Retire Transparent Pool on the 10th Zcash Birthday - Let's Make It Official!

Governance
22

Zcash already offers the best privacy in this industry. Those who really need privacy know how to use Zcash properly.

2 Likes
23

Yes and Yes remove all t-address and transparent pool Zcash will never be successful if they are present on it.

Zcash future will depend if its a true private-only shielded pool coin.

2 Likes
24

That’s pretty disingenuous.

Majority of users use T-addrs, and even if you were to use the shielded pool, a bad actor (or anyone), can deduce that you just transferred them over (unless you do it like one at a time per day or some crap).

That problem fades away with more entropy/on-chain activity (e.g. more people sending funds to the shielded pool), but yeah you can build the best piece of software but if no one is using it, it doesn’t mean jack shit.

3 Likes
25

100% :+1:. I’d go one step further, ORCHARD POOL ONLY.

5 Likes
26

I’d love for this to happen but I don’t see it happening. Some people will inevitably have funds in transparent addresses and will be mad that they can’t use it anymore.

2 Likes
27

I think Sprout deprecation has shown us how it was done. It’s feasible that by the 10th birthday, the users are informed that t-addr will not work anymore. If they still have funds in transparent pool, they can move it to Sapling or Orchard. If they have funds in CEX, then it’s on them to check with their service providers.

1 Like
28

What pool retirement would very likely mean is making the transparent pool exit-only, as the Sprout pool currently is. However, you’re correct that this could be problematic for users with transparent-only wallets; such users would need to recover from seed using a wallet that supports sending to the shielded pool(s).

6 Likes
29

Sprout is not deprecated as far as I know. Sprout is a one way out pool. Sprout->t. Hush did exactly that btw.

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30

I can’t understand what you are talking about. How does a person deduce who or what transfers within the same pool? Because that’s what I’m talking about when I say “Zcash offers the best privacy in the industry”. Transfers within the same pool. It doesn’t matter how many ZECs are within the pool or the activity.

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31

iirc, Thorchain has refused to integrate Zcash due to regulatory concern (cc @NighthawkApps). I guess it doesn’t matter if we have t-addr or not, Thorchain will not support Zcash anyway.

3 Likes
32

I am pleasantly surprised by the seemingly dominant vote to retire the transparent pool :man_astronaut:t2:
I wonder how it’d work with ZSAs as their current design requires transparent minting if I’m not mistaken. We might end up with a transparent pool that can only receive tokens from fresh mints and only letting $ZEC flow out, which I’d consider the best of both worlds.
Transparency about total mint supply of any ZSA being minted, while we enjoy maximum privacy for ALL $ZEC.

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33

Even though ZSAs require transparent minting and burning, they don’t interact with the transparent (Bitcoin Script) parts of the Zcash protocol at all. So no conflict here.

6 Likes
34

Very nice!

1 Like
35

While this thread focuses on the community’s decision regarding what to do with the Transparent pool, I’ve initiated another topic discussing the potential technical implementation of this decision.

36

Also I just realized that this clashes with the new “exchange address” being created for Binance compliance :frowning_face:

3 Likes
37

Yes, that’s why we need to make this decision soon. Will Zcash guarantee CEX access to transparent ZEC for the long term or not?

I think the current ambiguous state is the worst, where many (if not most) Zcashers want to get rid of Transparent pool but outsiders expect Zcash to always support Transparent address.

Let’s discuss what kind of expectation Zcashers have.

Also, while this poll is about “retiring” transparent pool. Technically, there are many ways to accomplish this. Including Draft ZIP: Disabling Addition of New Value to the Transparent Pool which makes sure t-address will still be usable but no new ZEC will enter transparent pool, similar to how Sprout pool is currently treated.

To be honest, if getting rid of Transparent pool makes Zcash easier to develop and maintain, I will gladly accept CEX delisting if it gets to it. I want Zcash to succeed as cash in the long term, not be traded on certain regulatory-arbitrager-cum-government-asskisser exchange long term.

1 Like
38

These are contradictory. Either Zcash is going to succeed as ~cash (whatever that is supposed to mean) in the long term, or Zcash is going to be widely adopted/ tradable on government compliant, centralized exchanges.

Both are extremely unlikely because success is only going to be possible as a function of access, liquidity, popularity, usability, value accrual, et al. The threshold for those success criteria won’t be achievable if Zcash isn’t widely available through compliant entities.

I understand that as we battle through this dark period, its appealing to think in more grandiose themes… but as a practical matter, it isn’t helping the ecosystem. We’ve got to keep our vision, planning, narrative building, and focus grounded in practicality.

In my dreams, we’d retire the Transparent Pool tomorrow. But in reality, I understand that the Transparent Pool most likely will be with Zcash forever. It was the bite from the forbidden fruit, when Zcash’s original creators decided to inherit so much (transparency) from Bitcoin.

39

Remember how we got here. When Zcash first launched a shielded transaction took a lot of RAM (4GB) and 30-40 seconds to process. Launching Zcash with only shielded transactions would have resulted in a unusable coin so transparent transactions, inherited from BTC, were a compromise that had to be made. It wasn’t until years later (Sapling) that processing transactions on a smartphone was a realistic option.

But your point still stands, it was a double edged sword. Now that the ecosystem is so reliant on the old BTC interactions I wonder if it will ever be possible to eliminate them.

I like the possibilities of discouraging T address use by making pools one-way T-Z eventually, or perhaps making T fees much higher to discourage their use.

8 Likes
41

Part of me hopes that we get delisted and can fully focus on shielded-only efforts. This fear of ever-looming non-compliance needs to be overcome in order to achieve Zcash’s full potential as the best private asset, without enter/exit heuristics. Getting it into the hands of those who need it can be done afterwards through truly resilient bisq-like software.
Those who need $ZEC the most will not be able to enter through a KYC’d super-transparent regulated exchange anyway; then it becomes a UX comparison between:
{buy btc from a very wide variety of exchanges or liquid OTC offices, install bisq, swap, done} vs {find a person with an non-sanctioned passport, trust them not to claim the account once capital is on there, swap, withdraw to transparent address, hide heuristics once t-to-z entry amount is known, done}

1 Like
42

ZEC wont succeed as cash as fiat in our lifetime. So the dark period is of our own making and where we have taken ZEC off track. There are three pieces all of which are incredibly important.

  1. ZEC is a wealth storage technology. This is the Bitcoin feature. BTC is being integrated into the fabric of global finance for this purposes. Everything else is a by product. Its Gold 2.0. Its the properties of ZEC as a commodity with its 21m cap that give it great value if its used and applied propertly. It is not designed for spending as a primary use case.

  2. Privacy - The ability to transact privately. This is the Z in Zcash. This also adds value. But its the combination of 1 & 2 that really gives it the power. And that is done inside the wallet (I believe).

  3. Custody/the Vault/the Mint - The wallet is the bank. And to be the bank, we need to enable people to mint their own stablecoins using ZEC as collateral (or buy the stablecoins on a 1:1 basis with more stable collateral like government bonds) and then to let them transact with privacy, and with a stable currency. Its the utility of ZEC as a wealth storage technology combined with this added feature of privacy that makes it work. We cant lose focus that privacy without ZEC as a wealth store tech is much more unlikely to work. Wealth storage are what central banks use to provide the stability to their fiat. The central banks with no reserves tend to be weak and fall apart over time.

So I would like to see us remove transparent ASAP within this context.

The community is so focused on privacy, they forgot what cash is. We need to add the cash to the Z by using Z as a wealth storage tech and the privacy as the transmission tech. They are two different things as core functions.

3 Likes