What was the reasoning for an asic resistant hashing algorithm??
I think some of the reasoning is that ASICs are part of the centralization of mining.
small hobbyist miners
I believe there is an old Zooko tweet about Zcash losing 90% of users at that time after acquiescing to ASICs.
ASICs are obviously unpopular with GPU miners and centralizes the hash power. However it does make zcash less likely to fall victim to a nicehash attack
I.M.O. a change from “Zcash” to something more intuitive & accurate would be a very smart evolution of the project.
“Zcash” as it exists today is tarnished brand that carries a lot of negative perceptions.
100%. The brand sucks. “Privacy is NORMAL you GUYZZ” 
Zcash needs simplicity in its narrative, the idea of ZEC functioning like a fiat is explicitly foolish, impractical, destructive, misleading, and based on the evidence of >5 years, a failure.
ZEC is for Saving and Speculating
ZUSD coming soon is for Commerce
This is it! then when confidence is built around the vision. Investors will know that ZEC will eventually one day be a real store of value as opposed to this undefined thing. It will eventually be a yield bearing instrument, a collateral token…But currently there is not trust in the vision for ZEC ever having value because as you rightly point out, the current team thinks ZEC is a private fiat. This is a failure as a concept.
Yes, and this is why there continues to be a growing minority of Zcash ecosystem members who want to end the block reward, and at that risk the Electric Coin Company and its ideologues around the ZEC = digital private fiat model could go with it.
A logical, practical, winning narrative is critically needed, and the best time to create it is now. Zcash of the past has suffered from the ill contrived narrative that ECC created and promoted for the first 7-8 years 
We must vote them out if they dont change the vision. because it becomes a “coin promotion” gig. Which is why they want so much money for marketing…But its a loser for a development plan (never ending coin issuance), and vision. We already see it, they want more than 21m coins or they want to take from the miners. And they want to pump the coin based on privacy selling people who cant accept the volatility…As we both know, the community gets smaller and smaller and eventually is dominated by grant recipients for special interest and not blockchain builders.
With the right vision, I think ZEC could go up substantially.
Yes. Beautifully articulated.
Friendly Reminder, To all of the disgruntled, frustrated, cat-herding, thought leaders…
I created this thread a long time ago, to serve as our shouting board/ open air group-therapy thread.
Sharing some Copy-Pasta from the past month.
The economics can’t change, the builder incentives can’t change, and the network usage can’t change until these core traits are changed. If we’re all comfortable keeping everything as-is, so be it.
I don’t believe the current trend is what this ecosystem wants for Zcash. (Where value is down, technical debt is high, network usage is down, full node counts are down, hashrate is down, narrative(s) are confusing, product(s) are discouraging)
The Good News: Zeboot is Happening. Zeboot is a window of opportunity.
And during its lead up, we’re already seeing a ton of great leadership and more engagement from The Electric Coin Company via @joshs
On the broader topic, I still describe my opinion along the lines that JGX does.
and cover your face with a mask while spending itMore copy-pasta. I can already see the Price Speculation thread going off the rails
We’ve said it a hundred times.
The creators of Zcash unsuccessfully pitched it as private digital fiat - with near zero fees, world-class encryption, and even a memo-field!
The market didn’t bite on that pitch, the users never showed up, and the technical issues that have plagued Zcash for years have now driven that pitch into the dustbin.
Zcash is not designed to function like a private digital fiat. The long term coin supply is scarce (while coin issuance is/has been very high) which makes ZEC ↔ ZEC stability impossible, once you introduce the vector of time.
Imagine having been a seed investor, or VC who put up capital for the launch of Zcash, and then years later you find that the two Zcash orgs designed themselves to destroy the market value of ZEC. Its no surprise that this ecosystem lost all of its deep pocketed supporters.
To Save Zcash, a new, practical, actionable, economic narrative needs to be created.
Particpants need to be convinced of a unifying vision that ZEC are valuable crypto assets for holding, not dumping (and we need a Zero-Tolerance policy for Lip Service.)
The following was hearted by multiple people, but flagged by one individual. We have a free speech problemm growing in this forum. A few bullies are trying to box out some folks like myself using the flagging feature.
After triple-checking the calendar, I can assure everyone else getting ready to comment below - No, it is not April 1st yet
Tripling down on the compensation to the three organizations who failed to drive Zcash quality, adoption, or value in the past 4 years makes absolutely no sense.
Two out of those three organizations failed to even partially support the Zcash native coin value, instead opting to use block reward funds to build out competing altcoin positions/ angel investments.
If we really are being forced to triple the block rewards going to the big three, could you at least add a clause that explicitly disallows them from taking in their block reward ZEC, then turning around to sell them in service of their alter-egos as shadow crypto hedge funds?
Comedy: So you mean everyone that isn’t paid out of the block rewards.
I haven’t followed the calls, so I’m sorry to be getting publicly shocked to hear that zcashd is being engineered into right now - despite having such a long, existing runway for deprecation.
This sounds like we’re outside varnishing the decks of the Titanic, while the ship is halfway under water.
Leave it to the block rewards teams to over-identify for themselves, creative new challenges to spend resources on; rather than applying a hard deadline for total zcashd deprecation prior to NU6.
Engineering another 9 months (zcashd deprecation is truly more than 16+ months old now?) into a product with a long, known deprecation end state is somewhat unbelievable!
Zcashd is beginning to feel like the Transparent ZEC pool 2.0… at the grassroots user level nobody really wants it, but at the block rewards level, we can’t live without it either.
Developing things take time. There’s a good chunk of functionality missing in zebra to make it replace zcashd and it won’t be ready in 9 months simply because it’s a lot.
@conradoplg What if you had more engineers? How many engineers needed to get it done faster?
I understand that there are development challenges to zebra (I work in an enterprise software company, and have experienced many projects where feature porting/ product deprecation take significantly more effort than might be expected from a simple glance), what makes less sense is that engineering resources have to continue to be spent on zcashd in preparation for it to live on in the NU6 era (which is still 8+ months away).
God speed to all of you software engineers!
I have the impression neither ECC nor ZF can afford hiring more people at the moment. In any case there’s always a ramp-up to get familiar with the code base, so I don’t think it would make a big difference for the purpose of what’s being discussed (gettiing more things into NU6 before the next halvening)
The main deadline here is the halvening / end of dev fund. If the community decides to keep the dev fund in some form, then a network upgrade is needed (NU6). And since zebra is unlikely to be able to replace zcashd at that point in time, it follows that NU6 would need to be implemented in zcashd.
Of course it’s possible the community chooses to not do that and then there won’t be any concrete deadline for NU6. Then it would be possible to get it done only in zebrad. But if there is something else that the community wants (ZSF? Smoothing out the issuance curve?) which would not be particularly hard to implement in zcashd then I don’t see why not do it.
There’s a book called “The mythical man month”. here’s the wikipedia entry for it The Mythical Man-Month - Wikipedia
you can’t add people to a project without delaying it. Much less to a really complex project like Zebra.
The ZSA thread is getting derailed, so I’m cross replying in my therapy thread.
Exactly, there is not a lack of vocal opinions about this current weakness/ confusion.
Leadership needs to stand up and speak with conviction. ZEC are valuable, we’re done with the dumping. We’re building products to help the world use ZEC, and a huge use case there-in is the Store of Value use case. - in addition to the core privacy features
Proof of Stake is a game changer that could Save Zcash because it will fundamentally make ZEC into an asset to Buy & Hold.
100%
Zcash needs to be seen and marketed as invisible and completely private wealth storage.
All the heavy hitters in the industry who publicly backed Zcash in the early days had huge wealth and understood that it was essentially private BTC.
Pablo Escobar, Spy agencies, Governments, Individuals…
All the above NECESSITATE private wealth storage and transfer.
No one is buying Chipotle with their Zcash because the hope is that its invisible SoV.
My Chipotle burrito is now double what it should be because Zcash is 50% down from purchase. As a SoV I don’t care because I understand the long-term vision.
If we keep pushing private transactions, it’s a huge miss and Zcash will continue to dwindle in an identity crisis spiral.
The “first 100” were the big backers in the early days who understood the value prop of INVISIBLE AND COMPLETELY PORTABLE WEALTH STORAGE. Spending Zcash like cash is not it and anyone thinking it should be is a threat to the project.
If I speak to non-crypto individuals and say “Hey there’s this project that allows you to send money to friends privately!”. Most literally couldn’t care less and many others believe that their transactions are already private.
If I speak to non-crypto individuals and say “Hey there’s this project that allows for INVISIBLE MONEY!”. Interest is spiked, people are interested, many way to even own some of this INVISIBLE wealth.
It’s painfully obvious.
No one cares about private cash app.
Everyone is interested in invisible wealth storage.