooko

There is no doubt about the efforts ECC team is putting with resources that are available. What’s surprising is ECC’s support of t-addr & t-z ecosystem as long term strategy. It was fine as a short term strategy.

Fundamentally, there is a difference b/n ECC’s plan & strategy vs what most of us here are looking for.

ECC wants to have more ZEC in shielded pool, more z2z transactions, right? (correct me if I’m wrong).

Can ECC leadership team answer questions:

1. I guess the bottleneck there would be exchanges storing ZEC in t-addr. Does ECC intend to push exchanges to store ZEC in shielded pool? is ECC fine as long as all users store ZEC in shielded pool on their wallets or hardware devices?

2. Does ECC support disabling t2t transactions?

3. Everyone agrees that it didn’t make sense to promote z-addr for technical reasons. We have wallets that make shielded transactions possible, ledger z support underway, possibly shielded multisig, viewkey support in sometime. How does ECC plan to promote z-addr storage? What are the strategies? (At this point, I won’t be surprised if it involved no protocol change to enable that).

4. What’s the role of t-addr in Zcash ecosystem?

5. What would ECC do when shielded usage doesn’t go significantly up even after making shielded tech available?

6. Winning users is not easy, the value proposition needs to be simple. Right now, majority of transactions are transparent. Does ECC have any action plan to organically reduce transparent transactions?

7. What does ECC think about users with perception that Zcash is not private? There is no point in scaling the blockchain if users who care about privately storing & transacting wouldn’t use Zcash (ex: immediate user growth will come from active users of Monero).

8. As you (ECC) can clearly see, members within Zcash community doesn’t agree keeping t-addr “forever”, also fully transparent transactions. Can ECC make an official stance on this? See Ian’s question: Leap frogging zaddr - #367 by secparam

9. If ZF poll turns out differently than what ECC intend to do, would ECC make appropriate software change (similar to the way we did with dev fund).

10. With the way, the conversations were happening, it is easy to question where the power lies. Good or bad, Would ECC plan to support changes that it doesn’t fully agree?

11. Does ECC intend to co-own Zcash trademark in perpetuity? I think releasing it would further support decentralization.