Yes, work is being done but we haven’t committed to an official roadmap yet. We’ll be discussing the research completed to date and our intended path ahead at our Zeboot event the end of the month. I’ll post a more detailed agenda this Friday. The current set of activities are documented in the TFL research DAG here.
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I think that something that ought to be rediscussed at Zeboot is TFL vs transitioning in one step. I have been supportive of the two step approach in the past, but personally I have begun leaning more towards transitioning in one step because of speed and complexity.
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i never really understood why we are looking for a hybrid POS & POW system, does this not require to rebuild everything when we decide to switch to POS only?
why not go to POS now?
the hybrid system would also only take half of the selling pressure of miners.
and as someone on the telegram group recently said, those that currently hold ZEC are the true believers, and i tend to agree with this. best conditions for stakers in the network!
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Nate listed the pros and cons here.
So the main benefit is potentially not disrupting the ecosystem if something goes wrong with the PoS protocol, as the PoW protocol could keep going. I am not sure how valuable this benefit is in practice. I mean there are probably 0 (or very close to 0) people in the world who rely on Zcash for their day-to-day purchases, we are already seen as a risky asset, and we don’t have any on-chain Defi that would be disrupted either. We would take a reputational hit for sure, but it is already pretty low and I don’t see any catastrophic consequences that would justify the increased time and complexity of the two-step solution. We are already trying to increase development speed and simplicity by switching to Zebra, the hybrid protocol could cancel out the benefits.
I say just develop a pure PoS Zcash and let the difficulty bomb kill the PoW chain.
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that was a great read, thanks @Milton
i agree on all your points, POS is the way to go! less complex and not as complicated as a hybrid, that either way most likely will switch to POS later on.
one thing that i would like to note, nate stated at the cons “losing miners”
that point needs some additional comments… we have already lost the miners a long time ago. (at the time where we decided to go with asics)
they sell their ZEC for BTC as soon as they get it, and they also don’t care about security, as we all can see how they choose the mining pools. (VIABTC currently has 58% of the hasrate)
replacing them with diamond hand believers of Zcash is a nobrainer to me!
Let’s make it happen.
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Hi!
Just chiming in here: I know of populations of people who rely on ZEC for their daily livelihoods (even if that’s just a couple txns per month). It’s very dangerous to assume a privacy-preserving financial system isn’t used for anything important.
So, because I personally know of some communities, I’m also going to assume there are probably more out there that I don’t even know about. And because of that, it’s a top priority for me not to disrupt them.
I still believe we can do a safe transition to hybrid PoW / PoS efficiently and without disruption, using Ethereum as a model (although our approach can be much simpler, IMO). In fact, I believe the Crosslink design (largely due to Daira with input from me and Str4d) ends up being fairly simple to implement and simple-ish to describe.
In terms of simplicity and speed: I’m not sure if a “single step” transition to pure PoS would actually be faster or less complex. Much of the complexity of Zcash nodes & wallets currently is due to the shielded transactions technology and we’d still need that in a PoS system. Plus, we’d have to ensure wallets work with a brand new consensus network.
And finally, I believe PoS can often have a few security flaws PoW does not have which the “Crosslink” design protects against. Namely: permissioned/coordinated restarts which I described in a Zcon presentation about “Trailing Finality Layer”. (Note: Ethereum has a defense against this which IIUC is “never let the network halt” which may be feasible.)
The other vulnerability is “multi-spend attacks” which I don’t know if it’s publicly disclosed anywhere, but comes from discussions with Zooko. These attacks are only possible by controlling a 2/3 super majority of the stake and they are just like you expect from double-spend attacks, but the subtlety is that in PoS an attacker can attack any number of victims with low computational resources, but in PoW (with 51% miner) and in Crosslink, the attacker must mine some amount for each victim, so attack “blast radius” is much more limited. (Just to be clear: this “blast radius” consideration does not matter unless attackers already have 51% miner or >2/3 stake.)
I hope that helps motivate hybrid as the best safety step for Zcash.
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