This thread warms my cold zcash heart. Privacy is the core of Zcash, and we need to make that front and center. If you want transparency, then why put your $ on this chain? If you don’t trust the shielded pool to store your funds then put your money elsewhere. If you do trust the shielded pool and the developers behind this project, then we should strive to achieve z2z only and have a healthy debate on how we work to achieve that common goal and when. I personally feel that we’ve lost so much time focusing on ancillary this or that and have forgotten why we are all here in the first place.
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I think what @secparam is eluding to isn’t unique to Zcash, unfortunately. I’ve been involved with cryptocurrencies since early 2017 as an investor, enthusiast, and hopefully soon incorporating the tech in my business.
What I have seen become of the space over the past few years has been very saddening. We have done to the cryptocurrency space what we have done to many other industries; that is we’ve made it about me vs. you, us vs. them, this coin vs. that coin, my protocol vs. your protocol. The crypto space has become a playground of adults who are arguing over who’s toy is better, shinier, etc.
I’ll use Bitcoin as an example since it’s the most transparent (no pun intended). One can’t go far without hearing about how Bitcoin is better than everything else. Crypto Twitter is dominated by people who are ready to go on the attack to prove this point. I’ve seen developers, prominent authors in the space, economists curse people for not accepting that Bitcoin is better than X coin, or gold, or whatever. To make matters worse, we’ve somehow attached completely childish monikers to Bitcoin and it’s followers. If you’re a Bitcoin supporter, you’re a “maximalist”, “hodler”, “meat eater”, and Bitcoin is a “honey badger” that “doesn’t care about anything/anyone else”. Ethereum has it’s own cult following of course.
This is all very sad and pathetic. Instead of celebrating a revolutionary technology, we’re busy attacking each other. Instead of uplifting each other and focusing on first principles, we’re too busy making up childish names for irrelevant themes. Yes there are bad characters in the space who are motivated by scamming people and those individuals should be exposed, but that’s no excuse to attack people the way I see happen consistently. All this detracts from what are the core principles and fundamentals of cryptocurrencies. Privacy is one such core principle as it pertains to Zcash.
I think until we move away from all this (if ever), those of us who are truly passionate about the technology will be the minority and we’ll continue to lose ground to the people who are in the space just to make a quick buck or to yell at each other about whose coin is better.
Just my thoughts on the matter. I hope I’m wrong though.
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The current third parties of a completely private zec have one obstacle that will not allow achieving their goal - this obstacle is financing, and while there is a chance of loss in price and a large number of exchanges in case of failure (even news of a failure, because the regulator may immediately rethink the argumentation that was used when entering the exchanges on the part of ECC) as well as the option of a drop in price after such news (look at XRP), then none of those present will achieve a result even after the vote, so that there would not be many dissatisfied with the next decision, this issue is not commented on by the main owners of the trademark, but how they will say so and we will live.
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I have mostly seen positive sentiment towards other cryptocurrencies from Zcash but not the other way! Glad you called out first principles, this discussion is more about realizing that.
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Because you want to speculate on other people valuing privacy.
Most people “adopting” Zcash do not value privacy, but count on others to do so.
What Zcash needs is for more people to put their mouth where their money is…
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Fair point about speculators. They can enjoy the risks/rewards of speculation in the shielded pool too though. Speculation is not a reason to keep t-addrs around while continuing to degrade Zcash’s core principle.
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The reason to hold zcash, in my view, is first and foremost as a store of value. Its a way to save money to convert into future purchases. Privacy is important; yet secondary.
Who wants to work hard and save money only to find out the currency has been debased. I’d much rather own a safe and sound currency that is public than a private one that could be be debased from counterfeiting. And the best would be a store of value free from the risk of debasement and private - zcash in theory. So, anything that can be done to ensure the supply is fixed and can not be counterfeited is needed. So far I have not heard anyone say the supply can be known with certainty.
It would be great if zcash supply could be regularly audited for supply while at the same time maintain privacy. If there is a supply breach then a system and protocol to resolve it.
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Check secparams’s replies above. That requires a separate discussion if you want to dig further for new solutions/ideas.
Also:
That may be a reason to hold cryptocurrency, but why buy, use, or hold Zcash specifically vs BTC or LTC? The answer is you think privacy is important, either to you, or cynically, to others so your holdings will appreciate.
Zcash can be a store of value and should be : Swiss bank accounts had privacy for a reason Because of privacy there’s a slightly larger risk of bugs leading to inflation than BTC, but privacy has value and we can mitigate those risks. However, if you buy into “hidden” inflation being uniquely risky, then you start looking for audits and safeguards for this special risk. And then you start justifying taddrs as the safety valve for hidden inflation: hidden inflation only effects the shielded pool, so money in taddrs is safe. This is fine on its own, but once you’ve bought into that, then you can never have most money be in the shielded pool. And so now you can’t have zcash really be about privacy. And again, privacy is the only reason to hold ZEC over LTC.
We have to agree its all about privacy, even if it takes time to get there.
(note, we can temporarily have a transparent pool as part of a process of iteratively improving our privacy tech and slowly moving everything over to shielded. But that still means privacy is the end goal. we’ve lost site of that)
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I have to disagree. It’s only about privacy after a person knows the currency is safe. For example, would you want to own a Venezuelan Bolivar based crytpo with complete privacy or a USD based crypto with complete transparency? The answer is obvious. Privacy is less important than inflation of the currency.
But once you can guarantee safety, privacy becomes important. You won’t get big money to invest without a safety protocol and you won’t get small money because they can’t accept the vol.
zcash is akin to a savings account not a checking account.
I own zcash. But I won’t for long if I can’t get comfortable the supply is safe. I bought it thinking it was better than Bitcoin. But it’s not if Bitcoin has better safety on the supply of coins.
Everyone is speculating at this point because no one really knows if the supply is truly fixed. Although it sounds like t-address is fixed and z-address is the issue.I don’t completely understand the issue. But my preference would be to eliminate the supply risk to the extent it exists.
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If you don’t trust zcash tech & devs then why hold money in t-addr, what do you achieve by doing that - you don’t get real privacy by storing in t-addr then doing t2z & z2z etc
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There are safeguards in place, but if you want 100% supply auditability on demand then you will be dissatisfied with any privacy coin.
Even the Monero guys are honest and say that they cannot guarantee supply, that’s the nature of “privacy”. You have to rely on established cryptographic assumptions.
With Bitcoin you rely on some cryptographic assumptions, like the way private keys and addresses are generated: you assume that the bar is too high for a computer to brute force a public/private keypair. But will that hold true even with quantum computing, forever? Who knows.
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Maybe it’s a naive question. But why can’t a coin have some type of unique ID or seal that can simply be counted without giving away private info. Assign a unique ID when it’s created and cross reference against the master list when it’s used. If the master list of IDs is more than expected or if the coin ID does not match the master list, then a protocol is in place to resolve the issue.
That’s how Zcash kinda already works, when a private transaction is made there is a unique “nullifier” that verifies that the transaction is valid without revealing the transactions details to everyone. It’s a bit over my head exactly how they work:
But what you are asking implies that there would also be some sort of “amount” tied to that nullifier.
I believe that would probably create a major privacy leak because amounts would something that can be correlated between transactions. Combine that with other metadata like time/blockheight/etc… and you have many ways to track funds via statistical graph analysis.
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I have heard different kinds of arguments for which there is a clear answer & explanation for deprecation of transparent addresses in the long term. So what we do now?
I’m taking about the number of coins outstanding; not transaction values. Assuming 21m coins are outstanding, there would be 21m unique IDs. However each coin can be used infinitely. So the IDs associated with the transactions would be different. Is there a concept like this built into zcash coin supply?
The unique identifier in the protocol is a big problem for anonymity, so it is impossible to implement. You can check if there are counterfeit coins in the secure pool when they are moved from the secure pool of the outdated protocol to the new one, read about the turnstile, everything seems to be clearly described there, but this does not guarantee complete safety against counterfeiting.
All coins with anonymity protection are subject to hidden issue, this is the nature of the technology, in zcash these risks are minimized due to: code audit, turnstile, existing unprotected address, code complexity, which means implementation of hidden errors. For today I think this is enough and zec is the safest coin in terms of technology and team.
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I agree with this.
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The post above is self-contradictory when it references:
privacy
and then
every exchange and … regulator
Exchanges and regulators are enemies of privacy. Governments are enemies of privacy.
Bitcoin is a success because it is amorphous. It has no corporate structure that can be leaned on by governments to impose anti-privacy AML/KYC requirements.
Unfortunately Zcash has several affiliated corporate structures. Corporations work to ensure their own survival. So the people running these Zcash-affiliated corporations hope that they can play the “compliance” game well enough to keep themselves afloat rather than squashed by governments.
I think it’s a vain hope. Governments prize their monopoly control of money flows. It keeps the tax revenues flowing and allows them to wage financial war, through sanctions and other means. A truly successful, truly private cryptocurrency would be too much of a threat for governments to tolerate. They would seek to either ban it or cripple its privacy features, as we are already seeing with Mnuchin’s latest proposal.
So every ounce of effort the Zcash community expends on playing a losing “compliance” game is wasted effort.
Where should that effort go instead?
Zcash is a privacy-oriented technology. So its competitive advantage would be strongest with users who value privacy the most. And who would that be? People doing things those in power don’t like. These days that mostly means: selling merchandise forbidden by the nanny state, and transacting with designated Evil countries.
So Zcash should be engaging quietly with every single dark web marketplace out there, asking why they are adopting Monero rather than Zcash, and making the technical case for zk-snarks rather than ring signatures. And it should be reaching out to the communities using Bitcoin to circumvent sanctions, so that Zcash can replace Bitcoin when Mnuchin’s successor starts prosecuting people for spending Bitcoins that started their life in Iran or Venezuela.
Now, if any of that actually started happening, no doubt that would bring down all sorts of regulatory hurt on Zcash’s affiliated corporate structures like ECC and the Zcash Foundation. So the people manning those structures have a big incentive to not do any of that. I don’t expect it to, dooming Zcash to remain technically brilliant, but mostly unadopted and largely irrelevant, until its backers give up and/or USG bans all privacy coins.
But I do expect a real privacy-focused cryptocurrency to come into existence someday, maybe even based on the Zcash codebase. zk-snarks are a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to their door. It’s just that that path won’t have signposts marked “KYC” or “AML” along the way.
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I love Zcash, and completely agree with Ian here. It’s about privacy stupid.
Wanted to jump on here for the first time, and voice my opinion. Shielded ZEC FTW! At very least set privacy as a standard. z2z by default, and prohibit all t2t transactions. If you want transparency, you can use many other blockchain out there. If the main focus for Zcash is to be ‘privacy-protecting digital currency’', then taddr should be taken out completely. Complete privacy || GTFO.
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