Aleo, Penumbra and others already have shielded assets with little success.
For any actual ZSA use case, a smart contract chain will always be a better fit.
Expands Zcash’s attack surface and complicates the codebase for years to come.
Dilutes ZEC’s value proposition.
Success scenario is actually dangerous: stablecoin issuers gain kingmaker power over forks by choosing which chain holds “their” asset in case of a hard fork.
Stablecoin issuers require blacklisting, freezing, and surveillance features—the opposite of what Zcash stands for.
Opportunity cost: every hour on ZSAs is an hour not spent on core privacy, UX, and adoption.
The best case for ZSAs is weak. The worst case compromises what makes Zcash worth building.
I agree. I wouldn’t want ZSA issuers controlling the network fork. It’s also weird to have centralized companies freezing coins. I think ZSAs are best fit for ZTarknet / Zcash L2.
Against ZSAs and against Crosslink. These ideas were born in a time when people were afraid Zcash would sink into irrelevancy and its price performance was poor. The Encrypted Bitcoin, Unstoppable Private Money is the course. The sooner we can close the book on making Zcash into a programmable layer 1 that would be very poorly received by the market, the better.
Zcash is a private store of value. The market has spoken. Let’s not shoot ourselves in the foot.
I’ve gone back and forth on this one, but there may be some exciting potential on the horizon: Zcash NU7 into a JAM service - #4 by outgoing.doze - it’s possibly nothing but sounds like it’s worth exploring.
ZSAs are already built, the community already paid for it. Don’t throw away code, look at Ethereum and other projects: stablecoins are the most proven product market fit for crypto.
If ZSAs are not merged, people will offer tokens regardless, but with a less technically-sound approach: ordinals (BRC-20) or memos.
We voted on ZSAs years ago and it passed. You can disagree, but it’s a decentralized project. Tokens will launch on Zcash whether you want them to or not. The question is whether we use the audited, professionally-built token implementation, or watch as chaos happens. The market always finds a way, and the market has voted for tokens to exist on L1s time and time again.
ZSAs are paid for, not merging them is a very negative signal to other teams’ donors & investors. Why fund and build Tachyon and Crosslink if the Zcash community can’t even merge ZSAs?
This debate is tired, it’s either tokens as ZSAs or tokens as a hack. Tokens are happening regardless of anyone’s opinions, they are inevitable.
I think its important to ask because QEDIT has been doing hard work and its rather interesting these convos are coming up now, in the midst of the ECC / Bootstrap drama. I also think its important to ask the community
Answer is simple: I wasn’t involved in Zcash at the time.
We should avoid falling for what is a textbook example of sunken cost fallacy. This was two years ago (the market changed since then and proved through Alea and Penumbra there is basically no demand for this) when Zcash had little traction.
Zcash is now having a ton of traction in the store of value / encrypted Bitcoin / sovereign money niche. That’s what we need to capitalize on. That’s our product-market fit. Everything else is effectively a distraction and hurts our ability to capitalize on this market fit.
With all due respect for QED-IT, and having met Jonathan, their CEO, in person and having had the chance to have a great exchange with him (he is awesome), this is again an example of sunken cost fallacy.
What matters is the present, and whether this is a good decision now, not how much work went into it in the past.
No need to turn conspiratorial, the reason is simply that a poll about ZSAs will go live next week.
Can you expand on (3) and (4)? Those are really the only points you should be arguing.
(1), (7) and (6) are non-arguments IMO. For (1), there might be a thousand reasons. (7) is not true because otherwise the lockbox would be empty, we are not budget constrained (right now), and (6) is a very simplistic view of the world. If Zcash stands for freedom, then people should be free to enter into any agreement that they understand and accept.
Here is an example for Penumbra regarding stablecoins, which given how dominant stablecoins are on other chains, gives you an idea of the lack of traction of shielded assets.
Yeah it is. Branding is about focus. If you say Zcash is one thing, but then many other things at the same time, that confuses people. Trying to do many things at once also expands Zcash’s attack surface and complicates the codebase for years to come.
(3): It’s pretty straightforward, it leads to more code, complicates everything, etc. there is a reason why it took two years for the QED-IT team to build this, it’s hard.
(4): Having shielded assets takes away the spotlight from ZEC specifically. Both in terms of branding, because now you can’t say Zcash is encrypted Bitcoin anymore etc. but also in terms of functionality: people might opt to hold a shielded asset instead of ZEC.
(1): It’s still a pretty significant piece of evidence. The Penumbra and Aleo people aren’t incompetent, and it’s unclear to me there is a strategy for ZSAs to not end up in the situation Penumbra and Aleo got into.
(6): Zcash is about privacy. Stablecoin issuers require surveillance features, which is against privacy. It’s pretty straightforward.
(7): I’m talking about developer resources. There is only one @daira, only one @str4d, etc. Money isn’t everything.
Just to make sure, everybody here understands that the ZSAs tokens do not benefit from the privacy pool of ZEC tokens? That is, every ZSAs has to start their privacy from 0. I’m not actually sure what the threshold is for reasonably privacy but I don’t think it’s clear for many that it starts at 0. My comment above (JAM) would potentially address this with trustless bridging.
