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

General
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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.

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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.

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.

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…

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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 :smiley:

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.

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161

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.

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Still true today. :student:

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

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I think reading this thread periodically is a great reminder about why Zcash exists and why we are here.

Privacy matters and privacy is the core competency of Zcash. Lets focus our time and resources on making enhancements to the privacy of financial data and waste less time on everything else.

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Because Of Taddresses

Zcashers can now engage in trades on Decentralized Exchanges. This means that we can interface with other cryptocurrencies without providing personal data to a centralized authority.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this means that because Zcash has taddresses it’s users have more privacy.

Sooo… @zooko was right in 2020, and @secparam was wrong.

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There are plenty of other transparent chains that can be used with decentralized exchanges. Creating transparent Z cash interoperability is not happening because of market demand (see liquidity and trading volumes). It happened because the developers were paid to create it.

Substantial usage of decentralized exchanges linked to Zcash will come when/if they can be accessed without unshielding. Unfortunately the work you cite will make shielded interoperability with decentralized exchanges far less likely in the short term because the dev effort is much higher (than for the transparent connections you are promoting).

We are literally paying money to move backwards as these decentralized exchange connections to transparent transactions will be used by some as an excuse for Zcash to continue to support transparency indefinitely (and hamper growth shielded usage).

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You seem to be unaware of the volume of ZEC activity on NEAR and MAYA.

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I am aware of the volume and how it pales in comparison with other transparent chains with the same integration) that Zcash should not be competing with.

100% of any funding to integrate Zcash with decentralized exchanges should be contingent on a shielded ONLY process.

IMHO we would be better off burning funds of giving it to charity compared to paying for Zcash unshielded integrations because they are already being used as an excuse to keep transparency functionality (and hold back Zcash shielded adoption)

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Well.. maybe we “shouldn’t” compete.. but… given that we are able to because we have taddresses…

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As far as I understand it, this has been @zooko 's point all along.. that Zcash should provide optionality.

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Viewing keys is modern optionality. t-addrs is legacy optionality.

Mainly, I’d like to know what stakeholders think about this. We have the tools to ask them so let’s schedule that asap.

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Agree 100%. Unfortunately I believe many of the people that mention optionality as a reason for keeping t-address functionality are being intellectually dishonest as attempt to mislead people. I say most (and not all) because some people are still unaware of view keys.

I think it’s important to take the vote of shielded stakeholders (only) as they represent the intended users of the value Zcash provides (financial privacy).

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You are Zooko are both completely aware that view keys offer optionality. Please refrain from making quotes like this that are likely to mislead new or less technically educated users.

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View keys don’t support the scripting functionality that’s required for DEX support.

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That is another misleading quote. You are technically educated. If you want to debate please attempt to be intellectually honest with your arguments.

Of course DEX support/atomic swaps are possible for shielded only Zcash. It would just take MUCH more development work compared to the relative ease of integrating transparent Zcash (or other chains developed from forks of Bitcoin).

For example Monero atomic swaps exist and are frequently used today. Zcash shielded swaps would probably be common today if the distraction of t-address support and t-address integrations were eliminated long ago.

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You have not been active in the forums for a while. I have been a fan of your Zk-SNARKs work prior to the first block of Zcash being mined. Thank you!

How are you feeling about the direction of Zcash (in terms of focus on privacy) in 2025?

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What would abandoning T support mean re the dev fund, ECC, ZF or Shielded Labs?
What do these organisations think about your idea of abandoning T support?

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This topic was started by an academic Ian Miers whose cryptography work (along with Matthew Green) created the foundation for Zcash.

There are various comments from members of the organization you cite in this thread with varied opinions. In general those that are the most technically sophisticated and care the most about privacy seem relatively more likely to support a shielded only Zcash sooner rather than later. Those who are less technical and/or (receive a (fiat) paycheck from one of those organizations seem slightly less enthusiastic about dropping T address support.

Unfortunately as long as the Zcash trademark is under centralized control no pull request (even if supported by most of the community) will be merged and activated on the Zcash network without their support.

Privacy advocates need to continue doing all we can to promote a promote dropping the transparent training wheels and all other anti privacy practices pushed upon us (requiring Google Accounts to view content and vote, funding things like TEX address creation, funding more internal and external development that requires t-address usage, etc).

Meanwhile promote privacy development even of it is more time consuming and expensive (compared to t-address work) such as for shielded only DEX integrations, shielded atomic swaps, shielded hardware wallets, ZIP 311 etc.

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