ZEC is Stale

General
21

I think you are actually kind of agreeing with me.

I’m referring to individuals. People take for granted what for them is usual and “naturally given”. So it’s natural that people from the US don’t understand USD-pegs. They live inside a cultural system that is self-centered. Why would they need zUSD if they have cash and that’s accepted everywhere?

If you were to conduct a study on stable coins, in such a place it would say something really different than in the populations of the people you’ve hired. That’s what I’m referring to. It’s really hard to understand a bi-monetary dynamic from the standpoint of having a strong currency in your country.

“Breaking Bad” would have made no sense in Canada. Walter White would have just gone to the hospital and taken a license from teaching.

Culture is important to narratives.

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22

you could not be more wrong. People all over the world want the same thing. A strong stable currency.

It’s very simple and my thinking is the same as my vendors. when i work for a day, i want to make sure when i convert my services into money, that the work i performed is worth the same today and tomorrow as the day before. you are caught up in the theory and not enough in the simple reality. people want stability from money. they will accept volitilty from investments

23

so is this a view that privacy is not important for money now?

24

I’m the first to my knowledge, cannabis retailer that is accepting crypto and we accept ZEC, by way of Rocketfuel, who is our 3rd party money transmitter. Awhile ago, I proposed a grant to fund a start-up grand opening but after some thinking I want to work with the community to propose a larger idea to benefit the entire cannabis eco-system.
I’d love to be the “test case” - and solve cash issues for the cannabis supply chain.

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25

Yes. Now this could be an real use case where there is a real problem.

26

It’s an interesting dynamic and I think both of you have valid points. Consider this - if I work for $1 USD today (just roll with the $1, keeping it simple for discussion purposes) and then I hold that dollar, over time, the buying power of that dollar will decrease due to inflation and various other economic forces at work.

Now let’s say I take that same dollar and invest it in a financial product that provides a 5% return in a year. After a year, I now have $1.05. As long as the economic and inflationary forces do not exceed 5%, my buying power increased. If those forces equal 5%, then that same $1 I had a year ago is now worth the same in terms of buying power today as it as then. If those forces are less than 5%, my dollar is worth less.

This is one of my issues with crypto in general… the economic forces are more driven by people pumping money into the coin and maintaining interest in it. ZEC seems to have lost some of that in recent years as other more novel projects took the zk tech and did their own thing. Even the Digitoads coin, which hasn’t launched, pumped up $6mil just in their marketing and promotional efforts.

ZEC is stale and boring. Until we make it interesting for more than just the crypto or privacy community, it won’t pump enough to make using it more valuable than the other options available.

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27

that’s right. 66% of the people in the USA spend their money immediately. so they don’t lose to inflation by holding money. they lose if their skills and services don’t keep up with inflatoon. those same economic forces that decrease the value of the currency increase the price of labor.

i think if you do the math, you will find, at least in the US, people labor has kept up pretty well in terms of purchasing power. it’s only the people who put money under the mattress that lose.

zec is trying to be an investment and money at the same time. I think zec with 21m supply needs to be more of an investment. the vol makes it impossible to be money as most peple think about money in my mind. and then a stablecoin with fixed income as collateral that flows the interest to owners (i think tether keeps the income on the collateral) can be better than fiat money. it’s basically fiat on steroids. low dose steroids because only hold ultra low risk collateral. and then it’s also the engine to power POS rewards because when people use the stable coin it can build in some type of small fee as well. in this scenario you could put money under the mattress and keep up with inflation with a stablecoin. and it would start the “stabecoin wars” if it can be pulled off.

zec has massive upside as POS powering the blockchain if done right (and legally allowed to do which i’m not sure about from legal perspective)

agree - a lot of crypto is vaporware driven by marketing

28

What percentage of your customer base you would estimate uses crypto?

Cannabis was just legalized in my home state and I am reaching out to the trade organizations to try to onboard these new retailers into ZEC.

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29

cash has great privacy guarantees. don’t really get the point you’re trying to make here.

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30

people rarely use physical cash in USA. so i think most people tend to think of cash as synomous with digital money. i didn’t think you meant physical cash. the world is going digital and moving at light speed.

i don’t think digital money is fully private in US. and i don’t think people really like visa, paypal or others selling their data for advertising.

31

We just rolled out it out 2 weeks ago…so about 2% - use crypto. I’ve got so many I ideas to increase adoption from a retail side. Most consumers still think dispensary are cash only . We are 100% cashless and we legally accept debit and credit.

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32

I’m saying just that. But with the difference that people that have strong fiat currencies don’t seem to get what stable coins are for. It’s not something they intrinsically need.

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33

Oh yes we do. We want stable money in the US and we need to always protect it. The fed is raising rates dramatically right now in the US to stabilize the dollar. So they fight to ensure its stable. It is something we all intrinsically need. Now we might have different ideas on what is included with a stablecoin. For example, in the US, we can move money very quickly with VISA. But they charge 2-3%. So we need stablecoins for a different reason than you do. We need it because we need a cheaper option than VISA. We dont want to pay wire fees of $30-$35. We dont want bank fees, etc etc. Stablecoins can make money more efficient and user friendly. And we want our money to have features that are not available with physical cash. People are going to invent features for digital money none of us can even think of now. So an open development platform is needed so people can create the money of the future. Just look at the things Venmo, Paypal, and these companies are doing. They are making payments so easy. I can pay a person in India with 1 click and it goes from my bank to his. And as I said before, they want USD. If I offer to pay in BTC, they dont want it.

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34

I think we are not understanding each other. Anyway, this is kind of off topic

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35

I think, first of all, we need to focus on anything that can reduce the oversupply of coins: ZPF, PoS + halving. All that is undermining us right now is just an oversupply of coins in a bear market. This wouldn’t have happened if bitcoin didn’t exist, but miners are swapping coins for a rarer asset.
Nick is right that talking about privacy is useless while the price is falling. The price should go up and then privacy will matter. Alas, this is how this industry works.

You know what he’s wrong about? Give us that quick sync finally and we’ll see people in the stadium again. At least I won’t be embarrassed to suggest people install the wallet.

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36

We want a shielded stablecoin.

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37

Who is we? And I’m asking that because this is the root of the real problem. Who wants the stablecoin? Why do they want it? How big is that target market for a Zcash stablecoin?

Replace “shielded stablecoin” with any of the other features and functionality and we should be having the same conversation.

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38

As I perceive, the Royal We Wants a privacy based altcoin with reliable increasing in relative fiat purchasing power. Sprinkle on some beta and it is a done deal.

Sadly Zcash cannot deliver that basic request. In a monolith sense, only Monero has done so which makes it today’s runaway horse.

In the future, we Fight to make Zcash command the same kind of integrity that Monero does. Zcash base technology is stronger, but the coin value proposition is the albatross around the neck.

With a new cycle, and new features to pitch, Zcash has more than enough potential to take a shoulder to shoulder position with Monero

How?

  1. Proof of Stake
  2. Shielded Pools Only
  3. Zcash SAFE
  4. Eliminated Trusted, Central Dev Teams (ECC & ZF)
  5. Geographic Decentralization
  6. Dynamic Fee Market
  7. Base layer proof recursion
  8. Hard Capped 21 million ZEC supply
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39

From my perspective, this is completely backwards. Many people have come and they found a product that didn’t work as it should and they left - in several waves over the years.

Just today I spent hours with some senior engineers discussing the mempool problem and the heuristics and probabilities of different tactics to get around it. Funds are getting stuck, cores are getting burned up rescanning. There are discussions today on discord about scans taking 2 days and whether it might be the computer overheating and throttling … or maybe, since gigabytes need to be transferred, is the person’s network good enough. I’ve been on this forum for 7 years and I’m an unusually good engineer and I had to spend hours getting my own funds unstuck this weekend.

There are messages on this very forum today of people trying to recover funds and spin up old wallets and move seed phrases to new software. How do these people feel when, instead of helping them and improving the product, leaders are talking about “we built it but no one came”? What about the people who are trying to recover their stranded funds right now?

Imagine the countless people I turned on to ZWL or Nighthawk who, if they ever go to check their funds, will just find an app that has been bricked ages ago… imagine a normal person trying to figure out how to recover their funds.

This stadium is super dangerous! Did you hear about that section collapsing on a bunch of people? Yikes!

Suggesting to a friend that Zcash is super awesome and telling them to put a bunch of funds into a shielded pool is negligent.

Here’s a different metaphor. A company sets out to make a complicated contraption that outputs juicy steaks. But, the contraption outputs something closer to dogfood. There are rumors that it’s poisonous. Instead of iteratively improving the product and testing it over and over again, the health and engineering teams bounce with a message, “I dont know why people dont love these juicy steaks, i think the marketing team needs to do some soul searching.”

Even now, Zcash has a lot going for it! Exchange support and regulatory footing are still strong for now. The focus must be on the usability of the core product. Dev fund should go to development. Everything should be measured by code contributions and developer ergonomics. Please please don’t spend any money on product-market fit research. People will buy juicy steaks but they won’t buy dogfood marketed as juicy steak.

Build something truly great and they will come.(Liquid) private digital cash (with a great user interface) is still, at this late date, a no-brainer.

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40

:100:

Btw, isn’t it funny how @zooko is mute for all of these “difficult” threads? As is @Dodger. These aren’t leaders. We need new blood in here with a strong track record in delivering world class software.

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