I would like to compile a list of barriers, concerns, feedback from new users. if anyone in the community has had the experience of introducing Zcash to new users I’d love to hear what your experience was like and what questions/concerns came up. My experience has been users are concerned about:
The primary factor impeding the wider user adoption of Zcash lies in the rarity of establishments that accept it. While one may critique Monero for its association with the darknet, the functionality of a currency fundamentally hinges on its usability. It is worth noting that the Monero wallet experience, synchronization time, and privacy features are all inferior to those of Zcash. Yet, despite these drawbacks, Monero has managed to maintain its value more effectively.
Why isnt ZEC getting used where Monero is getting used?
“What do I do with it?”
People need to have options to spend ZEC in order to be interested to try it. If we can’t provide a list of places where you can spend ZEC, people won’t be willing to go through the hassle of trying something new. And to most people, downloading a new app is too much hassle already, not to mention the syncing, off-ramps, etc.
So how do we get a bunch of vendors to accept ZEC? Well, they ask “who’s going to pay me with it?” and unless we can point to a significant (to the vendor) group of ZEC holders that are willing and able to buy right away, then the hassle of implementing ZEC payments is not worth it to them.
What do we do then? We need to target an entire community of vendors and buyers and onboard both sides of the equation at the same time.
The problem to framing Zcash around its purported usability in commerce is simple: Any amount of technical complexity of use instantly makes spending ZEC more burdensome than simply spending physical cash (or even digital cash like with Paypal, Venmo, Cashapp, et al)
Next factor in points GGuy noted, like merchant and consumer tax implications, or the long term instability of the value of ZEC coins… and you reach the conclusion that commerce isn’t the use case that we ought to be focusing in on yet.
The question of adoption hinges on the question of ZEC value over time (which has been bad). We’re never going to see adoption trend higher, until first we see the coin value trend higher. The value of the coin is a leading indicator (not trailing) for adoption, because the market is a future/ forward-looking pricing mechanism.
I disagree, I think the coin price is a factor for Crypto Twitter and the speculators. Even if ZEC went parabolic, these adopters would just dump it as soon as they hit their profit targets and then move on to the next coin they hope goes parabolic.
I’m old enough to remember these:
Vendors didn’t adopt these because they were easier than cash, they adopted them because it meant that a tribe of people would see the sticker on their front door saying “Diner’s Club accepted” and would go in and buy. And people didn’t get Diner’s Club cards because it was easier, it was a cumbersome application process and you had to pay membership fees. People got their Diner’s Club cards because they wanted to be part of the tribe, be in-the-know.
What the Zcash ecosystem needs is to find this tribe, this group of people and vendors that want to use a new payment technology and grow with them.
You can disagree as a belief, but my point is just reflective of the reality of crypto projects since the creation of Bitcoin itself. No project has gone mainstream in the context of usage, without a leading and well established coin price trend. If you can come up with a counter example, let me know.
And note that this isn’t to say that some stupid project coins can go viral/ price can go the the moon, but then two years later it all vanished. That is a common phenomena in crypto, and it doesn’t invalidate the point I’m making.
Without a reliable, upward coin price trend, nothing else will follow because its the basic mechanics of what a market does (it evaluates products to reward winners and penalize losers). There is also a nuance here, some usage statistics are manufactured by project insiders - Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision is a great example. Fraudulent usage statistics aren’t the same as common, organic, broad usage.
No project has gone mainstream in the context of usage, period. Even the companies that tried accepting BTC like Tesla stopped, even though BTC has “a leading and well-established coin price trend”.
@refinance brought up XMR. I don’t believe that the people that use XMR on the dark web do it because they think it has a great price trend or because it is a solid medium-term investment. They use it because the community (people that want to sell things on the dark web plus the people that want to buy those things) agreed to exchange using XMR, because it meets their needs despite the UX. In the days of Silk Road, they used BTC because back then, pseudonymity was enough, now it isn’t so they moved on despite BTC’s price action beating XMR’s handily.
I only meant “mainstream” in the crypto-relative context. Meaning that projects like Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Ripple are mainstream, and projects like Zcash or Decred are not yet mainstream. I don’t mean that in a global corporate sense, like you might say about Apple iPhones, et al.
Crypto as a whole is now mainstream as well - total market capitalization is above 1 trillion dollars.
What is ahead for the next 5-10 years will be the networks and markets battling to allocate the next couple billion users/ use cases and the next few trillion dollars worth of capitalization.
I think we should refocus on Zcash being money for the internet rather than to be used offline. The early adopters are online.
Looking at the most recent 500 blocks, there are, lo and behold, 51 fully shielded transactions (exluding coinbase, spam, t2z and z2t.).
You can calculate the “shielded effective transactions per second” as 51, divided by 500 (blocks), and then again by 75 (seconds per block). That’s 0.00136 tps. That’s an abysmally low number that quantitively reflects the shielded adoption.
| Block | # z2z + orchard |
|---|---|
| 2138679 | 1 |
| 2138682 | 1 |
| 2138688 | 2 |
| 2138689 | 1 |
| 2138693 | 1 |
| 2138701 | 2 |
| 2138706 | 2 |
| 2138707 | 2 |
| 2138717 | 1 |
| 2138729 | 1 |
| 2138741 | 1 |
| 2138747 | 1 |
| 2138753 | 1 |
| 2138756 | 1 |
| 2138774 | 2 |
| 2138780 | 1 |
| 2138786 | 1 |
| 2138794 | 1 |
| 2138806 | 1 |
| 2138807 | 1 |
| 2138820 | 1 |
| 2138829 | 1 |
| 2138905 | 1 |
| 2138908 | 1 |
| 2138912 | 1 |
| 2138921 | 1 |
| 2138925 | 2 |
| 2138942 | 1 |
| 2138951 | 1 |
| 2138960 | 2 |
| 2138962 | 1 |
| 2138966 | 2 |
| 2138972 | 1 |
| 2138985 | 1 |
| 2139015 | 1 |
| 2139022 | 1 |
| 2139071 | 1 |
| 2139108 | 1 |
| 2139131 | 1 |
| 2139162 | 1 |
| 2139165 | 2 |
| 2139172 | 1 |
One can discuss the academic strength and benefits of zcash privacy ad-aeternam but when it comes to actual usage, it is clear that it is practically nonexistent.
Innovation adoption is a well studied discipline but for some reason in this forum people keep trying to freestyle it as if it the mechanics behind it were something that could be figured out by osmosis, or something.
What you described is common to pretty much all innovations that get adopted “en masse” but the network effects behind “wanting to be part of a tribe”, or more like “wanting to enjoy the benefits and convenience a ‘trusted’ tribe already enjoys”, only start happening after more than 15% of the total addressable market is already using the innovation at some extent.
To put things in perspective, no matter how you slice what the “total addressable market of Zcash” might be, it is impossible to argue that it has conquered even 0.5% of it, and even that is an unrealistic number to where we stand right now.
We have awarded Zcash media 1.5 million dollars, or so, from the dev fun, that could have been spent way more effectively in the things we know actually drive adoption (expensive youtube documentaries are not among them at all, sadly), but the political economy behind the dev fund is geared towards serving the powers that be and their cronies, rather than Zcash itself, so here we are today.
In other words, the prospects for Zcash adoption “are not looking good bruv”, not by many many miles.
Which are those things?
Promoting Zcash through what you would call “interpersonal communication channels”.
For example, Zooko asking his 70k followers on the reg to “take zecwallet lite for a spin”, without a doubt had a bigger impact on Zcash adoption that the 1st set of expensive zcash media documentaries ever will, and for free!
Quoting the great Everett Rogers " technology diffusion is a very social process that involves interpersonal communication relationships”.
I did bring all of this up several times during the (charade) debate on whether to further fund zcash media or not, but a scientific-based approach to Zcash adoption did not stand a chance if it would not benefit Zcash’s powers-that-be and their cronies.
I agree with you here. Crypto in general is way too focused on making noise on Twitter as if it were a driver of adoption.
I think we do have successful people doing good work in the community, Boston Zcash and Zcash Brasil come to mind. We need to encourage these groups and build upon their success, learn from them.
I seem to have made this remark to deaf ears.
If Zcash Media intends to make an impact with its releases that are supposed to begin in August, someone… anyone out there with access to that channel should be creating some engagement content so that the channel itself begins to track across crypto social media radar screens again.
Otherwise we’re going to get the same exact outcome that we got last time. A slow roll out of videos which get a quicky 15-20k views, and then fade their way into 40-50k views a month or two later, before ultimately falling out of sight in the rearview mirror.
$1,000,000 is a lot of ZCG funds, imo we deserve a better approach to the beginning of the launch of the round 2 productions.
I see that @ZcashMedia on twitter hasn’t done a single tweet in the entire 2023 calendar year.
I agree the social aspect is crucial. Having watched friends’ many failed and moderately-successful attempts to launch products, what distinguished success from failure the most was going out and talking to people, learning what they need, and adapting the product to work for them. I’ve seen obviously-great ideas get fully built and then fail because this process was missing. That said, it seems to be an art form that’s not easily replicated or taught, and the right approach is different for every product. I wouldn’t know how to do it, aside from trying lots of different things and observing what works and what doesn’t.
Exactly, you personally wouldn’t, but even though you are aware you don’t know, you still went and for some reason, went gave a diagnosis of the situation “it seems to be an art form that’s not easily replicated or taught”, which serves as perfect example of why I said this:
Speaking from ignorance in the topic of Zcash adoption contributes in nothing, really, and it only spreads confusion among the community, facilitating for people to capitalise on this confusion to extract value from Zcash holders by selling us things/grants we don’t need (for example, 1.5 million dollars in zcash media documentaries)
There are copious amounts of academic research, including Nobel prize winning research, on innovation adoption. Sure, we might have to do some a/b testing on the type of message and audience, but gladly, the main pathways that actually drive innovation adoption have already been figured out by extremely bright people. We just decided to spend 1.5 million dollars of community money to go against them.
The push from some powers-that-be in Zcash for the community to fund Zcash Media’s million dollar grant was just ferocious; besides Zooko actually implying it was “one of the most important things for humanity” to his 70k followers, he also slid into my DM’s to try and convince me of the benefits of funding Zcash Media with 2 million dollars (they were asking for 2 million dollars when Zooko contacted me), so I would not voice my dissent.
That made me think really low of him, and about the reality of Zcash governance in general.
We should not facilitate for people to abuse the community, Zcash holders, and the dev fund.
For what it’s worth, I really disagree that that there’s an academic understanding of how to succeed at these kinds of adoption efforts.
If there were, anyone could read some papers and books and learn it, and it would be easy to be an entrepreneur. If such a thing existed, VCs would not need to place such an emphasis as they do on their founders’ past successes; they would only need to invest in whoever they trust to follow what’s been shown to work in academia.
I wish it were true that what you’re claiming were the case, because business would be so much simpler and humanity would be so much better off. We’d see far more successes from projects that improve our lives. Far fewer startups would fail, and the economy would be so much more efficient.
There’s certainly some aspects of the process that have been laid out in case studies and books that we can learn from (IDEO’s process comes to mind), but I’ve never seen any body of research—supported by evidence—that claims to know how that process should work for any given product.
I would really love to have my mind changed on this topic (because IMO it would be a superpower to know how to make product marketing most likely to work), so feel free to link to any of the research you hold in high regard in this area, and I’ll read it and get back to you with my thoughts! In addition, I’d love to hear from you any ideas you have for gaining adoption; perhaps they could be turned into RFPs for ZCG to fund.