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

[earthrise]

@Jgx7

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).

I think the argument might be that Zcash’s security against 51% attacks is correlated with mining rewards (which is correlated with price and thus market cap). ZSAs’ privacy makes 51% attacks a whole lot harder to execute in practice, so I’m not sure the argument applies, but doing million-dollar transactions on a network that provides less than millions-of-dollars worth of security may be unattractive.

On the topic of the ZEC price, I think we need to look at the project with our “investor” hats on to understand why it’s valued where it is and how we can improve the outlook. The price has been doing pretty much what I expected it to do over the past 2+ years, based on putting myself in the position of an outsider evaluating our prospects, and a lot of my forum posts have been calling out the problems I saw.

I think for ZEC to be valued higher investors would want to see (a) visible user adoption within a community that needs privacy/censorship-resistance, (b) a much-improved user/developer onboarding flow. Things I see as holding the price down are (c) a lack of acknowledgement of the problems from leaders (exceptions being Nick’s post and Josh’s post which raised my confidence in ZEC), (d) a lack of understanding of the issues I’ve raised within Zcash’s leadership, (e) a focus on technical upgrades that aren’t centered around usability and onboarding-flow (a focus on technical upgrades was absolutely the right strategy 5+ years ago but that’s not how things are valued anymore, aside from VCs funding new projects), and (f) decentralization that’s dividing us and causing waste rather than aligning our resources towards good adoption bets.

ZSAs will certainly help but we need much more emphasis on “the last mile” of getting ZEC wallets into peoples’ hands and on visibly marketing ZEC into actual use cases. IMO most of the price still comes from speculation, so we need to make the project look amazing to people going down the coinmarketcap list and doing ~1hr max. of research to decide what’s worth investing in.

That said, trying to read investors’ minds is bound to almost always be wrong in some ways… I think I’m decent at it given my returns over the last 8 years… but maybe coinholder polling would help a lot here.

[Jgx7]

@earthrise

(f) decentralization that’s dividing us and causing waste rather than aligning our resources towards good adoption bets.

Zcash to me looks highly centralized. Block rewards are like the central government taxing us. And no matter how many entities you create under the centralized tax, its still centralized planning and development using the blockchain rewards tax. We are seeing people fighting over the tax money. Real decentralization doesn’t require anyone to allocate money to a special project. People just build it into the ecosystem and collect fees or charges for features that are important. For example Uber drivers will pay 1% to get instant access to their money rather than wait 2-3 days.

@earthrise

we need much more emphasis on “the last mile” of getting ZEC wallets into peoples’ hands and on visibly marketing ZEC into actual use cases.

I agree last mile is very important. But several issues with this as it relates to ZEC: a) ZEC is not money. So a last mile to a retailer is the wrong last mile. Retailers want stability. They want stablecoins. To me this is so crystal clear. But again, I am just listening to what they tell me and how they actually behave. I’m not imagining some world where everything collapses and the USD is vaporized. So building a last mile to a retailer with ZEC as the currency is a bridge to no where in my mind. Moreover, the technology will change, it will become a maintenance nightmare and no real transactions will develop. b) there is no mechanism to incentive third party development. Marketing is an easy thing to blame; but its really not the solution if you plan on telling people ZEC is cash they should use to accept their wages or tell a vendor they should accept for goods or services. The evidence is everywhere accepting wages in ZEC or accepting ZEC for goods & services is not the use case.

If you look at the USD - its high decentralized from a development infrastructure perspective. Companies create use cases not funded centrally. The central planners can never come up with real world use cases. In this case, the dev fund are the central planners. If you take a few of the infrastructure companies, namely VISA, Mastercard, AMEX, Paypal. They don’t even try to do the last mile. They outsource the last mile to probably 100s if not thousands of independent companies who get paid per transaction. So third parties are not only highly incetivized to find the right use cases; its required because the markets are just too big for one company to do it all (that’s decentralization). So for ZEC to try and figure out the last mile while at the same time offering a product that probably wont work for last mile use cases seems like a waste of money to market/advertise (to me). Let projects like AMP, figure out the last mile; and let anyone who wants to fund and install last mile for a cut of gas/transaction fees. AMP has already have done the research! People may want to spend crypto; but the retailers want real cash.

@earthrise

ZEC wallets into peoples’ hands

Wallets are critical for sure. But without on and off ramps, they really are not that useful as a means to spend money, at least to me, other than for storage. I’m sure there will be some good ones coming. Coinbase looks interesting, Im sure Paypal will eventually have one that is consumer friendly, Celo, and many more…

[tim_ukrainian]

Still I’d like to bring some positive vision I have and I feel that a lot of people share this vision with me.

I foresee people needing Zcash’s features in the near future. Individuals often prioritize privacy when their assets are vulnerable, and they desire protection.

L2s are vulnerable, Zcash is unstoppable.

At that point Zcash’s appeal won’t be limited to privacy alone. It will provide value to users desiring privacy through various avenues like NFTs, stablecoins, or even the value of $ZEC itself.

I even bet more on shielded property certificates and utility tokens rather than at shielded stablecoins.

You won’t need to hold stables if you will be able to spend whatever you want whenever you can while person on the other side of transaction will get whatever they want on their side.

God bless zkAMM

This need for privacy will drive demand for ZEC since transactions require it. And if the Zcash network persists for another 5, 10, or 15 years, the ZEC coin will naturally evolve into a store of value (SoV).

Even if ZEC appears undervalued now, it doesn’t mean it’s being ignored and no one is buying it.

Until the majority catches on, a development fund is crucial to maintain operations.

I like to compare Zcash to Visa, but in truth, it’s much more. We are witnessing the establishment of foundations for a future network state.
With its governance and taxes.

We might find a best alternative governance mechanisms and funding methods later. But for now, we’re should consider ourselves lucky to have some of the brightest minds tirelessly advancing Zcash. We owe them our gratitude.

Nothing is perfect and things might seem to move slowly, but these individuals have already prevented major flaws that could have took the network down.

As the network effect comes in play, the potential for exploits skyrockets. Zcash must be fortified at its core to meet these challenges head-on.

So maybe there were some mistakes in the past, future plans seem to consider past experience based on those mistakes because for most of dev fund recipients Zcash’s success is a lifetime mission.

Let’s agree to disagree and move forward at least on things we do agree on.
Godspeed Zcash fam.

[Tsupportisharmful]

@noamchom

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.)

You are correct. The choice is simple:

1. Continue what we are doing (Zcash network provides optional privacy and optional transparency) and lose market share blockchains that are private by default and do not allow transparent transactions.

2. Focus on what Zcash is best at (implementing cutting edge zero knowledge proofs to provide the most transaction privacy available for every transaction).

I choose #2. Privacy is the path we need to focus on if we wish to build network effects in global private transactions and private storage of value.

[dismad]

@joshs

It’s my belief that adoption and transition to zadders will come with time as the tools become more accessible and user friendly, the cryptography gets better, and the user and 3rd party developer community increasingly sees that the Zcash shield is necessary, as much as the HTTP shield is necessary. In fact, I think it will soon accelerate. It could move even quicker if BTC’s lack of privacy proves to be a liability in some high profile way.

Still true today.

[i2pZ7812HTZV69]

yea zcash need z-2-z only chain or it will never work