Thats valid, I suggest the using asic mega thread though, many more there interested in the subject so greater likelihood of response, also because of its actual subject matter
the problem is that I don’t think a debater would be able to present any sort of argument that hadn’t already been discussed probably multiple times
Given that and the fact its a completely “how do you feel about it” issue, I dont know how much “sway” any continuation of that argument would have
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@hloo is the only candidate, that I could see, who talked about ensuring low transaction fees in the years to come. Do any other candidates disagree with that position?
It’s my opinion that adoption follows utility and high fees would hurt usability and accessibility of Zcash.
Edit: I want to clarify that by low fees I’m talking about on-chain transactions only. Off-chain solutions like the Lightning Network on Bitcoin introduces a hub-spoke trust model that could undermine privacy.
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@root I would be shocked if any of the other prospective board members thought high fees are a good idea. I certainly think they aren’t. Similarly, no one thinks centralization under one ASIC manufacturing is a good idea. its easy to say “NO ASICS” or “NO INCREASED FEES”. Slogans will win you elections to govern, but they won’t do you one bit of good actually governing.
These are hard problems and the goal they support may need to be done other ways. It may be the case that ASIC resistance isn’t viable long term. It may be the case that on chain cannot scale to handle VISA levels of traffic and we need to do payment hubs. The point is to find technical solutions to these problems or technical work arounds. For example, the foundation is now handling development of Bolt, a protocol I designed to create privacy preserving layer two payments. So if it turns out that we cannot get low fees long term, and I hope we can, then we have a backup.
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and we need to do payment hubs
This would be a big loss of security for Zcash. Payment hubs will never be a suitable solution because of the potential requirement of KYC/AML. If you lose strictly peer-to-peer you introduce trust and weakness into the protocol.
It may be the case that on chain cannot scale to handle VISA levels of traffic
Bitcoin Cash has a gigablock testnet that runs on high-end consumer hardware. They also just upgraded mainnet to 32mb blocks. This will be even better with canonical ordering of transactions allowing for parallelization. I think they will reach Visa levels without any problems and I hope Zcash follows that path.
I agree with your point that we need more than two hardware manufacturers.
@secparam please see my question to you regarding a rough timeframe for some of the goals that you’ve put forth:
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@root I share your concerns about KYC/AML and payment hubs. I don’t know how that interacts with e.g. Visa. It may be there’s a legal avenue for it to work. But it is a concern.
I think as far as consensus goes, Zcash will go with what works. So if Bitcoin cash works at those scales and is sufficiently decentralized, then it is a viable option. If not, then there are may be competing scaling solutions. All have various considerations. If those won’t work or come with unacceptable downsides, then we have a backup. The point is to have plans that give us technical options and ways to react depending on what happens.
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Some great questions here, thanks @root
@hloo is the only candidate, that I could see, who talked about ensuring low transaction fees in the years to come. Do any other candidates disagree with that position?
After being on the receiving end of a support tsunami during the “Bitcoin fee crisis” of 2017, I can say I obviously am not in favor of high fees, as it leads to terrible UX. Full blocks cause an incredibly unpleasant experience for consumers & merchants. That being said, I’m not sure that its so easy to say “low fees is the way to go!”. These are seriously hard problems that have undesirable tradeoffs. If 100% of Bitcoin traffic all of a sudden moved to ZCash, we would have to accept a significantly different network topology, with all the pain it brings
I would venture to say that the foundation itself is unlikely able to “centrally” plan for these types of events. Instead, all that can be done is to fund research & development into different methods of capacity increases & measure their effect on privacy, which leads me to my next point:
This is a fair concern, but keep in mind that users will use the service that meets their requirements. Adding Lightning channels/BOLT doesn’t preclude users from using Zcash as they do today. Furthermore, not all jurisdictions will require KYC/AML for BOLT; it’s also not clear that many will. That being said, Watchtowers and other requirements for a good BOLT UX will have serious privacy implications.
Again, I would venture to say that the Foundation won’t likely succeed as a central planning committee. I would tend to focus on research and development grants to research the privacy impact of different scaling techniques.
Hope that answers your questions.
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Zcash has 2mb blocks, so I don’t think there would be much pain with Bitcoin transaction levels. That said, we should probably move to 8mb or 16mb blocks soon to get ahead of the issue before it becomes a problem.
Thanks for your input.
How to vote? other than posting comments, I cannot find any button to vote on the webpage.
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Only the members of the community governance panel are able to vote. You can read a bit more about the governance process, and there is also the Zcash Foundation’s voting announcement.
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While this is true, there is a lot more to scale than just the block size. Increased traffic makes running a local node more complicated; changes the dynamics of the mempool, makes spam easier, etc. When it gets harder to run nodes, the network topology changes.
Also, transaction demand is not linear across the day, it generally peaks after business hours EST, so there are times of “network congestion”.
Long story short: Bitcoin taught us some lessons about scale, and Zcash is well positioned to not make the same mistakes.
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I have posted some thoughts on how I voted for the board nominees… feel free to now yell at me…
Here’s @HershyatHatch’s post about how he voted for Board Members in the Zcash Community Governance Panel: 2018 Q2 Zcash Foundation Community Governance Panel Election - Board Nominees: My Vote — Steemit
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