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Z|ECC Diaries Day two - Part One: "Who likes Zcashd?"

I overslept!!! No. I didn’t. In fact, I woke up before the alarm clock. My mind is still four hours ahead of where my body is.



I walk down to where the breakfast is Served. I hear the word “FFI” in a flawless English British Broadcasting accent.



“It should be forbidden to talk about Foreign Function Interfaces before 9 AM”

-Laughs-



Zcashers don’t have a second to waste. Discussions, debates and innovations don’t take a break. Day two would be packed with deep discussions about the protocol and the mission of Zcash. Developers are abstracted from the world around them. But I see the staff faces. You can tell when someone tries to overhear a conversation that its unintelligible to them. It’s not hard to nerd-snipe a Zcasher. And that seems to already have happened minutes before I got there. 🤓


When I was embracing the night owl in me, I didn’t use to have breakfast. With the years I accommodated to society and well the years don’t come by alone 👴🏻.

Now it was too early to be nerd-sniped. I needed food -for thought-. 

 Also, two new polls appeared! ZAC and ZCAP polls shipped overnight to know more about the Dev Fund and the ecosystem.




## What is the crypto use case? (Cont’d)



The constant bashing among Zodlers is the fact that ZEC is not chosen by the market albeit being objectively a better L1 protocol than all other PoW UTXO based protocols including Satoshi’s.



> “Bitcoin has been captured by financial institutions”

Anyone who thought there was going to be a slow start in the morning was proven wrong.

Zcash was born as a fork of Bitcoin that added privacy to it.

Were Bitcoin core developers too conservative when they were reluctant to merge the Zk-Proof system created by The Zerocoin company devs back in 2015?

If you recall in the [Day Zero chronicles)(https://free2z.cash/pacu/zpage/z-ecc-diaries-day-zero) I described the nature of a Core Developer work.

“A protocol or core developer has to be able balance the urge with the safety, understand the underlying requirement, evaluate its feasibility and tell the person making the request why it common be done as stated and hopefully how it could be done instead.“

And that’s exactly what Bitcoin developers did back then and this was recognized by one of Zcash main engineers at the time. “If Zcash would have been added to Bitcoin, it would have been a disaster because of the Zerocash inflation bug”. We know that the (in)famous bug was not exploited. And that was thanks to some of the core developers taking the toll of living a “double-life” by “working by day, fixing by night”. Zcash had a remarkable advantage at the time, which was that it was not as adopted as Bitcoin. It was not an obvious Prey. Also, the bug was pretty sophisticated and there were probably not many people in the world that could have actually pull an exploit off. 



It was not that Bitcoin core developers renounced to Satoshi’s dream of having ZK-proofs in Bitcoin. They did what it was safe and gave the ZK-Proofs space a chance to mature and grow in a less risky and hostile environment.

Zcash is a better electronic cash than Bitcoin. But… The Z|ECC Zeal had to go back to roots and ask themselves the basic questions.

What is cash?

Cash is a peer-to-peer limitless money without intermediaries. When you relinquish cash, you get into an ecosystem of financial institutions and gatekeepers.


If you recall from Z|ECC Day 1 it was said that 

> “credit cards and credit score systems are a system of oppression”

And this is not an overstatement. As Josh Swihart had mentioned in on his Zcash community forums post “Cash is dead. Long live digital cash! ECC weekly update ”, electronic money is being gently and freely offered to people by Governments with the help of many financial institutions that also get a fair deal of the Lion’s share.


A few years ago the crypto use case was “getting to the Unbanked”. Here at Zcash we talked about “bank deserts”, highly populated areas that had no banks because they were populated with “undesirable customers” from the point of view of Banks’ Risk Analysis systems. Nowadays, only three or four years later, anyone can open virtual bank account only by KYC’ing. Also, Fiat-backed Digital wallets offer significant discounts on daily products and basic needs groceries to attract the customers they once repelled.



In his post, Josh portrayed this QR system. He was astonished by it because they are not much of a thing in the U.S. I was not. I’m really familiar with it. I’ve seen them grow and flourish. Imagine that you are an unbanked worker living on a pay-day basis and there’s a virtual wallet that let’s you receive payments and have an daily APY % on your balance only by taking a picture of your ID and yourself? It doesn’t sound like much, but let me add 100% inflation rate to the mix. Interesting isn’t it?

This wallet now owns all your information, your contacts, your consumer habits and it costs them nothing, because they’ll hedge on your money like a shark-loaner. In reality these wallets are popular not because “normies are dumb” as some crypto maxis may say in Xitter. They are really convenient. They provide access. And not to privileged individuals, but to the folk.

These systems are not evidently harmful. For example the “Cuenta DNI” wallet offers substantial discount in meat in a country where prices skyrocketed (so did poverty) and salaries plummeted to their "All Time Lows" of 234 official USD or 174 “blue” (informal) USD this July 2024. Would you say “I’ll pass” to a deal to have a 35% off when you buy proteins to feed your kids? 


There’s nothing wrong with these apps that enforce state policies that help people until… bad people are in power.

As Josh recollected in his post, India started to pull back high denomination bank notes from the market and reduced cash usage by onboarding the masses to these digital wallets. Yes, although it may sound inclusive, it’s a dangerous concentration of power. Cults and dissident political movements started to be censored by closing their accounts.

So, what are the challenges for us, Zcashers?

• Regulated stablecoins
• Centralized payment systems
• CBDCs
• Intermediated systems such as credit cards, etc.
• Other cryptos.

What is the Zcash use case?

The group started asking themselves the following question:

what are the relative strengths and weaknesses of Zcash as Digital Cash?

This is the list of strengths:

- Fungible

• Faster than other privacy coins
• Use cases
• It can be scaled (HALO2 recursion)
• Real Electronic cash

In between: Privacy By default. Convenient for some and a deal breaker for others.

List of Weaknesses:

• (Low) Adoption
• Narrow demand
• Not currently scalable
• Can’t be used offline
• Performance on old phones
• Interoperability
• Not really known by the people who need it.

Then these questions popped up again:

• What are we passionate about?
• What are we best in the world at?
• What will be our legacy?

I think that Zcashers are passionate about ZEC, privacy and financial freedom. They are freedom maxis. They can recognize the good and the bad in ZEC and will look forward to improve it. Zcashers suffer bit of “Survivorship Bias”. When I look around, I see experts. I like what I see, I feel good. It’s comforting. But it is a problem. Zcashers are good at solving hard problems. But we also tend to over-complicate stuff. Our friction tolerance standards are high and we look at our world through those lenses.

Survivor Bias linked back to what ZURE surveys were remarking on Day 1:



> “On curious piece of data that was shared from the user surveys is that Zcash power users don’t care much about UX friction, they want more features instead“



Are we the planes with the red dots?

I think that we probably are. And that we need to look back and see where are the rest of the planes. How each one of those “Power users” that carry UX friction as a “Medal of Honor”, how many have been left behind?

The other thing I questioned is Legacy. What will our legacy be? I don’t know yet. But I couldn’t help to tell the group this story. Back in 2020, my manager asked the team the typical manager’s book question: Where do you see yourself in 5 or 10 years?” and someone replied: Hopefully? Retired!.

We laughed but it was true. People have the right to move on.

Once I read a tweet (it was called twitter at the time) that said: “Zcash has three Pillars: Daira, Sean and Str4d”.

We have to be grateful that we have them. I looked around the room, and I saw very similar age ranges. I don’t like ageism, but Nature is what Nature wants: we were given a free will, to be ourselves, to look for our true meaning, but within a finite period of time. As I watch the Olympic flame being carried over the city of Paris on TV back at home, I can’t avoid thinking about the question that I asked the room that day: Who will be carrying on with our legacy?

Back to the “In Between” section of the list, there was quite an even-split of the room in terms of transparent addresses. I don’t have strong opinion. Somedays I wake up and think, this is awful we should get rid of it for once and for all at all costs. And others I see the value of having an easy Bitcoin-like way of supporting Zcash. But someone said something really interesting in terms of how T affects Zcash capabilities of being Internet Cash:


“Transparent hasn’t achieved adoption because the presence on CEXs has only provided access to to speculators but has achieved no digital cash properties”

That’s an honest point of view and definitely something to think about when we finally decide as a community to take action on this matter.

And what about user segments?

ZURE is mostly about Power users, but going back to the “survivorship bias”, is is better if we split wallet features to target different users? 


The ECC Wallet team is roaming around this idea: PRO or not to PRO?

This would meant that there’s a Zashi Basic, very simple, for everyday use. Ano a Zashi PRO which is less like a wallet and more like a “vault” that has multi-sig, HW wallet support among other advanced features. 


What do you think about it?

Is there a need for two versions? What are the advantages and disadvantages of having two versions?

Leave some comments below and let me know what you think!

All we know is that ZEC Rocks

“Who likes Zcashd?” - Thumbs down across the room.

Rhetorical questions were put aside for a moment when Emersonian got to present his view for Zcash public infrastructure. Having public servers that shielded wallets can use is super important. The cost of running infra for Zcashers is not “huge” (yet) but neither negligible. “Zec.rocks” has contributed significantly to improve the ease of deployment of Zcash nodes and their respective light wallet servers by using two tools: Fly and Kubernetes (k8s). These are Industry standards for managing “cloud” computers.

Most importantly is that the Zec Rocks project is bringing the idea of a circular (z)economy to the table. All of its providers are paid with ZEC. This is something that Zingoistas do a lot too. Zcash grantees are paid in ZEC and for that is for their best interest to foster payments in ZEC to avoid conversions and fees from exchanges. Sometimes KYC-less CEXs offer awful price quotes for ZEC unless you exchange more than 100 USD worth of ZEC. Working around those foes is something that is much necessary but easier to say than to actually possible to do.


In this “zircular zeconomy” ZEC Rocks described, it would be possible to run a program to retroactively fund people that runs Zcash infrastructure with a high degree uptime. The more uptime the MOAR REWARDS

What if we could have 200 or more instances of lightwalletd’s? That’s the ambitious project of Zec.Rocks. This would totally help network availability and reliability.

There are some outstanding questions:

• How to get metrics privately?
• Which regions are more important to tackle first?
• How to make sure no-one is logging anything?


This presentation was ending and I got distracted by some notification


There was something more. We all were given some post-it notes to put which things we wanted to discuss, these were sticked in a whiteboard and grouped in clusters. Many notes resembled. We are not THAT original after all.


I thought the poling was over for a bit, but I was wrong! A Zcasher grabbed his laptop, put up a server with a private poll for Z|ECC attendant to vote on which would be the main topics to discuss in the afternoon. The Z|ECC bunch would have to assign a set of points to a set of different curated topics that from what’s being discussed by the community within the Zcash ecosystem. 

After some minutes and technical hiccups -yes, we all were using some VPN that got in the way because, privacy first- these were the results.



“Make Zcash Fun Again” was a pun intended that struck hard and made it to the top five in a tie with DEXs! Apparently having fun is as important as being able to transact free from centralized evils. Fair enough. Instant payments got the pole position. But the more astonishing fact was that ZSAs was not even on the list.

That was a productive morning! After lunch the group would reunite again in the meeting room.

This story will continue in Part two!