June 16, 2017 - Dev update

fyi we found out the other day that the zcash proving keys official download URL is blocked in mainland china, but that my mirror of them on AWS CloudFront wasn’t…and the user that found the issue downloaded from my mirror (while they could, its always touch and go!) and uploaded them to a local chinese mirror.

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Thanks for the follow up! I’m glad you’re still engaged with us, even if we disagree on some things. It sounds like the main points of strategy disagreement are FR structure and official wallet.

I agree with you FR structure ship has sailed, but I think it’s still important to discuss so that other future projects might benefit from any understandings we come across. I’m curious to know what other funding / incentives designs you consider better. (Even “plain ol’ FLOSS volunteer dev” is an option.)

As for an official wallet, I do find it persuasive that some users request this.

Let’s recap. @zooko said:

There are no “official” user-friendly apps for mainstream platforms like iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac. This thing about the app being “official” is really important to certain people. Multiple people from mainland China, for example, that I’ve talked to, have said something to the effect of “Well obviously I would never run a non-official Zcash app.”. I’m not sure how to respond to that.

To which my response is: “You respond to that by giving them an official Zcash app.”

We’re talking about people from mainland China.

An enormous potential user base who report that they would “obviously never run a non-official Zcash app”.

My current thinking here is that if we hired some Silicon Valley GUI engineers and ramped up an official Zcash GUI project, we’d have some amount of success in Chinese adoption. (This presumes that the one Chinese source Zooko heard from was correct about the Chinese market, btw.)

OTOH, if we want to target the Chinese market effectively, we should ramp up a Chinese-expert team.

I hear that Chinese “super apps” like Wechat are pervasive and broadly encompassing and that the built-in payment systems there which are easy to integrate with banking accounts are widely used. A Chinese person told me a few days ago that street vendors selling food from carts on the street routinely accept payments with these apps.

I’m inspired by Signal, which convinced Whatsapp to integrate their encryption directly. Whatsapp isn’t “an official Signal app”, but that one move brought strong privacy tech to a vast swath of users. In my opinion, that kind of strategy is the bigger, longer term success. For example, if we could get a Wechat plugin that has the same UX as existing payment plugins and is culturally tailored for Chinese street vendors, that would be lightyears ahead of the typical “mobile cryptocurrency wallet”.

Now it may be that this big picture / long term strategy is too far out for ZcashCo to nail, and an official wallet app would be a much better lower hanging fruit for the next couple of years time frame. Definitely something we need to consider.

I still feel like we’re not wallet specialists, and we’d be competing with many existing good wallets. I almost believe the best way to have an “official” Zcash wallet is to convince one of the existing wallets to add Zcash support and ZcashCo officially blesses it. Doing that, though, would require a high degree of trust. We’d want to have really thorough security auditing, for example.

So, for the time being, our strategy is to put a lot of our effort supporting existing wallets, mobile and hardware, and most importantly work on getting the zkSNARK tech ported into them.

Edit: PS: Having good high quality criticism above the standard trolly noise floor of eg twitter & reddit is so valuable! Keep it up. We need more high quality criticism.

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FYI, according to the network map, there’s a bunch of Zcash nodes located in China, and looking at the top Zcash markets, more than 60% of the trading volume in Zcash is versus CNY.

I love the WeChat plugin idea. That sort of approach works well because it allows us to focus on our priorities - developing the protocol, improving performance, and adding more functionality to the Zcash platform. The current version of Zcash barely scratches the surface of what the technology is capable of.

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About funding models for wallets. Jaxx makes money from shapeshift transactions done on their wallet https://www.reddit.com/r/jaxx/comments/6e0ang/how_does_jaxx_make_money/
I think that’s a good one.

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(non programmer here)
would it be possible to build a bitcoin wallet that uses zcash as a mixing service?
LURKERS - if possible, I’ll pay somebody to build it.

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Question is if there’s a way to do it so that it would be better than mixing that doesn’t use Zcash. Cause if ultimately the user gets his bitcoin from on of the mixer’s bitcoin addresses, I don’t see what he gained from going through Zcash.

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