Zcash Thorchain Integration Grant

CC @decentralistdan perhaps a DM from the ZcashOMG Twitter handle could reach out?

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Erik doesnā€™t have it set that we can message him from the ZOMG Twitter account. Does anyone in here have more direct access to him? Alternatively the conversation can be public on the post he commented on:

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My objection is that youā€™ve never actually stated why the existing UTXO code canā€™t be reused and always speak of it as a hard constant rather than a discussion to have. It, to me, screams there isnā€™t one, especially when TC devs have confirmed that property, and solely want to keep the grant request value high. Iā€™ve explicitly asked you about this to an incomplete or no response. I even asked if youā€™d be willing to accept my work on this grant for the benefit of ZOMG and to help get this grant passed to nothing.

If Vorhees chips in half, that would bring it down to within range of my personal numbers, even if Iā€™d still like it to be a further 40k lower. Good news though! Iā€™m not a member of ZOMG and canā€™t vote on this. That said, as a moral commentary, I think itā€™s ridiculous this grant would still be paid roughly a quarter million USD despite its false pretenses. At this point, I think my dream scenario would be the grant is lowered to 60k, and Voorheesā€™s share counts as the other half for 120 total which is a number I believe Iā€™ve sufficiently explained, or at least the grant is lowered to 120k to acknowledge the scope of work and Voorheesā€™s share counts as a donation, instead of ZOMG saying itā€™s okay to overpay on proposals as long as theyā€™re not footing the entire bill. If they didnā€™t previously pass it do to the funding requirement, and they do now, considering their current balance and limited outflow, itā€™s hard to draw any other conclusion. Iā€™m just splitting hairs with an irrelevant opinion at this point though, and Iā€™d like to say I do appreciate the generosity in question.

As one other note, this is NOT the first cross chain project using ZEC. AtomicDEX or renVM at least is. I truly despise all the false claims made in this thread and this is just another (though one not said definitively? But he does know of renVM so itā€™s at least thoughtlessā€¦)

No matter what happens, it sounds like this is being funded in some form. While I definitively want a RCP, believing the official reason for why not (this proposal existing) is meaningless when it says only one proposal on a topic can exist and it only has to be first, regardless of quality, Voorhees chipping in may be sufficient to end the problems in front of us. If anyone directly reaches out to me, say, explaining why they said none of the standing code was usable, Iā€™d be happy to respond and contribute. At this point though, I think Iā€™m just being more mean than helpful, so I will recuse myself from the thread otherwise. I did come back quite shortly though I believe I was very helpful.

Best of luck to everyone. Long live decentralized, cross chain applications, and long live ZCash.

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I assume this part was directed at @aiyadt

Out of curiosity, how much do people in the community think the integration should be funded? (regardless of the source)

  • As it is! 200k
  • 150k
  • 100k
  • 50k
  • Free

0 voters

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Is there an option for ā€œpay twice what theyā€™re asking because it is time-sensitive and is potentially worth 100X what they are asking, to me as a ZEC holder, even if it is costing them much less than what they are asking?ā€. :wink:

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P.S. This isnā€™t advice to anyone. Iā€™m not on ZOMG ā€” thank goodness ā€” so I donā€™t have to do the hard work of forming careful opinions on such things. This is just a comment on the structure of your pollā€”seems kind of a narrow Overton Window.

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Thatā€™s a hard one for non coders. 2 ways to see it: either gauge the value of the work done or make a cost calculation of the work to be supplied. (Iā€™m for the latter one)

A comment comes out of this:

In the industry I work in, when there is an RFQ out, the buyer usually knows what to expect in terms of services hours related to the hardware heā€™s asking for.

In this case it seems it is not the case, or I miss something

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@Shawn The reusability of existing Bitcoin fork code has been brought up earlier in the thread. While the bitfrost code is reusable at the structural and architectural level, the Zcash modules need to be developed along with custom tests.

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Just to push the Overton window on this a little more: how about funding more than one team to work on it ASAP, and give a $50K reward to who ever gets it up and running first? Bonus $100K reward if it runs smoothly for one year with no hacks/bugs? Directly incentivize speed and quality and donā€™t worry so much about cost for this super important and time sensitive grant?

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The Zcash <> Thorchain integration needs collaboration, not competition. We should not incentivize developers to hurry up the integration as it might cause blunders.

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Thorchain = brand equity. All I would say is that whatever happens, hopefully a decision is made soon. Timing is essential here. Not every side is going to be happy in a business decision. Sure, the risk and concern is that there is a potential security problem, but that could (and will) potentially happen in any chain. Itā€™s just unfortunate it happened so recently in Thorchainā€™s history. Kevin Rose is a big Thorchain fan, and heā€™s actually a pretty decent futurist (in terms of predictions). https://lnns.co/0AB4wPjx_o9 they talk about Thorchain actually and heā€™s spoken about them before.

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Why canā€™t we be more progressive with spending these funds? In theory these funds are going to life long ZODLrs if they really believe in building multiple projects for Zcash. @aiyadt seems like he loves the protocol behind Zcash! We need more builders like this! I believe we are at a point in time where we need to START ALLOCATING OUR FUNDS because the community is so small around Zcash. I love the tech behind our mission but to truly be adopted we need to be like other communities (with such inferior tech) who BUIDL EVERYWHERE. How is XMR, building this integration off donations? Now we have a very well known influencer, investor, innovator (& billionaire) ready to literally donate to make this happen yet there is still a hold up? A Thorchain integration would bring MASSIVE value to Zcash just from the new user base and access to interest bearing products! I love Zcash and have an irresponsibly long position because I believe in the mission.

ITā€™S TIME TO START POURING INTO THE COMMUNITY

We should be working overtime, overpaying, and over broadcasting the utility Zcash and layer 1 privacy can bring to the crypto Ecosystem. This forumn is so long and I feel the same questions are asked over and over again. I donā€™t see a single person who says the cost should be so low volunteering to build this integration with the love and care @aiyadt is proposing and the Zcash community is deserving of.

All in all, I guess I just have a ton of coins and a zcap vote but my opinion is that this should not only be funded but FAST TRACKED.

The intent of donation by Erik shows how much the crypto ecosystem wants us to participate. Letā€™s stand by our mission and bring financial privacy to THOR CHAIN.

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GitHub - kayabaNerve/zecd: An alternative full node bitcoin implementation written in Go (golang) is a fork of all the relevant Go libraries with SegWit and co purged, implementing ZCash serialization for transactions. Block serialization isnā€™t touched yet shouldnā€™t be required. The tests were not updated accordingly and these libs still call out to BTC libs such as btcec (both use secp256k1) and btcjson (itā€™s json. Just json). The rpcclient had methods present in BTC yet not in ZEC purged as well, and my colleague ensured all required ZEC methods were included.

https://github.com/kayabaNerve/thorchain/commit/936ca9f2bc3a74dcc5aa705687e1825d792b1254 is my initial stab at a Bifrost implementation. Itā€™s a basic rename combined with tuning for ZCash (uses actually available RPC calls) and using the new libraries. While I confirmed the new libraries compiled, I have yet to try compiling this. Pardon uploading all of Thornode in a commit with my work, yet the description explains why.

It took ~2 hours to write the Bifrost, 3 hours for my sleep deprived friend to purge RPC methods that ZCash doesnā€™t have yet the lib does, and then an additional hour or so to segregate and update the libraries (including serialization support, where deserialization worked off the bat). chaincfg is not currently updated with new params as I shimmed those into the bifrost (again, untested, libs compile, didnā€™t try thornode yet). It may be feasible to use btcd chaincfg yet it relies on wire, which required mods, and I didnā€™t map out how they interacted.

However this grant ends up, this should be a large portion of the initial development. The libraries have been reduced to supplying chain cfg + tests. Then the Bifrost has a single panic (TX size estimation function I didnā€™t bother writing) and a few notes now generally solved via the libraries I didnā€™t remove.

I know I said Iā€™d recuse myself, yet I wanted to put forth this work in an attempt to make one final point and drastically help accelerate any Thorchain integration.

Also, @rekodi, I did offer to help with this. I didnā€™t get a response back. Iā€™d read up on the thread for context.

As one other note, I truly hope this gets moved to a RFP.

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Thorchain is presented as being a native decentralized exchange. That is simply not the case. They control keys and can lock the liquidity pools whenever they want. We know because they did it on numerous occasions.

Going by the existing code developed for the other UTXO coins supported by Thorchain, the work they did to do the ā€œmodulesā€ and ā€œcustom testsā€ is >90 % copy paste.

I think all major grants should split the business research from the implementation and have the later go through a RFP.

@aiyadt and people at ECC (sorry forgot who) have worked with the Thorchain team for a while now. Bringing this business opportunity is valuable to the ecosystem.

But it seems that we are in disagreement when it comes to the implementation cost.

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@ZcashGrants Are we going to pit everyone against each other for every grant going forward? I feel like an approval or denial (supplemented with a path to alternative on major projects) is taking way too long.

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My Bifrost proposal, granted itā€™s sitting there as untested code, probably had ~20 lines edited. The Go libs were the much harder part but Iā€™ve also proven that can be done rather efficiently, leaving testing, deployment scripts, and xchainjs. Even if those were extensive projects, I donā€™t see them costing a quarter million.

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For large grants with a dispute about who should do it due to issues with the proposal and no clear choice on people, I donā€™t see this as an issue. There are multiple groups eligible and interested, with large debates about cost (do you want to throw away 150k for no reason from a limited budget?), along with unknown levels of skill best left to fully detailed proposals formally submitted. How would it not be optimal to extend this by 3-5 days, when Thorchain is still sorting itself out, to ensure the best option is taken?

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I just think if Zcash is ever successful in itā€™s adoption part of itā€™s mission ~ it does not matter whether we paid $50k, $250k or even $500k. ZOMG was designed such that income will always be coming to keep funding community expansion technically and in adoption. I believe this is how other very successful chains managed their dev funds early and currently. Some chains even have a mandatory spend per week, month and quarter. Letā€™s Build.

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Yes, the budget has been scrutinized a lot for this proposal. My developers are sticking with their estimates to deliver the integration holistically. And now that it is official that they will be providing 1 year of active support(see updated grant text), I strongly believe Zcash community gets more bang for the buck by funding this grant with the new dev additions and subsequently opening up the possibility of mobile wallet integrations that can make swaps available from within wallets in the Zcash eco-system.

Sounds like a great idea on paper, weā€™d need to chart out how this will work in the reality and what can be expected in terms of contributions from each spectrum. Algorand Foundation has been working along these lines for large projects(based on my limited interaction with the team in 2019, see Grants). I also like how Cardano manages their Catalyst Funding, they have appointed Community Advisors who give a brief review and 5 star rating scale and the end user votes on each grant. https://cardanocataly.st

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