Technical AMA w/ ECC team July 12, 2019 noon PDT

[hloo]

For the architecture described in @daira’s presentation at Zcon1, I believe that @daira mentioned that scripting is not possible. How about user-issued tokens/assets?

[Shawn]

What barriers remain for getting reference wallet stuff; lightwalletd/Android RPC fully tested and ready for main-net? Any timeline to expect?

It would be nice for the main repo to not have so many big s GitHub - zcash/zcash-android-wallet-poc: Frontend Android code for the reference wallet

[lindanaeunlee]

Technically, we have done the work for the reference wallet to be compatible for mainnet transactions. We need to test it and do the remaining android work to expose this option in GUI form.

The lightwalletd has issues when blocks are out of order, and we’re working on the fixes to that now. Technically, you can stand up your own lightwalletd server at the moment, but it’s brittle and unreliable.

These two things are on the wallet team list of things to do, near the top priority! We have the lightwalletd set to be addressed this sprint, and mainnet more or less blocked on us setting up a CI/CD system. The reference wallet will be in a much better state in a couple months.

[lindanaeunlee]

@Shawn

It would be nice for the main repo to not have so many big s https://github.com/zcash/zcash-android-wallet-poc

We just wanted to be clear about the state of things, and are generally an emoji-happy team.

[lindanaeunlee]

@sonya

If I interpreted @jmsjsph’s question correctly, he was asking if changes to Zcash would impact whether someone could claim their YEC 1 – 10 years from now. But that’s probably still difficult to answer without the Ycash team.

Ycash people are here!

@hloo would you like to answer some of these questions?

[ChileBob]

More of a request than a question

Sean did a talk on how Sapling came to be & an outline of how it worked during the activation livestream (which was excellent BTW).

Could Daira do one on scaling next livestream ?

[sonya]

@hloo since Linda’s comment indicates that the Zcash team is fine with it, I concur that you should answer the question relevant to Ycash As long as the thread doesn’t derail into a big side conversation, I see no problem with that.

Edit: There are other moderators present in this thread who should feel free to overrule me if they disagree.

[daira]

@hloo

For the architecture described in @daira’s presentation at Zcon1, I believe that @daira mentioned that scripting is not possible.

I said that Bitcoin scripting is not possible in the kind of design I proposed. I also said that it would be difficult enough to do privacy and scaling without programmability. That doesn’t mean it’s not possible, or even that we’re not thinking (at least a little) about how to do it.

Also, we might choose to use an approach to scaling different from what I proposed, and that might retain Bitcoin scripting.

If we did do programmability, it would probably look more like Zexe than like Ethereum or Bitcoin scripting.

How about user-issued tokens/assets?

There’s an approach to implementing user-issued tokens that we had in mind when designing Sapling, using independent bases for the value commitment to represent different assets. See ticket 830 for further technical discussion of UITs in general.

As Nathan says on that ticket, the main obstacle to deploying UITs is representing issuance policy, and it might be possible to do that off-chain rather than by implementing general programmability. This is not on the current research roadmap, but we haven’t ruled out deploying something like that.

[daira]

@ChileBob

Sean did a talk on how Sapling came to be & an outline of how it worked during the activation livestream (which was excellent BTW).

Could Daira do one on scaling next livestream ?

I’d love to

20 chars

[Shawn]

I haven’t looked through GitHub so this might already be out there, but with Blossom what will the new faster block-time be? And reward per block?

[zooko]

@daira

As Nathan says on that ticket, the main obstacle to deploying UITs is representing issuance policy, and it might be possible to do that off-chain rather than by implementing general programmability.

Potentially the issuance policy could be implemented in a smart contract on a different blockchain (e.g. Ethereum, Cosmos, Polkadot) which had pegged side-chaining to the Zcash blockchain. That way you could use a smart contract on that (transparent—no privacy) blockchain to control issuance but people could use the resulting issued tokens on the Zcash blockchain with full privacy.

[daira]

@Shawn

I haven’t looked through GitHub so this might already be out there, but with Blossom what will the new faster block-time be?

75 seconds. (Assuming no showstopper security bugs that prevent deployment.)

And reward per block?

Half the current reward per block; same FR proportion (until the next halving). That preserves the existing monetary issuance curve with respect to time. Note that I would expect the difficulty to reduce downward (in terms of effort per block) so that the expected profit for miners is comparable — but I can’t predict that precisely.

[hloo]

I’ll just say very briefly that @daira raises an important point that I had not considered. I’ve been telling people that there is no deadline for accessing their YEC (because people incorrectly think that this is some sort of limited-time airdrop). But in reality, a deadline could arise in the future due to changes that Ycash chooses to make (perhaps as part of adopting changes that Zcash makes).

So the more accurate answer is: Currently there no is no deadline for accessing your YEC, but one could arise in the future.