Zerocash, & a new friendly fork every 4 years

Community Collaborations
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brain storming a bit …if there was a new friendly zcash fork - what would your perfect new coin look like?

zerocash:

  1. no transparent addresses
  2. zcash/zerocash XCAT
  3. stable?
  4. ASIC hostile
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  1. Forks will not survive, there is not a single example of a fork developing in parallel.
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yec’s alive, and been around for a minute.

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I don’t think it can be called life and development. He exists.

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YEC is ticking along & they’re determined, constrained by ‘number stay down’ but that could change.

Doubt there’s room for many friendly forks. Its too easy for rhetoric to turn nasty & depends entirely on the people involved.

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Could Ycash change into what you want here through a Network Upgrade, if the Ycash community so chose?

What do you mean by “stable”?

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The Ycash Foundation has already taken the position, pre-fork, that transparent Ycash addresses will not be deprecated:

I love being able to choose between transparent addresses and shielded addresses.

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i’d like to see “zerocash” remain pegged as close to $1 as possible. maybe allow for some tolerance to move in either direction. think it would be interesting to see “zerocash” operate as closely to actual cash as possible. a stable highly fungible cash-like currency with XCAT would be really cool, imo.

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zec/yec xcat would be interesting to play with - memo fields, viewkeys, hmm…

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What do you think about only forking the z address coins? Could incentivize more people to move to z addresses.

Edit: this would probably also mean that a larger percentage of people claim the fork since z address users are actually storing their own zec and not keeping on exchanges.

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Another idea for a good friendly fork, only users who move their new coins through a turnstyle after the fork get to keep their coins. The rest are burned. This way you can actually calculate how many ‘active’ coins are on the new forked chain.

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Vulnerable to exchanges not coughing up forked coins & plenty of that happened with ycash, although anyone who hasn’t heard ‘not your keys not your coins’ is clearly only visiting this planet & gets limited sympathy.

Its also a relevant thought if value has to be ‘turnstiled’ into a halo based infrastructure, but that’s a different story.

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I think the problem of exchanges keeping the forked coins would pretty much be solved if you only fork the shielded pools, since there are almost no exchanges holding z address zec right now.

Then you have to decide about the supply schedule since there are only ~600k zec in the shielded pools…

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That gets interesting… 10.5m ZEC issued turns into 600k notZEC, assuming there isn’t a sudden rush to shield everything!

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Summary of good ideas above:

  1. New friendly fork for z-address ZEC.
  2. [optional] available for turnstiled coins.
  3. GPU friendly algorithm/ASIC-resistant.

What could happen – if this gets any momentum, exchanges can adopt z-address.

Not sure if there is PoW cryptocurrency that sends part of block reward to their users (not just miners, developers). This can bring more active users to ecosystem because users are being rewarded for their trust in ZEC.

If there is leader who can start a movement around new friendly fork, I’d recommend them to consider my idea as well.

Zcash has always focused on technological innovation (zksnarks, Sapling, Halo). In addition to that, we need to work on product & market innovation to succeed & reach new users.

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Don’t underestimate the time, effort, money & expertise - its insanely complicated & devs with the right skills are rare.

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Avalanche AVAX launches on main-net tomorrow, wonder if anyone wants to look in to migrating the shielded Zcash fork on to a PoS sub-chain.

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I totally agree. I am not a fan of chain forks, at all. They just split the attention of the community and the anonymity set. There are only a couple of good Zcash forks IMHO: KMD/Komodo and ARRR/PirateCoin, and those are code forks started from genesis (with ARRR being an asset chain of Komodo).

Note that any chain forks of a Zcash coin that preserves shielded notes across the fork, has the problem that spends of the same note on each fork will be linkable, because they have the same nullifier. Also, it’s exceptionally difficult for a fork to achieve adequate hash rate and anonymity set for real security.

@kek For your original set of goals for a potential fork, I would say just use ARRR.

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For Ycash, we tried to address this concern by providing a tool for users to send all their Sapling funds to a fresh (generated post-fork) Sapling address:

https://www.ycash.xyz/docs/nullifier_migration/

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