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

General
136

The primary way web servers redirect a client to https is by issuing a 301 Moved Permanently to clients to force the client to the https site. And this is a very good point. It’s not like one day the developers said “you know what, we’re just going to stop supporting HTTP”. No, they built up enough support in both client/server implementations and let the web hosting entities decide when to enable https support.

Now there is a feature called HTTP Strict Transport Security which is a unique feature that lets the server tell your browser to connect via https every time, even if you type in http://. The first time you visit http://www.domain.com, you’ll get the 301 redirect, but also get a header that tells your browser to connect over https for any subsequent connections for a specified max-age.

Example header:
Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000;

It would be very cool if we could devise a method to implement something like this within zcash.

4 Likes
137

I’m not sure I’d even agree we should stop. More so we should all agree that stoping at some point is an objective and we should put resources towards that

@wobbzz iis right about

the problem is, much of that didn’t happen until people decided to get serious and their goal was eventually getting rid for HTTP. That’s when we go e.g. Lets encrypt, a free automated CA.

3 Likes
138

That is a great analogy and a timely one. Grin Slatepack/tor support (better privacy) has been available for some time. Yet exchanges all continued to used unsecured http listeners until the fork today when that functionality was removed.

It might prove to be the same situation with Zcash. Protocol changes can force privacy improvements that were already available but not widely utilized to occur.

4 Likes
139

Do you have any more details about what happened to Grin when they did this?
I’m still of the opinion this should be a principle we set, not an immediate action. It’s this is a goal, we will keep it until we do it or we see that for whatever reason its harming net privacy adoption.
But it would be interesting if Grin switched over without much of a problem.

4 Likes
140

We’re actually currently making progress on exactly that! You can expect an auto-shielding feature to be showing up soon in our mobile wallet SDK. This will allow fully shielded wallets to accept transactions to transparent addresses in a way that will result in those funds being automatically transferred to the wallet’s shielded address, with only minimal user interaction. The details of when this shielding will be performed and what user interaction will be required are still under consideration, but automatic redirection from HTTP to HTTPS is a good analogy for what we’re trying to achieve.

15 Likes
141

That is awesome! Thanks for the info!

142

Auto shield should be on all wallets including desktops

3 Likes
143

My username should make my opinions obvious, but this is clearly a step in the right direction. Thank you!

2 Likes
144

Agree 100% and this is a large part of the reason why the Monero community has grown much faster over the past few years despite awareness many Monero users have that Zcash shielded transactions (when not used a pass-through) can provide far stronger privacy guarantees. The part of the community that values privacy the most often is disappointed that ECC leadership seems to care a lot less about shielded usage (as a % of total network usage) numbers remaining very low after 4+ years. Monero is not perfect, but the community sees continual progress in numerous areas including some that Zcash has largely ignored (network layer privacy improvements such as Dandelion++, etc) and the results can be seen in the transaction data

3 Likes
145

Zcash is Whatsapp of money but it needs to be Signal of money.

3 Likes
146

I like the analogy because it emphasizes that privacy should not be optional. Zcash will reach its full potential only when it provides privacy for everyone (as long as privacy is optional this will not be the case).

Signal is not perfect but does appear to moving in the right direction. Lets move Zcash in the right direction by at least agreeing that we eventually need to remove T address functionality completely. Then we can focus on when and how this should be done.

4 Likes
147

The change was consistent with one of Grins core principles, which is simplicity. That principle is consistent with my preference for statically typed languages such as Rust. This is a case of addition by subtraction as the simplicity gained by removing http listeners will also make Grin more private.

There are multiple reasons why Exchanges spent a lot of time supporting Grin and some have delisted it. This fork was designed to help address those challenges. We should know more about the status of exchange support by the Jan 26th meeting on Keybase. Current exchange support is poor but with this being the 4th and final scheduled hard fork there will be more long term stability in the future, making Grin easier to support in the future.

2 Likes
148

Eagerly waiting for answers :slight_smile:

1 Like
149

Would be cool if auto shielding can be done for old transactions as well. That’ll be even more impressive!!

1 Like
150

Privacy is what we need to advertise to people

Zcash is sufficient, but its not quite necessary. Times are changing… rapidly :zipper_mouth_face: :heartpulse:

exhibit 0:

152

Can anyone here in the forum share some technical depth about why the transparent pool cannot be deprecated?

If privacy is the focus, then the transparent pool needs to be eliminated, just as were the trusted setups.
(Otherwise, any time that we assert privacy is the focus we appear to be selling a fable.)

3 Likes
154

If for other cryptos, such as LTC, privacy is a feature and not a product, what product do they offer that Zcash doesn’t?

I’ve observed a lot of struggle and disagreement around Zcash, especially concerning taddr.

From my perspective (within my personal info-bubble), one of the core issues is the lack of a price-adoption-evolution cycle. I believe @januszgrze or @joshs highlighted this once. I can’t locate the original article, but the idea has resonated with me since I read that.

Every cryptocurrency requires engagement to grow, and much of this engagement in crypto is driven by price rather than features.

Perhaps it’s a “chicken and egg” dilemma, but I’m quite certain that eggs came before chickens and in our case the egg represents price.

Most buy crypto to make money, not for privacy or freedom. Once they have made some money, they start to think about keeping/spending it privately. Some use a Binance Visa card, which I think misses the whole point of crypto.
But why do they use Visa ?
Because it’s accepted everywhere and it’s so called private because vendor won’t have any information about their funds.

As for t-addr, people keep their Zcash in taddr because they trust tools like Ledger. They think it’s safer than keeping coins on their phones.

Based on these reflexions, I think two things can make Zcash(and shielding in particular) more popular:

•	A rising price(or at least not falling, with a clear bottom line)
•	A simple and safe way for long term storage.

I see a lot of very smart people here who are trying to get along and make Zcash network successful. IMHO all of these people are going too deep into the rabbit hole, trying to find an engineering solution for adoption while it’s not quite necessary to go so deep.

Many of those bright minds don’t even know who is Michael Saylor which is so popular in CT among « crypto normies » if I can call them this way.

I personally don’t have any actual solution but I hope to provide view on crypto industry from my perspective.
When I was at Zcon4, I had met a lot of people involved in Zcash who don’t even use Twitter because they don’t have time for it.
Most people I know in my daily life are into crypto just to make money. Bitcoin for them is « number go up » tech, not « digital p2p cash ».

People are laughing at me when I ask them if they accept ZEC but few of them are actually okay with BTC.

And indeed, why you will accept something that loses it’s value.

Wow, that makes a lot of letters…
I hope this message proves useful and isn’t a waste of time for you guys…

And also, if « price is not an egg » I personally bet on ZSAs.
If ZSAs won’t bring the adoption-price-evolution cycle, I can’t imagine what can do that…

5 Likes
155

Privacy is a feature. Now, I think we all believe its a right people should have. But its pretty obvious that coins can and do exist with transparency and many have real value. Privacy without value is worthless to me. So what gives ZEC value?

This makes a lot of sense. If you look back and study major technological improvements. No one really understands them. So, they bid up the price of them all. And the average person just goes with the momentum. Eventually there are no more bigger fools to buy and the prices collapse. The real companies emerge while the frauds and vaporware are washed out. And this happens over and over until there is this survivor bias where the best companies that create real value for people are left.

  1. ZSAs should be the core foundation that gives ZEC its value.
  2. If ZEC can have some real utility then it can have value other than the hype and momentum.
  3. If ZEC can be easily and seamlessly transferred between a USDz and ZEC, then USDz becomes the trojan horse that broadens the market and makes privacy based coins useable.

Agree. ZSAs should be the driving force and ZEC as gas will give ZEC value to create a blockchain and pave the way for decentralized development on top of the blockchain.

1 Like
156

I feel disagreement about ZSAs as the carrier for a positive Zcash price cycle. Why?

Because no rational actor can be presumed to want to store their valuable assets as ZSAs on the Zcash network, if the Zcash network has never been revalued to broadcast success, reliability, robustness, decentralization, et al

As Zcash currently exists, valued barely in the Top 100 of crypto projects. It is a far cry to hypothesize that high wealth crypto asset holders would move, lets say $100,000,000 of assets into ZSAs, why? Well the entire Zcash network is only valued at around $400,000,000 - it would be irrational to place external assets of that amount of value into a project barely worth more.

ZSAs cannot go mainstream until Zcash has already been revalued upwards of 3-5 billion dollars. That is a conservative estimate. Have a look at Ethereum, where all of the most valuable NFTs are housed, its network valuation exceeds 220 billion dollars today - and so it follows that wealthy people could be comfortable with custodying NFT collections in Ethereum that exceed $100,000,000. On Zcash ZSAs, we’re not there yet. ZEC will give ZSAs value, but not the other way around. First a revaluation of ZEC is required, if ZSAs are ever to have a chance at mainstreaming.

1 Like
157

I meant Zstablecoins. Stablecoins scale is not connected with the market cap of ZEC. So you could put hundreds of billions into them fairly easily and not be concerned about losing money (absent theft or outright fraud). Stablecoins are backed 1:1 with the underlying collateral (which is treasury bonds in the case of a USDz). The stablecoins that did go bust were essentially frauds or grossly negligent. The way stablecoins drive the value of ZEC is if there is a gas mechanism. Paypal will likely be the price setter; so pretty much just have to copy them on pricing. One likely path Paypal will take is to keep the interest income earned on the collateral and use it to subsidize the gas. So people can transact for free and forgoe the income earned on the collateral. Just a guess. But stablecoin collateral is going to give Paypal a huge float that can be used to subsidize development and the transactions. Contrast this with ZEC who uses inflation (issuing more coins) to subsidize the development and transactions.

The ZEC blockchain and privacy can help give stablecoins/ZSA value; but its the gas from transactions and the interest income earned on the stablecoin collateral that will/could ultimately give ZEC value in my opinion. I dont see what is a catalyst to give ZEC a revaluation when a) ZEC holders are funding development via the block rewards and b) there is no visible way that any value accrues back to ZEC. To me BTC and Monero both are going up based on momentum. But at least they appear to understand their coin is not cash designed for day to day transactions. So we have a fairly big issue with trying to tell people this is money when it likely will never behave in a way most people want money to behave (for day to day usage).