I'm a dev. What's still missing in the Zcash ecosystem?

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Hi all,

I’m a mobile/blockchain engineer with many successful apps and some blockchain projects (did a GPU miner for zcash too).

I am wondering what else the zcash community would need to be built. Any ideas?
Any interesting business models built on top of zcash?

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I think most people don’t know what kind of possibilities lay ahead with blockchain tech.

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There isn’t a lot yet for merchants to take Zcash directly, especially with shielded payments (from/to a zaddr). Non-private transactions with taddr->taddr are pretty easy to hack up, as zcash taddrs are BIP32 compatible (with a different prefix), but even payment gateways and such with those are still thin on the ground.

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As I see Zcash as a good long term candidate for investment assets, an hardware wallet will help expand the usage.

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Several of the major bitcoin/altcoin hardware wallets just added zcash support, or have it in the works (I’m getting samples of some from China later today to add support for zcash another one of them myself).

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+1 for merchant payment software for shielded addresses. The memo field option for sending private ZEC is currently an underutilized tool which could provide a huge benefit for sending a refund address or other potentially useful notes in a private way.

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A fast & stable linux miner.
A client-side wallet like Ethereum’s MEW.
A GUI wallet which has an address book. (should be simple right?)
A mobile (iOS/Android) mining monitor app similar to the many which exist for Ethereum.

That’s just off the top of my head cause I’m a miner.

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For a client-side wallet we would need to port zkSNARKs to JavaScript, which seems a bit of a pain given that they require fast execution and 3GB of memory, I heard. Maybe something like Chrome’s Native Client technology would help.

Also, how would you connect to the network? Through a block explorer? Cause otherwise you’d need to implement a sort of SPV Zcash client.

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Yep, that’s exactly what I was thinking.

Examine the MEW source code and talk to them. (They’re friendly people).

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The Ledger Nano S already supports Zcash. I use it now.

Others such as the Keepkey and Trezor have plans to support it.

Of course these are all for transparent transactions since private ones consume too much processing power for such small devices.

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How about a GUI for encrypted memos? :relaxed:

Specification: [ZIP 302] Memo field format specification · Issue #366 · zcash/zips · GitHub

Code that implements it: GitHub - whyrusleeping/zmsg: A small program for sending messages via zcash encrypted memo fields

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I second this idea! Should be simple enough to do and would provide a new channel for easy to do private communications.

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For sure this is nice to show off the power of the memo field in Zcash. But I’m not sure we want to bloat the blockchain with private messages…

I would see this field shine the most when implementing some sort of coloured coins on top of Zcash. With coloured coins you could have private shares of a company on the blockchain. Something you would hesitate to do with other non-privacy-preserving blockchains.

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14

Hello,

I’ve been thinking of this but for a coin to work not saying Zcash won’t but assuming it’s the same as the rest they all go the same ongoing issue of not connecting with the world correctly. I’m considering creating one which has true benefits rather then a get petty cash scheme. I’ve been looking for people who would like to create one with benefits for everyone and get crypo-currency into the real world.

If anyone would like to share some ideas and possible/hopefully create a coin that works please PM me.

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I spoke to whyrus about this last week. Think I’ll try to hack that together in the next couple of days.

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I miss more than anything a braindead-simple GUI of a wallet that doesn’t require running a separate daemon (or if it does, it takes care of everything for me). Something like bitcoin-qt that runs on windows and mac without having to edit any config files.

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I think this is what you’re looking for:

It runs as a Google Chrome extension on Windows, Mac or Linux.

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Yeah, the only thing I’ve seen done with the memo field so far is sending private messages with zmsg (GitHub - whyrusleeping/zmsg: A small program for sending messages via zcash encrypted memo fields ) which is pretty cool, and still needs a GUI (in my copious free time I’m going to take a stab at it for Mac). Yet another thing that needs a native Windows zcashd to work!

Oh yeah, if you have C++ experience, my stalled native Windows port needs C++ help, @matteo that would be REALLY awesome if you did and could lend a hand! Lemme pull up the post with setting up the dev env for it

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Jaxx is great, but you don’t have the blockchain on your own machine, and depend on their servers (even though your private key doesn’t leave your machine). It would be great if someone could hack up the GUI code from Bitcoin Core that is still latent in the Zcash source tree to get it to work with Zcash (I imaging private transactions/zaddrs are most of what needs to be supported).

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Ok… since no one has said it yet…

ZookoDice

Like SatoshiDice back in the day :smiley:

"Paging Eric Voorhees, please pick up the white courtesy phone and press “Z”…

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