September 11, 2020 - weekly forum update

Ten weeks until Canopy activation. Last week we announced Halo 2, this week we focused on governance. Get ready for more announcements, events and swag (:socks::tshirt::school_satchel:) in the months ahead. Here are the updates from the week:

Mark your calendars,

  • Sun, 9/13, Zbay in the Park
  • Wed, 9/16 - Elena is speaking on two panels CHCI conf and BSIC (with Holmes!)
  • Fri, 9/18, MGRC voting ends
  • Thurs, 9/24, ECC live stream, set a reminder
  • Fri, 9/25, U.S. patents on scalar multiplication using elliptic curve endomorphisms expire

Community Shout Outs - Shout out to ZcashRU and Pacu for helping out with translations this week! Shout out to rex4539 who contributed the first community PR to Halo. Core team merged community PRs from 0xarbitrage (4) and syd0 (1) this week as well.

Documentation:

  • :rotating_light: Huge update :rotating_light: Deprecated user guide and replaced with zcash guide. Check it out, it’s looking pretty snazzy
  • Working on an ASICS mining guide
  • Working on wallet video (demo)
  • Hunted down all possible build warnings for docs

DevInfra:

  • Zcashd v4 release (updates nodes, docs, etc)
  • Deployed 2 new zcashd v4 detectors
  • Pantheon website backups automated
  • Tekton integration with Github status apis now catches errors!!

Core:

Security: Analysis is going great, bucketing and discarding false positives through graphical analysis

Wallet:

  • Auto-shielding technical design and messaging (demo)
  • Launched localization work
  • Addressing seed phrase issues with importing wallet (demo)
  • Mempool solution research and implementation
  • Checkpointing solution: reduces ~5 man hours/release!

This week in surveillance and censorship resistance, EFF does a deep dive on how TPMs/DRM (digital rights management) can be at odds with freedom of expression and freedom from surveillance. The Social Dilemma documentary on Netflix is getting pretty great reviews. The film covers how “social media is reprogramming civilization.” Speaking of social media, TikTok restricts LGBTQ hashtags, BBC reports. In really weird news, PayPal is now blocking any payments that contain the word tardigrade.

This week in crypto, an insightful report from Reuters (via NYT) on bitcoin adoption in Nigeria. Community funded bitcoin ads in Hong Kong. Coindesk explores money’s “distance trap.” DeFi seems to be recovering from a case of bad sushi.

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Slight correction on the new Zcash guide, this section should say CPU instead of GPU:

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Hello @elenita!
Zcash guide doesn’t have a Russian language. I think it’s time to fix this. You may contact me for help in this matter :slight_smile:

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