Projects like Zcash and others are designed with privacy in mind, but aren’t yet fast enough or mobile-oriented enough. Transactions can take tens of minutes, and even with shortcuts to speed up an individual transaction, subsequent transactions can block on it. They also require all clients to scan all transactions made by all other clients in order to identify those relevant to them, which won’t work on all mobile devices on all networks (similar to how requiring all Signal clients to scan all Signal messages everyone sends to everyone else in order to identify those destined to them wouldn’t work). Signal >> Blog >> Update on beta testing payments in Signal
Perhaps someone from ECC should reach out to them and show them Zcash mobile wallets?
From what I understand Zcash was one of the cryptocurrencies considered because of its privacy but it doesn’t currently meet the speed/scaling they’re looking for. And they are not wrong on that blog post, even the mobile wallets require some short time to sync.
Now if Zcash had gone forward with implementing BOLT private payment channels as had been proposed a couple years ago it would have probably been a more serious contender for Mobicoins pricing model and speed.
Hard to say. The core dev team has decided to focus on layer 1 privacy and scaling rather than layer 2. Layer 2 solutions like Lightning Network (BOLT) are essentially Band-Aids for what layer 1 can’t do.
In the short term I would say maybe this particular opportunity slipped by because Zcash isn’t ready for it yet. But I think focusing on long term improvements like HALO and Zk-Rollups will be key differentiators that add value to Zcash.
In the future there will be no need to set up separate LN nodes and fiddle with channels to get those benefits from Zcash.
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