Technical AMA w/ Zcash team December 14, 2018 noon PST

I’ve got a few other questions, probably a sensitive topic:

  1. Have you had any requests from the U.S. (or other) government to help track or de-anonymize Zcash transactions/wallets?

  2. And have you received any requests to backdoor Zcash?

  3. Any plans on moving the company to a different country?

  4. Any clues on the proportion of criminal use of Zcash versus legit use?

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will you guys do some marketing after mobile wallet release?
how do you get people to use zcash as a currency on their phones?

Do you as a company look out for possible companies to accept zcash?
or do the companies have to find out by them self?

would love to spent my zcash somewhere for food and other stuff in my country (europe)
(not with amazon gift cards)

I agree that getting info on these would be a hard task. But we immediatly could get a map with RED countries, in the meaning of impossible mining operations, by given electricity prices. This as well would give a good picture what countries/regions get excluded/unprofitable for mining. With each “red” region we get a shifting towards the remaining lowest electricity countries/regions, not?

As these mining operations of scale are anyway in most cases suited/placed in such very low electricity regions it doesn’t really matter if we know there electricity costs as research is based geographically, not on single mining operations. Just an idea in case the foundation/zcash have in interest of avoiding geographical mining centralization at all.

  1. No, and if we did, we wouldn’t have any more information than the blockchain or other entities who run widely connected nodes.

  2. Nope!

  3. No plans!

  4. We’re not aware of any illicit use, nor would we have any special insight. Third-party wallets and exchanges which collect KYC data would probably be the best place to gather any relevant data like this from.

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Hi @hanswurst33.

On the companies accepting Zcash, please see this response.

We would like to clarify the reference wallet is not for end users, and that we have not committed to deploying a wallet for users to use Zcash as a currency.

As written in Introducing the Zcash Reference Wallet - Electric Coin Company :

The objective of this project is to prove that shielded transactions can work on mobile devices and to build reusable solutions for functionality required to support shielded addresses.

We are already in contact with some light wallets that support Zcash, and they are very eager for the reference wallet. We hope that this helps their engineering teams adopt sapling zaddresses.

We’re currently debating if we should also make an accompanying Zcash wallet for end users–and the decision is not set to be made until next year. We’ll keep you posted and announce if we decide to make a product!

I hear you on wanting to spend Zcash for everyday items. We realize that point of sales support/merchant support is a weak link in the purchase process.

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Got it. Great answer!

thanks :pray:

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ok, i didn’t know that.
if i could choose, i would prefer using a wallet the zcash company has made.

‘‘I hear you on wanting to spend Zcash for everyday items. We realize that point of sales support/merchant support is a weak link in the purchase process’’ - i agree on that, but i’m still optimistic.

We think this would be a fascinating project; with competing priorities we don’t think we’ll get to soon and we very much encourage the community to take up the mantle!

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Maybe we can work together to do that? Let’s take clips from the 30 minute talk and intersplice it with our own comments? I will do the video editing if you can help me finalize the “script”

Earlier today i asked @joshs if Zcash would ever create a decetralized exchange where pairs would be against Zcash, and he referred me to ShapeShift, but like other users like @hanswurst33 , I think exchange made by Zcash company would be more trusted, it would give a stream of revenue to Zcash company and add another usecase for Zcash.

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This is awesome. Thanks for the detailed response, @daira

I’m going to add this to zec-qt-wallet

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Yeah, I’m actually the one responsible for making the business case for building a Zcash wallet made by Zcash, and that is one of the benefits that I mention:

Capitalize on trusted status: Users will flock to a Zcash live wallet to maximize privacy and minimize the risk of losing funds due to low quality code or being compromised by a malicious application.

With the other benefits being:

Direct user interaction: LW means we communicate directly with real end users, generate user data to inform future iterations, can set defaults for users, highlight zcash-specific features, and design own user flow, indicators, and words.

Delight customers: LW gives users a way to use Zcash to pay peers or buying goods/services, shielded by default. The Zcash user survey shows this is what they want: links to portals to buy goods with Zcash and easy fiat on and off ramps, even over shielded addresses (full survey results and link in Appendix 6).

Strategic advantage: Our wallet features won’t be the lowest common denominator between 50 currencies, but great, curated features for Zcash. Wallets create multi-currency wallets so that they can have revenue; most wallets’ revenue comes from a cut of exchange fees. I.e.: Jaxx gets a cut of all exchanges made via its ShapeShift integration when a user converts one cryptocurrency to another. We won’t put user needs as a secondary consideration.

I think to be honest the real elephant in the room is the bear market, and in my opinion it’s more of a question of “now or later” vs “yes or no.”

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Probably last question for me:

Any clues why Peter Todd keeps trashing Zcash on Twitter? Why is he so angry? https://twitter.com/search?q=%40peterktodd%20zcash&src=typd

Thank you for the AMA and for being transparent with us!

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Agreed that services made by Zcash company would be more trusted, but there’s a balance of resources. The company is currently focused on the most important aspect: maintaining the infrastructure that underlies all these services. :wink:

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I will make a new topic tomorrow an see if other community members are interested in helping making some mining centralization maps…

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Not sure! (20 chars)

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now there are more reasons why i want the wallet to come from the zcash company :smiley:

maybe supporting bitcoin inside your wallet? integrate XCAT for atomic swaps between BTC and Zcash?
would it be possible to send BTC via an atomic swap and receive Zcash in a shielded way?

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There are so many reasons! :slight_smile: I am a UX researcher by trade so just the idea of standardizing all the things and getting :sparkles: user data :sparkles: seems nice…

Oh man! We’re just working on some basic things, like supporting sapling addresses, depreciating taddrs, turnstiles, local address books, and some better organizational features. So your suggestions seem great but they seem more like v…5? features.

Also, I’m sad to report that XCAT has been de-prioritized by Zcash in the push for Sapling, and we don’t have plans to pick it back up at a specific time. It is an inactive project, with the last commit about a year ago. GitHub - zcash-hackworks/zbxcat: A work-in-progress for Zcash Bitcoin Cross-Chain Atomic Transactions

This was the last update on XCAT: An Update on Atomic Trades - Electric Coin Company

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Actually, I have a legal-related question:

Can we freely use the Zcash brand name and logo to develop legal services around Zcash, or have a blog or website that introduces Zcash? i.e. Someone was selling a zcash domain name at some point on Reddit and was concerned that he would get in trouble for doing that. What is the company’s point of view about that?

I understand legally the Zcash company could sue people for the use of the Zcash brand, but I remember reading somewhere that it would not happen for X reason I forgot. Is that still the case?

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