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

[pjv]

@secparam

Privacy is what we need to advertise to people, its what we need to be believe. Its what we need to focus on to get adoption. Because it’s the only thing that sets us apart and its our massive strength. We have the world’s best privacy tech and some of the best cryptographers and engineers building it.

But, we’ve lost touch with that. Our zeitgeist is more cryptocurrency economics, experiments, and contrarianism, not privacy. We keep talking about and marketing things that don’t help. It’s an anti-vision.

Wow, if only someone had seen this and pointed it out in January 2016. Oh wait…

@pjv

Fourth suggestion: I know that this is dev times with Zcash and that all the existing discussion and documentation is dev related and thus deals with ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’, ‘transparent’ and ‘protected’ cash, ‘pours’, and etc. That’s all fine for architecting and developing the underlying plumbing, and this suggestion is mostly about building clients/wallets, but it also bears on communicating about Zcash outside of dev circles even now. Before Zcash rolls out to real public adoption all of the arcana should be completely hidden from end users and the only metaphor that should be presented to Joe (Sixpack) is the relatively instant private transfer of a specific quantity of Zcash from Joe’s wallet to Anne’s wallet, or Joe’s wallet to Amazon.com. All Joe cares about is how much he is sending and to whom. Joe should never hear anything about “inputs”, “outputs”, and “change”. From his point of view he sends exactly the amount of whatever transaction he is effecting and the end result is that his wallet’s balance is debited by exactly that amount. I understand in high-level terms how the zerocoin protocol runs on top of a “transparent” bitcoin-like blockchain and so I get what a “transparent” coin is. Joe should never, ever need to know about them. That should all be part of the hidden plumbing and Joe should only ever think about and interact with Zs with which he can assume all his transactions carry a strong privacy guarantee. On the receiving end, Joe should be able to think of his wallet as a singular entity (he should not have to think about different public addresses), but still be able to rely on maximum privacy / anonymity for his transactions. I have thoughts about how to accomplish this in practice, but it goes beyond the scope of this note and I’m sure there are better ways that I haven’t thought of.

…Or followed up in December 2016 with the specifics of exactly how the rollout failed:

@pjv

FWIW, from my point of view, total fail .

Zcash, while technically amazing, has been rolled out as just another alt-coin. I have no idea what the future holds, but for now, it’s just another alt.

Woulda, coulda, shoulda…

What would have been interesting / different / revolutionary is if your “release” had been a well-designed, cross-platform, GUI client (ala Jaxx) built on top of the Z-guts, that is easy for regular folks to comprehend and use. In that client there should have been no mention of t-addrs or z-addrs or even any “addresses” per sé (and BTW, t-addrs should be all but invisible except to the geekiest of the geeks who need them for some reason - the z-addr is the entire reason for the existence of Zcash, it should be the automatic default and no client should ever generate a t-addr except by some kind of explicit opt-in or advanced setting), all of which is like exposing the technical details of a transmission to a grandmother whose only worry when buying a new car is what color it is.

Both of these quotes from this thread:

Some usability / adoptability suggestions

I have some high-level suggestions for the Zcash team in the area of the overall usability and public adoptability of Zcash. These are ultimately based on some Really Deep Thoughts about the nature of money in human culture, but I'll spare you the metaphysics. My assumption, following the Hello World blog post, is that Zcash is about the private, trust-less, non-intermediated transfer of value from party A to party B and that any other uses (smart contracts, yada yada yada) are totally inciden…

Maybe there is still time to turn things around. Still invoking the ghost of SJ: Think Different!