We’re hosting an AMA with the Zcash Company team Friday, December 14th at 12:00 PST/15:00 EST/19:00 UTC. The team will be online taking questions for 2 hours.
This will be the thread which we will be taking and responding to your questions - please keep questions focused on technical topics related to Zcash.
With the recent price decline, I’m concerned about the Zcash company’s profitability. How low can the price go and for how long it can remain low until it starts affecting the company and its employees’ pay? Which measures will you take if Zcash’s price continues to downtrend for the next couple of years?
Financially, we’re in good shape. While the company’s primary source of income is from selling ZEC, we built up a reserve of USD in the bank for precisely this type of scenario, to give us a runway to get through the winter.
It’s probably fair to say that we’re being a wee bit more conservative with our spending plans now than we were a couple of months ago but we have no plans to make any cut backs. Our primary focus right now is rolling out new features and functionality for Sapling, and selecting features for our next network upgrade in October 2019.
congratulation to the zcash team for successfully activating sapling!
Question 1: Are there some updates you or the team can share about the mobile wallet? How progress is going on, or problems you are facing on the way? maybe some kind of timeline, when we can expect it to come out.
Question 2: Are there some infos on BOLT? How is progress going on there? Any updates on this site?
Question 3: Ian Miers presentations, are really impressive. it is really easy, by listening to him, to understand the different privacy approaches available. in my view there is a lack of understanding in privacy and Individuals(some of them highly respected) on twitter are throwing FUD in the direction of zcash. How will you educate people and win the battle against the trolls?
Question 3: Crypto prices are dropping, so what will the zcash team do to have funds for the future? Do you still have enough money?
Question 5: i read an article on Zexe, and wanted to know if the Zcash Company is working on that by them self? or is it just a side project? With Zexe, is there a use for the Zcash Coin? Like, paying Gas with Ether?
Question 4: How do you feel about being part in this (R)evolution?
1.) With the recent prices, today below 50 per ZEC, is the Foundation/Zcash company aware that current asic mining is allready forced out of competition? I mean most european countries allready can't mine ZEC as their electricity costs are higher than 0.12 per kw/h often even higher than 0.25$.
2.) As Blossom will come mostly at the same time as ETH casper and after ETH constantinople compared with the current prices and rising difficutly is the Foundation/Zcash really thinking that POW mining on blossom is still possible, or better profitable for miners than?
3.) Is the foundation/Zcash aware that with every price drop we get more and more mining centralization favouring a few regions with very low electricity costs? Is this ok and wanted or just accepted as it is?
4.) While blossom was decided did someone make test calculations on estiminated difficulty/network/electricity prices/ZEC prices to see if it will work (secure the network decentralized) at all at lower ZEC prices?
5.) If for some reason the price downtrend continues and ZEC goes down to let’s say $20-25, can the dev teams, foundation and everybody still continue to work normally or have special urgent measures be taken if the downtrend contious longer and harder than expected?
Ledger has communicated an intent to add shielded addresses as soon as feasible, perhaps mid next year. We are releasing libraries in Q1 that should be of help to them.
Trezor hasn’t made a commitment but it is our understanding that they will add shielded support when feasible and based upon user demand.
Keepkey is also evaluating the addition of shielded addresses after the first of the year.
There’s a detailed proposal for how to do that at GitHub issue 1770. The ZIP specifying this has been assigned number 304, but has not been started yet. If someone outside the company wants to work on this to help speed things up, we’d be happy to collaborate on it.
The GitHub issue tracker is relatively easy to search, and we try to make sure that the tags are up-to-date on each ticket. If there’s progress on a feature then it will usually be recorded on GitHub.
Not in the coming year. It’s not ready. But we are close to their team watching progress.
Ledger has communicated an intent to add shielded addresses as soon as feasible, perhaps mid next year. We are releasing libraries in Q1 that should be of help to them.
We are working on a plan but a specific date has not yet been determined.
If I understand it correctly, the current specification of light wallets reduces data download by an order of magnitude, which is awesome. However, this still implies that a light wallet will need to download ~100s of MB of data every month to check blocks for relevant Txs.
Are there other ideas for how to reduce the data requirement further? If the light wallet was willing to give a node view keys?
As i got a hint in another topic that Zcash is watching/observing other hybrid and POS projects, which ones are of interest and watched and what exactly is of matter for Zcash while doing/watching/observing them?
You are correct that some either don’t understand how Zcash works, or have an agenda to cast it in a negative light. The best we can do is to make sure truthful and accurate information is out there and address concerns as they come up.
It also helps if members of the community who know better provide links and engage in respectful conversations with people that may not have the full picture about Zcash.
(PS: I work for Zcash Foundation, not Zcash Company)
