This is the order of operations I propose:
- Pause Qedit’s work on ZSA surveillance, focus their highly-qualified engineering resources elsewhere.
- Deploy the ZSA standard to mainnet.
- Watch and learn how developers are building and issuing ZSAs in the real world (someone might launch a wrapped DAI as the chain’s first stablecoin token, for example, alongside wBTC and plenty of memes)
- Poll early ZSA users and developers on whether they need or want this surveillance feature.
- If so, fund it.
Is there a formal place that I can propose this to the funding organization’s board?
I firmly believe that the entire Zcash community should be polled on whether or not they want this feature. I consider myself a power user and was not aware of it until reading this post.
I firmly believe that most users are not actively monitoring the forums and that deploying this feature would bring extreme negative sentiment, well beyond T-addresses (which I personally support as a key regulatory differentiator verses other privacy coins).
ZSA developers have not yet voiced demand for this feature. Because there are not any ZSA developers/issuers yet. Let’s get ZSAs live then decide on further expansions, especially extremely controversial features like this.
A user of surveilled ZSAs cannot be warned enough: “By using this Surveilled ZSA, be aware that its issuer can see all of your transaction history when using this ZSA. You can never know who they may share their view key with in the future, or even sell it to, which would reveal all transactions in this ZSA’s history. Using this feature may give you temporary privacy, but assume that all of your transactions may be made public some day. Treat Surveilled ZSAs as no different from public Ethereum ERC-20 tokens.”