You have to remember the Electric Coin Company and the Zcash Foundation are based in the US and is under the authority of many government agencies including the SEC. The ECC and ZFND care about promoting privacy preserving technology and open source software, not boosting investor profits.
If they were to begin trying to “pump” or “shill” Zcash for short term price gains as you suggest then it could be perceived as price fixing/manipulation by a private company which is highly illegal in the US.
Zcash is designed to be a tool for users to transact privately and securely with one another.
(Disclaimer: my opinions are my own and do not represent an official position from the Zcash Foundation)
We’re all aware that the SEC is monitoring the actions of both the ECC and ZFND which constrains a lot of their actions. However, I believe @anon36438132’s point was missed in your response. While the ECC effectively focused on cryptography for 3 years they seemed to ignore the objective of increasing adoption. This helps the price of ZEC (indirectly) and increases the probability of the privacy-oriented future that @zooko desires.
All of the owners of Zcash (including myself) have subsidized development for several years. I think there’s a set of people in both organizations that tend to forget that. Your gain is effectively my loss. It seems to me that many coin holders are upset for not being rewarded (or listened to) when we have had skin in the game for several years.
Cryptography and adoption are not mutually exclusive. The reason the ECC has focused on the core technology is because improving it was necessary to facilitate adoption.
Who here remembers when Zcash first launched? It took 40 seconds and 3.1GB of RAM just to process a JoinSplit (private) transaction and you had to download the entire blockchain which could take days. This was basically unusable for anything but a PC and certainly not something the mainstream public and merchants would accept.
Now fast forward to 2020, here we are with blocktimes/confirmations every 75 seconds (!) , the first lite wallet (ZecWallet lite built on top of ECCs reference client) is available for you start using private transactions in less than 5 minutes with no blockchain download, making a private transaction takes seconds with only 40mb of RAM, Josh S. and the reference wallet team have just made the first fully mobile private Zcash transaction on iOS.
All of this has happened in just three years, from Zerocashs barely working academic grade (proof of concept) code to something that is now actually ready for mainstream adoption.
I agree to a degree. I’m not entirely sure whether all of those improvements had a sufficient ROI for a SoV-oriented currency. Additionally, at what point do further back-end improvements contribute to potential adoption?
Regardless, superior technology does not ensure adoption. Monero is evidence of that. It can be argued it has been around a bit longer and hence has a significant advantage. However, the gap appears to have grown over the past year given any reasonable metric (web traffic, transaction count, exchange volume, etc.).
Anyway, this dialogue feels less like a conversation and more like a fight of talking points so I’ll end with that. Have a good day Shawn.
I certainly hope you don’t feel that I’m trying to pick a fight, that’s not my intention. I’m simply trying to post the big picture for everyone, threads like this tend to get bogged down with the short term and forget about how far we have come.
I don’t disagree with many of the points made but if we want Zcash to succeed we need to focus more on the use and utility of Zcash. Use Zcash (not just hodl) ask your friends and vendors to accept Zcash, support Zcash on social media, that’s how we can help drive adoption.
Now I want to introduce my thoughts about which I am already tired of talking.
All that was said before me is true, but you are talking about slightly different sides of one thing that zcash lacked for 3 years, these are the ideas for using and implementing it, why should I tell my friends about zcash, how they can use it and why his? All this can also be done with a simple transfer from the card. Where is the coin uniqueness given its technical superiority? For 3 years, everyone focused on technology, but now there is not enough money to go forward, that’s what Yugo talked about, technical excellence is as important for the project as its value (return on investment), otherwise everything will be reduced to general acceptance.How does it look from the side:
There was raw code and a small user base, an update comes out with quick confirmation and a small memory requirement, users began to use a coin? Apparently not, because there were no wallets, conferences and meetings are being held, and users are not added, an update with block acceleration is coming out, and that has changed, the base was probably under constant load, apparently no, nothing has changed, the number of users has not increased, the wallet is leaving (third year coming), users come and use? again past, the announcement of a new completely unexplored HALO code.
After 3 years of development and enrichment of the creators and initial investors, the coin is not suitable for use because there are competitors who have a much simpler way to use and much greater liquidity and not such price dynamics.All updates were made for no one, just to be there, but after each update you need to increase users, and not do the prospect that, when the coin is ready, everyone will start using it (they will not), the updates should solve current problems, they partially solved the problems of the code itself, but not the needs of people.
So what you’re saying is (worst case scenario) Zcash just ends up a safer version of Bitcoin, yeah Id agree thats pretty much the lower bound projection
I’d say we’re already there with that… I’d much rather spend/receive ZEC than BTC, far safer.
Its interesting to me how little patience people have, its only been three years and technical progress has been pretty amazing. Its supposed to be careful, cautious & done correctly - this is money we’re talking about.
Having the best privacy and continual improvements is the entire point. Privacy is an ever changing battlefield so continual improvements are necessary or else privacy can be broken.
The same could be said about Bitcoin, where is the uniqueness? There are so many “Bitcoins” that do the same things, faster. Why does Bitcoin stay relevant when I can just use my regular Credit Card faster? Those are bigger questions for all cryptocurrency not just Zcash.
The answer is of course adoption and use. More users adopting a product will impact the value users place on the product.
Up until right now, 2020, Zcash has been laying the groundwork, the foundation upon which to build. Next step is to get users to understand the lack of privacy on platforms and to make the choice, make the switch.
I agree with Brian Armstrong:
I believe we’ll eventually see a “privacy coin” or blockchain with built in privacy features get mainstream adoption in the 2020s.
Bitcoin was used as a means of accumulating cash at its ever-increasing price and of course use in shadow and illegal operations, this is not the case with zcash
Than the ECC and ZF have totally failed on this matter/level by reaching all time lows on different levels like price, active adresses, market cap, you name it …
To declare a project a failure implies that forward progress has stopped, it has not.
The roadmap, halving, mobile wallet, scaling progress will all be positive for Zcash. 2020 will be a big year towards adoption, come back to this post in December and see where it’s at.
I wrote that the ECC and ZF have failed with adoption and use, but i should have added so far of course.
It will mostly be a big year compared to the last years, but the missing adoption and still huge inflation rate will eat these positive impacts.
I hadn’t much time so far for 2020 calculations, but my first calculation with current adoption levels indicate that a price in the range of $15-20 at the bottom border and $40-50 for the upper border will be the result in december 2020, not counting short time peeks that may occcur at some time.
The missing level of adoption and high inflation rate for the next 5 years is just too high, easy and simple as that…
I know, i know, pessimistic predictions are not popular …
Edit: Whatever comes out for Zcash in the first 6 months of 2020 won’t mostly have any impact because the BTC halving coming will eat that together with the inflation rate, unfortunatly!!!
The only short time hope for a temporary price increase not dictated by BTC is in a time window right after the BTC halving for 1-3 months due a possible Zec halving hype, after that, everything is back to normality again.
