What is Zcash trying to be?

General
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The NU7 poll is live (ish). Eleven questions. Support or Oppose. ZSAs, NSM, Tachyon, fee burns, quantum recoverability.

But I want to zoom out.

We’re asking users to vote on technical details.

Halving vs smooth issuance. 60% fee burn vs some other number. Note plaintext formats. These aren’t vision questions. They’re implementation details that most voters can’t properly evaluate.

@ValarDragon’s NU 7 discussions: NSM . The proposal bundles two separate things. Voters have to accept or reject both. That’s not informed decision-making. That’s a take-it-or-leave-it package.

Meanwhile, the actual vision question isn’t on the ballot.

What is Zcash trying to be?

There’s Do we see Zcash as MoE? . No consensus. Some say ZEC is private savings and ZSAs handle payments. Others say ZEC can do both. Others are skeptical it works as cash at all.

How you answer that question changes how you vote on everything else. But we’re not aligned on it. So we get votes on features from people with incompatible assumptions about what success looks like.

The voting mechanism itself is broken.

@daira’s NU7 Sentiment Polling and ZIP Submission Window - #43 by daira in coinholder voting. Unaudited circuits (apparently now audited). Risky fund transfers. Potential rollback attacks. One of Zcash’s principal protocol designers, who understands these tradeoffs better than almost anyone, is opting out.

But even if the mechanism were secure, we’d still be asking non-experts to make expert decisions.

What’s the alternative?

Proof of stake. Stakeholders vote by running the code they believe in. No polling infrastructure. No seed phrase risks. No debates about circuit audits.

Engineers propose visions. Stakeholders choose which fork to follow. If enough stake runs the new code, it’s consensus. Clean.

This also solves the “who decides technical details” problem. Technical experts make technical calls. Stakeholders back teams and visions, not individual parameters.

The question:

Are we building governance infrastructure for a PoW chain that’s not designed for it? Or should we be focusing energy on the PoS transition where stakeholder governance happens naturally?

I don’t have the answer. But I think we’re debating the wrong layer.

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Coinholder: Protocol Feature Sentiment Poll
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Nobody answered. Fair enough. Let me try a different angle.

Sean just tweeted that Bitcoin has been “taken over by a cult of ossification.”

He’s not wrong about Bitcoin. But it sharpens the question I was trying to ask: where should Zcash sit on this spectrum?

Two legitimate positions

Stability-first: Trust comes from predictability. Holders shouldn’t need to monitor forums to keep funds safe. High thresholds for change protect against capture. Security through simplicity.

Adaptation-first: Trust comes from competence. Quantum is real. Technical debt creates risk. Staying ahead of threats requires shipping improvements. Security through evolution.

Both want Zcash to succeed. Different theories of how.

The tension in practice

The Sprout deprecation thread shows this playing out.

@daira says: “I estimate that there is a significant chance within the next 3 years that we will be forced to make a decision about whether to also disable the ability to spend Sapling and pre-NU7 Orchard notes.”

That’s adaptation-first. Quantum is coming. Pools will need to migrate. Users should expect this.

@ValarDragon says: “it’ll always be a criticism that ‘one day people decided to just remove it in the next upgrade’, that will run counter to a moneyness narrative.”

That’s stability-first. Sound money means you can hold for decades without surprises.

Both are right about something. Neither extreme works alone.

My position

Balance. Progressive ossification.

Evolve the execution layer. Ossify the trust layer over time.

Quantum resistance, scaling, efficiency improvements. Keep shipping those.

But privacy guarantees, supply schedule, the expectation that current pools won’t vanish without years of warning and broad outreach. Those should get harder to change over time.

The threshold for fundamental changes should be high. Not impossible. High.

The question

Where do ECC, ZF, and Shielded Labs think we should sit on this spectrum?

Stability-first? Adaptation-first? Some specific balance?

The “encrypted Bitcoin” narrative implies stability-first. The Sprout deprecation approach implies adaptation-first. Which is it?

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i think thats the direction Zcash aims to go…

but no cryptocurrency has this figured out afaik with the quantum era approaching us. even if bitcoin wants to be this super stable asset it likely wont be good enough in 10y without big upgrades.

a truly digital form of decades long storage of value is hard or close to impossible (at least as of 2026)

i would love if pools had end-of-life estimates already known to users or very soon so there would be more perception that your cold storage funds will need to be moved at some point into newer pools.

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Agreed on the EOL estimates. That would help communication. But it doesn’t solve governance.

Coinholder polls measure sentiment. They don’t create accountability. Technical leaders can ignore the results. There’s no mechanism to say “you’re building something stakeholders didn’t sign up for.”

The real solution is staking. Two paths are being explored. Shielded Labs is building Crosslink. And there’s the JAM proposal of @sourabhniyogi to run Zcash as a service with its own ZEC stakers. Both would let stakeholders actually vote with their stake.

But neither is here yet. And deprecation decisions are happening now. By the time staking ships, the adaptation-first approach may already be locked in as precedent.

We need leaders to articulate their vision publicly before that happens. Not after. (@joshs @aquietinvestor & ZF head (sorry not sure who that is at the moment))

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There’s a golden mean between ossifying way too soon like Bitcoin did without having the mere basics to become money and becoming some kind of perpetual Frankenstein project at a science fair.

Upgrades must be done to fix real deficiencies and problems, not imaginary ones or even worst create new ones.

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Do you mean Zcash - Coin Voting 2.0 - Least Authority ? That is not what I would consider an adequate circuit audit. The only finding that mentions the circuit is Issue F. That finding indeed seems to be resolved on the vote_v2 and vote_v2b branches (which one is used? it’s unclear). But I see no evidence of any depth to the auditing of the circuit code; I would expect many more findings even if only about specification clarity.

This is an example of what I would expect for a proper circuit audit (Qedit’s audit of the Orchard circuit for NU5): Zcash NU5 Final Audit Report - September 2021 - HackMD

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Speaking for myself: :backhand_index_pointing_up:

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Zcash is privacy infrastructure with a native currency. We’re building ZChat - shielded transactions as messaging. No servers, no metadata.

If Zcash wins, it’s because shielded pool = “private by default” like HTTPS = secure. Apps, not just coins.

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We’ve been debating this from the inside. Stability vs adaptation. Poll mechanics. Feature bundles. But look at what’s happening outside right now.

Dollar down almost 10% in a year. US debt past $38 trillion. Central banks dumping dollar reserves and buying gold at record pace. BRICS settling most of their mutual trade in local currencies. Gold near $5,000. It was under $3,000 a year ago.

It’s all happening. And it’s exciting. It’s also sad because lots of people are going to get hurt. But the old system is failing before our eyes and a new one is taking shape.

The tariff war isn’t a policy disagreement. It’s a symptom. When the world’s reserve currency is backed by over 120% debt-to-GDP and the response is to tax imports at 25%, you’re watching a system try to hold power through coercion because it can’t hold it through trust anymore.

And the “crypto” response? Bitcoin down nearly 50% from its peak. Moving with the S&P because institutions made it correlated. The thing that was supposed to be the exit from traditional finance now tracks it. ETFs were the Trojan horse. Wall Street didn’t adopt Bitcoin. Bitcoin adopted Wall Street.

That’s not a foundation. That’s a decoration on the old building.

Meanwhile, over 130 countries are exploring CBDCs. Russia rolls out its Digital Ruble in September. Brazil this year. The design pattern? Privacy up to a threshold, full state visibility above it. That’s not a new system. That’s the old system with better tracking.

So what does a sound foundation actually look like?

Private by default. Not “private if you opt in” or “private below a limit.” Default. Because the moment privacy is optional, it becomes suspicious. And the moment it has a ceiling, the ceiling drops.

Sovereign. Not correlated with the Nasdaq. Not dependent on ETF flows. Not capturable by the institutions it was designed to route around.

Sound money. Predictable supply. No one at a desk deciding how much to print this quarter.

Network states aren’t hypothetical anymore. Praxis just raised $525 million. Prospera is operating. But a network state built on transparent money is a network state that any traditional state can surveil, sanction, and strangle. You don’t get sovereignty without private money. That’s not a feature request. That’s the foundation.

Everything happening right now is a case study in why Zcash needs to exist. The dollar is weakening. CBDCs are the state’s response. Bitcoin got captured. Gold can’t move at the speed of the internet.

What’s left? Private, digital, sound money.

That’s what Zcash is trying to be. The crash isn’t the story. The crash is the old site being cleared.

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The adage says that when the US has a cold, the rest of the world has pneumonia. So what exactly happens to the rest of the world when the US has pneumonia?

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They build their own immune system.

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