Thanks for your questions! I’ll answer a few of them:
Question 1: The Zcash team has been working tirelessly on the reference wallet and they are on track to have it working with the ability to receive shielded transactions by the end of 2018. They are also planning on adding the ability to send shielded transactions by Feb 15th, 2019. We are planning to release the (unfinished) light client library in the beginning of 2019 for feedback as well.
Question 2: Zcash Company is very excited about the work the BOLT Project is doing and we think it could have an incredible impact on the way people use cryptocurrency across the globe. As a result, we are working closely with them to incorporate BOLT-friendly changes to Zcash in the Blossom upgrade set for October 2019. For interesting updates about BOLT specifically, I’d recommend checking with the BOLT Project directly.
Question 3 (the one about crypto pricing): Please check out elisehamdon’s response to Klimenos above.
I have to fine tune the question than. After it’s neither ok nor accepted what are the plans to counter this currently not avoidable centralization issue?
The Zcash team is obviously watching the evolution of Ethereum towards PoS. We’ve also been keeping an eye on the Decred project, which has a hybrid PoW/PoS consensus algorithm. We’re also particularly interested in the work that the Coda team has done with respect to leveraging ZK-SNARKs for succinct blockchains. If there are other projects that you feel are doing particularly innovating things with respect to PoS, please let us know!
Do you plan on adding a payment processor for your mobile wallets? (RFID payments with mobile)
Are there any new companies interested in Zcash?
What do you think of Dr Craig S Wright’s claims about Zcash? To name a few: he mentioned that Zcash’ privacy is a false promise, that “Zcash even gets taken in proceeds of crime cases - now”, that “Zcash will not be legal.” and “With the founders reward, zcash is a regulatable security. More fun, I will be publishing a paper on how law enforcement can trace it later this year.”.
Zexe is currently just a research paper. It would require significant development to be included in a Zcash network upgrade. I’ve commented about this before on the forum:
(In fact User Issued Tokens are feasible in the NU3 timeframe, although I don’t know whether they will actually be included in that upgrade.)
Yes. If we did add this (with the caveats above), it’s likely that the payment protocol would not be implemented as a special case of the programmable functionality, for security, efficiency and compatibility reasons.
Syncing the blockchain right now is CPU bound. I understand that a lot of the optimization work done on upstream bitcoin core has not made it down to zcashd yet, but even with these optimizations, a sync will still take a long time.
What would be the implications if zcashd imported blocks verifying only the PoW (instead of the full verification, which is very very slow), and used the checkpoints to verify it’s on the right chain?
This obviously reduces security, but can you quantify by how much? Will this be better than SPV-level security that bitcoin has?
I did some experiments skipping the verification, and the zcash blockchain imports in almost 1/3rd the time.
yeah i get that, but people are not just falling for trolls. they can face serious problems by using those networks!
we need more education. maybe a simple 5 min video showing the different privacy approaches available. i learned a lot in IANS talks, but most other people don’t take 30min of their time to watch it.
just compress IANS talks to 5min. and we as a community have something to share and help educate others.
We completely agree that it’s quite time consuming to sync the node from scratch and many people would get value out of a hosted snapshot of the blockchain in any cloud. We’d love to work on this; with many competing priorities we’re not sure when we would get to it. We highly encourage any motivated folks out there to get that moving if they’re interested!
That would start with research so we can better understand. We are currently looking at harmony mining, as you perhaps are aware of.
I would say it’s difficult to do proper research to conform to such a quickly fluctuating market, though.
The foundation has announced they are funding an iOS project. See here: home - zcash foundation
We do not currently have any plans.
I’m not sure what you mean. Which kind of companies?
We support good research and feedback that will improve the safety and security of Zcash users. These assertions, however, don’t qualify. If Craig produces good research, we’ll certainly review it.
For the reference wallet we are quite deliberately trying to avoid privacy compromises, even if that does involve higher bandwidth usage. We believe this is the right approach because it is important to demonstrate the feasibility of a high-security solution.
It may be possible to reduce bandwidth consumption further without compromising on privacy, by use of Private Information Retrieval schemes. We’re actively researching this area, and my impression is that there have been substantial improvements in practicality and deployability of these protocols recently.
Recently we’ve had Coinbase supporting Zcash, but this is yet another exchange. I am more thinking about companies that could be interested in using Zcash (i.e. payment processing). Or do you believe that Zcash is not meant to be used by companies but rather by individuals primarily?
If Craig produces good research, we’ll certainly review it.