The main feature of Zcash is its private transactions (z-addr), but nobody seems to be using that feature. I was reading that there have been various bugs around using the z-addr. Was this cryptocurrency launched before it was ready?
We’re almost two months in and I don’t see:
any significant shielding of total ZEC in existence (less than 1% at present)
any exchange that provides you with a z-addr
any documentation on how to use the “view key” to reveal transaction history for a given z-addr (on the blog or the “using zcash” guide). I’d like to try this out but don’t know how.
So it appears that at least today, people are just using Zcash as though it’s Bitcoin. No?
Perhaps it just needs more bake time or the price needs to stop dropping first.
I’d use shielded addresses but waiting for a windows gui wallet. The whole command line thing is not intuitive for me personally. I suspect that is the case for many average users as well?
You would just include your Stellar address in the memo to a specific address and get Zcash issued on the Stellar network. This would immediately give you access to a completely decentralised exchange on Stellar (https://galactictalk.org/d/26-project-idea-distributed-exchange) and super fast (2-3 sec confirmations) micro transactions (Zcash’s lightening network?). You can also go the other way (Stellar transactions have also a memo field). You do a transaction to a specific Stellar address with a memo containing the Zcash address and your Stellar Zcash turns into a real Zcash transaction.
I think that there are even more possibilities. It will just take some time until we realise what we can do. But we will get there. It’s like 1 month since Zcash lunched and great ideas/projects will take some time to be implemented.
I don’t see people with umbrellas every day so that must indicate a lack of interest in umbrellas.
How much transactional privacy do you hope to achieve when a third party does your z_addr transactions for you?
Despite that, I suspect there is a way to avoid dependence on having a local copy of the entire blockchain before spending z_addr balances but it would require prior knowledge of which blocks the relevant transactions were recorded to.
Lol @ that analogy. The usage speaks for itself… sub-1% of $10M market cap means hardly anyone is using the shielding capability yet, possibly because it’s too much of a hassle, as opposed to lack of interest. That said, I suppose it’s still too early for me to be complaining about it yet.
Good point @Voluntary about a zaddr without a full node!
And @bkolobara makes good points too. The command line sucks, and I haven’t seen any wallets aside from the ZCashSwingUI Wallet by @vaklinov that support private transactions. HOWEVER:
A full node without having to touch the command line is now possible, if you are on a Mac: https://zcash4mac.com
zcash4mac is a 100% GUI, signed Mac App that @zab and I have been working on. It bundles zcashd, the ZCashSwingUI wallet by @vaklinov, the needed jre, downloads the proving key via the GUI, creates the config file if you haven’t ever run zcash on your mac (and respects the one you have if you’ve been running my command-line Mac port!), and verifies the proving key on each launch.
Increased adoption as awareness of the coin spreads? Initial distribution of Founder’s Reward funds being sent to shielded addresses? Users with Macs no longer needing to even touch the command line for their full node to use private addresses (with my release at https://zcash4mac.com)? All of the above?
