Zcash is a privacy coin with the purpose of transacting anonymously. In order for Zcash to succeed, real world usage would be crucial. For now, most transactions on Zcash are transparent and outside of speculation, Zcash is pretty much looking for a use case. A big hindrance seems to be the lack of going fully z-address.
I feel that a big step towards usage would be to integrate itself into another blockchain such as Ethereum. Ethereum currently is the most resilient and secure blockchain with smart contract capabilities at the moment with large real world usage.
As with all things, you have to start small and if it would be easier to work towards using t-addresses on Ethereum with the expectation of the ability to use z-addresses in the future, it would be a huge benefit to both chains. If using z-addresses or having the option between the two wouldn’t be much harder, it would be even better. For one, it would lessen some of the scalability issue by reducing some of the load on Ethereum by having the option for Zcash as payment through smart contracts. It would help Zcash by giving it a huge real world use case.
In a sense, Ethereum could focus on developing it’s smart contract platform while Zcash can focus on becoming becoming an anonymous payment currency. With the boost in interest and usage of Zcash, ASICs would be lesser of a problem in the short term as a flood of crypto miners would flock to mine Zcash as the price would rise compared to the ability for ASIC companies to produce ASICS.
Disclaimer: This next part is a completely arbitrary idea without any thought. A suggestion without fully thinking about the consequences and any other suggestions would be welcomed.
I am unaware of the funding issue with this but I would imagine if some method or idea of being able to make this happen could be created, there would be ways to fund this. Here are some ideas I have thought of that could be used, contingent upon if it could be possible:
- ASIC producers would benefit in terms of sales so some funding could be from them. Possibly work a contract of sorts beforehand with an agreement to a certain amount of sales, donation, or …
- Increasing the Founder’s Reward moving forward by X.XX% for funding of this and using the funds to sell to other investors. (Note: The increased amount could also be permanent and used to fund future community voted experimental features or marketing to help adoption. Basically an adoption tax).
- Community donations
- Existing portion of current Founder’s Reward
what are you talking about? Zcash is an “anonymous payment currency” currently, the focus being improving Zcash with the intention of becoming the de facto internet money