You are reading the fourth article of the Z|ECC series. You can read the Day two part 1 here

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Z|ECC Diaries Day Two - Part Two: Overcoming our Reputation(al damage) Era

After lunch the most voted topics will be debated with a time limit set by an alarm clock, because Zcashers are passionate and could spend a week discussing a single one of them. 



Open debate on Instant payments

Str4d moderated and the conversation started:

“(Zcash) Instant payments need to be fast as cash”

What is a payment? A payment is done in a way that the recepient receives the funds in a quick way, ideally within 10 seconds

What are the options to achieve this?

• Zero confirmation transaction: watch the mempool and assume the sender won’t double spend the notes
• Liberated payments (LINK) as the were designed
• A defined liberated payment where the sender can’t claim the funds until the specific moment or amount of minutes
• Smaller block time and microtransactions (pre pay fees)

What’s the use of payments?

• Is it really fast finality + smaller block time?
• Is the p2p onboarding needing to be fast?
• Is it time-to-onboarding a new zec user?

What is the opportunity cost of implementing instant payments?

Let me tell you that block time inconsistencies can be a problem for users. Currently the average block is 72 seconds but the variance of this average can be sometimes high too. This means that although the average holds, there are times where blocks can be mine very slowly and some others very fast. The latter is not a bad experience on its own, the former is a source of UX friction. It’s not that there’s not possible improvement until we get PoS or fast finality. There are things that can be done today to make payments faster. Using less number of confirmations for certain user cases is one of those things.

An alarm clock indicated it was time to move on to the next topic. Also a new alien message popped up on my phone.


Reaching communities around the globe

The room started to ask who should Zcash teams be targeting to make ZEC’s mission a success. There were some clear and (sort of) obvious groups:

• Privacy and freedom advocates and their communities
• Online sex workers
• Unbanked people
• Oppressed minorities.
• People under oppressive regimes

One of the summit attendees’ company has continued presence in several festivals of individual freedom and privacy communities and gave the rest of the room the hard truth: Zcash was nowhere to be found. No one was representing ZEC. All transactions were made either in cash or XMR. Where were the Zcashers?

For example, one of these summits was very “right to carry” -firearms- kind of summit. I’m not very fond of guns. I don’t think most of the people in the room were either. That doesn’t mean that I -or any other Zcasher that doesn’t like guns- have to be there. Maybe someone else can. That’s what decentralization is about. We don’t have to agree on everything, but have consensus over the basics (the Zcash protocol). By stepping away from the territory we are letting the FUD spreaders to do their thing. We are just letting Zcash detractor win.

The second identified group was the online sex workers. The person advocating for this group painted a very clear picture of what the payment rails for these workers are. Sex workers depend on platforms that chew up their a share of the workers’ profit, they require extensive amounts of personal information and they also act as gate keepers of the workers’ profiles and their contents. Also, those who somehow manage to break free from these platforms face other challenges: they need to take care of the payment rails themselves. These are mostly fiat backed, trad-fi sub products that also can censor the person’s assets once they figure out the source of their income. Also, they expose the real payee information to the workers’ customers, which is often undesirable because they end up being easy preys for people with evil means.

This was directly related to the “oppressed minorities” groups. They face similar challenges because they are targets of the Status Quo System. These minorities are being persecuted openly or covertly depending on the countries’ laws and "traditions". The difference between these two alternatives is that in the first one, these minorities are being persecuted and punished with all the force of the State and its laws, while in the second case, there is a faux sense of “Liberté-Egalité-Fraternité” in the written law that acts as a sugar coating for a rotten system of medieval and oppressive values. These people need an economy that can protect them from harm. They need ways to transact with each other without getting doxxed every single time.

How can Zcash get to all these people?


There was a big elephant in the room. Crypto has a “trust” problem. Many anarchist, left-wing, progressive and even liberals think that “crypto is hyper capitalized”. Meaning that it has been capture by the traditional financial powers and that its narratives are ridiculous. Crypto suffers from a huge reputational damage.


Not only the number-go-up, laser-eyed, young-male-dominated narratives seem to have pushed all the rest of the population who don’t respond to their standards out. Someone also mentioned another ugly truth: crypto has a white knight problem.


**
What are white knights? **

If you don’t catch the pun, I'll explain. The “we are the saviors” narrative has a pushback effect over the targeted audiences. Many times crypto projects have been seen disembarking in “needed populations” to spread the gospel of Satoshi and telling those people what their problems were and how they would solve them with a novel technology brought from eight thousand kilometers away from where they live called blockchain.

The opposite to "white knights" are trusted community members. We know them as “ambassadors”. These are individuals that are part of these communities, that know (and probably suffer) the problems that the community has and think that this tech can help them.

Everything it’s not lost. As someone said, necessity can overcome reputational damage. As long as the Zcash ecosystem has genuine connection with those communities we will be able to know their needs. Do we have such connections?

How can we develop these connections?


Some ideas were thrown to the air.

• “Find a community leader that can collect their needs and that can spread the word and reach out a lot of people”.
• “We are not reaching certain communities because of the (bad) reputation of crypto”.
• We need to be in contact with different community leaders and get behind them so Tha we can help them with their problems.

This brought up two initiatives that the bear market took from us:

• The Ambassadors program
• Crypto-in-context

The Ambassador Program

The Global Ambassador program was launched by ZCG in February 2022. It called out different community members to become Zcash ambassadors in their communities. The program went on for a whole year and according to this restrospective it was quite a success.

Crypto-into-Context

The crypto into context program from ECC was a program launched by ECC and a teacher from The Bronx, named Carlos Acevedo. Carlos was deeply rooted into a community also known as a “bank desert”, featuring the most unbanked population of the NYC area. The CiC program was quite a success and gained a lot of traction to the point that exchanges and other crypto companied partnered with ECC to contribute to the program.

Can we make these programs return? That’s an open question. But the brainstorming and debate did not end there.


Someone reflected on our past and present and remarked that “the path that we are taking might not be the best but it’s our own and maybe in five years people from other privacy coins will say ‘hey, look at what Zcash did’ and replicate it”. 



Getting to people couldn’t dodge the fact of the ability of spend ZEC anywhere. So in synth with what it was discussed the day before, it was remarked that although it is desirable that they have an interest in crypto, in general, merchant don’t need know anything about crypto to accept Zcash as MoE. Also another person encouraged the room to take action within crypto sphere: “When some charity shares or posts their BTC address, let’s approach them and then them about Zcash and (maybe) donate some”. There’s nothing better than leading by example.

The alarm clock sounded again and it was the turn to decide between “Make Zcash Fun Again” and “DEXs”.


Decentralized Exchanges and ZEC

What are the options at hand for exchanging ZEC?

• Maya
• Serai
• ZSA Dex (hopefully one day)
• ZavaX Bridge

What are the use case for DEXs?

• Breaking traceability with ZEC
• Avoiding KYC
• Swap Assets
  • Day trading
  • P2P payments
• Avoiding CEX Delist impact
• Deprecate T-addresses

An uncomfortable question resounded in the room: “Will State attack the Dex or the ZavaX bridge?”. The answer was unknown, but the decentralized nature of DEXs will make them resilient to possible attacks. This brought back some memories with the once promissory Ren Protocol and its ZEC support, now buried with all of other projects acquired by FTX and its foes. Ren Protocol was nowhere near to decentralization. “Five dudes held the keys to a gazillion of crypto presumably in their houses” ironized someone. A very sharp tongue, but nonetheless very close to reality.

“Wallets must support more than one currency. Many wallets make a lot of money with thorchain”.

The original idea was to create a Swap Kit that included Thorchain and Maya. But “some DEXs spooked out”. Are ECC or ZF thinking about creating “our own” DEX? Asked a non-ecc Z|ECC’er. It was remarked that it happens that Penumbra is just that. Shall we just use penumbra ond namada? Or should Zcash have its own take?

“Maya is our closest and quickest way”. Cried a DEXsperate soul. And what about ZSA Stablecoins? - replied another. Then discussions heated up.

> “Stable ZSA proposal from QEDIT -According to ZK Proof 6 presentation- would require a series of compromises that are against privacy principles”.

Very few of the people in the summit had complete notion of what ZSA Stablecoin Grant proposal from QEDIT that was recently granted entailed. The sentence “I’m not afraid to call it a surveillance protocol” sounded like a thunder.

Conversations would go on as some of the attendees became “aliens” and responded to the call of the mothership.

Note: the ZSA Stablecoin grant was eventually cancelled by ZCG after the community took notice of what some of the protocol developers had to say about the proposal.

Into the Mothership


In some way we were aliens within the aliens.
Not everyday a bunch of privacy nerds come by to your favorite restaurant.

There were some interesting conversations with some weird cocktails like these.

Food was also strange and alien-like. The mothership didn’t disappoint, it was a real space ship. But honestly, I prefer earthly food. The Z|ECC bunch moved on to a burger joint 🤣.

So much for Day 2! Day Three was ECC only. So my plan was to get to know San Diego a bit and Visit EDGE offices in the evening. They were going to throw an awesome meetup!