Some usability / adoptability suggestions

[pjv]

@zooko

I totally agree that we should focus on user experience, that we should design “top down” — starting from user experiences and then choose the narrative, terminology, protocol, and cryptography to implement that intended user experience.

(Instead of “bottom up” — starting from a protocol and then trying to figure out how to layer a good user experience on top of it. To some degree we’ve already done that bottom-up part, starting from Bitcoin and Zerocash, but now I think we should switch to top-down, as much as possible, for the rest of the process of creation the Zcash-1.0 product.)

FWIW, from my point of view, total fail.

Zcash, while technically amazing, has been rolled out as just another alt-coin. I have no idea what the future holds, but for now, it’s just another alt.

Woulda, coulda, shoulda…

What would have been interesting / different / revolutionary is if your “release” had been a well-designed, cross-platform, GUI client (ala Jaxx) built on top of the Z-guts, that is easy for regular folks to comprehend and use. In that client there should have been no mention of t-addrs or z-addrs or even any “addresses” per sé (and BTW, t-addrs should be all but invisible except to the geekiest of the geeks who need them for some reason - the z-addr is the entire reason for the existence of Zcash, it should be the automatic default and no client should ever generate a t-addr except by some kind of explicit opt-in or advanced setting), all of which is like exposing the technical details of a transmission to a grandmother whose only worry when buying a new car is what color it is.

As I wrote in the OP:

@pjv

Before Zcash rolls out to real public adoption all of the arcana should be completely hidden from end users and the only metaphor that should be presented to Joe (Sixpack) is the relatively instant private transfer of a specific quantity of Zcash from Joe’s wallet to Anne’s wallet, or Joe’s wallet to Amazon.com. All Joe cares about is how much he is sending and to whom. Joe should never hear anything about “inputs”, “outputs”, and “change”. From his point of view he sends exactly the amount of whatever transaction he is effecting and the end result is that his wallet’s balance is debited by exactly that amount. I understand in high-level terms how the zerocoin protocol runs on top of a “transparent” bitcoin-like blockchain and so I get what a “transparent” coin is. Joe should never, ever need to know about them. That should all be part of the hidden plumbing and Joe should only ever think about and interact with Zs with which he can assume all his transactions carry a strong privacy guarantee. On the receiving end, Joe should be able to think of his wallet as a singular entity (he should not have to think about different public addresses), but still be able to rely on maximum privacy / anonymity for his transactions.

You could have released a revolution. Instead you released a geeky protocol. Maybe someone builds a revolution on top of it - I can’t predict. But I do believe you guys missed a huge opportunity by not pulling your heads out of the low-level engineering and looking around at what the world needs BIG PICTURE.