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"We have been working on zcash for about five years and I think it will take another five years before it reaches the blooming level we have been thinking about since the beginning."
It's Zooko Wilcox, CEO of Electric Coin Company (ECC) – the company behind the zcash cryptocurrency, focused on privacy. He commented on the long-term trajectory of zcash during a conversation on the last day of the RadicalxChange conference, which took place in February in Detroit.
Suitcase and coffee in hand at the time of the interview, Zooko was about to fly to Tokyo to embark on a "zcash promotional world tour" extended in East Asia.
But as founder and CEO of ECC – the company that created the zcash protocol and continues to play the role of hub for the development of zcash – Wilcox admitted:
"Within two years, a little over two years, of [zcash’] existence, we have not added substantial changes outside of privacy. "
Launched in 2016, zcash was originally created as an encrypted bitcoin fork optimized for privacy. In October of last year, Zcash has undergone its biggest protocol upgrade so far, nicknamed "Sapling".
"I think that sapling was the biggest improvement of the protocol so far. It was huge, "Josh Cincinnati, Executive Director of the Zcash Foundation told CoinDesk. "This makes privacy much more accessible and also opens the door to mobile applications. It was a moonshot project of the electric money company that succeeded. "
Now, Wilcox is considering another "moonshot project of three or four years" in order to develop zcash "in a non-specific way to confidentiality".
"I am in favor of an ambitious improvement in scalability," says Wilcox. "I think we need a lot of scalability at level 1 so that we can achieve the mission of giving everyone economic freedom and opportunity."
He added:
"Although I think that Layer Two is cool and that it has a lot of potential and potential uses, I think we also need a layer that is scalable." This is what I advocate within my company and the zcash community. "
But there are other proposals on hand, noted Wilcox. One of them is to extend "zcash for it to be programmable as Ethereum".
"Of course, we would tend to use evidence of zero knowledge to ensure that the execution of smart contracts is private and off-line," Wilcox said.
All of these proposals will eventually have to go through a process of discussion and debate within the community.
Cincinatti told CoinDesk that for the first time in the protocol history, new ZIP files will be reviewed by a representative of ECC and Zcash Foundation.
The new ZIP process
Initially, ZIP implementation was entirely the responsibility of the ECC, while the Zcash Foundation was primarily a "grantmaking organization".
Last month, the Foundation announced steps to engage more actively in the protocol development process alongside the EQF.
"The metaphor is that I want us to exist in a two-signature multi-signature governance model where the electrical parts company holds a key and the foundation a key and where broader decisions about zcash must be mutually accepted by the Foundation and the Electric Coin Company, "said Cincinatti.
Thus, for the Electric Network Company scheduled network upgrade to be activated in April 2020, all ZIPs will be subject to a review process by two so-called "ZIP publishers".
"As publishers, we need to agree on which features should be accepted as ZIPs. We do not agree so much on what should be included as on the fact that there is a consensus. [in the community] that these elements must be included, "said Cincinatti.
The deadline for ZIP proposals in Network Upgrade 3S is April 1 and, as Cincinatti tells CoinDesk, a total of 8 proposals are currently being reviewed by publishers – Daira Hopwood at 39. ECC and Cincinatti Foundation.
One of these proposals would introduce a new voting function allowing users to vote with funds held in "armored" invisible addresses directly without transferring the funds to an "unprotected" public address. Another proposal is to lay the groundwork for a Layer 2 private payment network over the zcash protocol called BOLT.
And before these proposals are approved, tested and activated on zcash mainnet, Cincinnati indicates that zcash will finally have its second software, also called client, which will implement the protocol. Currently, all users rely on the zcash ECC implementation called "zcashd".
In light of zcash's future multi-client ecosystem, Cincinnati explains that it is important to start now with iterations of the ZIP process, noting:
"Finally, If many consensus-aware implementations are running, you must be able to share and collaborate on the roadmap and feature set. "
Privacy as a mainstream
Apart from the ZIP process, the Zcash network is also preparing for the activation of two incompatible changes with earlier versions of a system-wide upgrade, also called "hard fork" in next october.
Nicknamed Blossom, the once-launched fork will increase block times on the network and divide the 20% block reward tax from the network into three wallet addresses: one for the Zcash Foundation, Electric Coin Company's strategic reserve. and the rest.
This last change – as reported on GitHub by ECC project manager Nathan Wilcox – is to decouple the once-singular "organizational, legal and operational" funding flow and further strengthen the "transparency regarding the structure of the founders' reward". .
"It's just a cleaning job to make it easier for people to see what's being sent to the Electric Coin Company, the first recipients of the Founders' Reward Award," Cincinatti told CoinDesk.
This model of financing sustainable development through a tax on block rewards that Zooko Wilcox has notified to CoinDesk has been copied by other cryptocurrency projects, such as the private Beam coin. Beam, which debuted in January, was closely followed by the launch of another privacy-sensitive cryptocurrency using a similar technology called Grin.
Zooko Wilcox explains to CoinDesk about the emergence of these new entrants into the crypto-currency space:
"I do not like their technology very much … [but] I like communities a lot because they are in this collegial win-win spirit, where they love to help others and love to help them because we are all on the same side of history. "
And history, explains Zooko Wilcox, will eventually prove that confidentiality pieces such as zcash, beam and grin are the norm for all cryptocurrencies in the future. Comparing the current wave of crypto-currencies to improved privacy in the 1990s, when encryption for web browsing was introduced. Wilcox pointed out that "after a decade of political and militant struggle, encryption has become the norm."
"In the early days, when HTTPS was invented, people saw it as making the Web a kind of special web for privacy that was dangerous and could violate the law," said Zooko Wilcox. "Now, the US government requires you to use HTTPS on anything that is sensitive and could affect users."
Zooko Wilcox said the same type of fight is going on now with governments that consider crypto-currencies such as Zcash, Grin and Beam organizing "enhanced protection of privacy" as "dangerous and scary".
He said:
"In ten years, no one will say," Oh, that's a piece of privacy. They will say, "Oh, that's a normal room that you can use for all the normal affairs of the world. "Today, we do not say:" Oh HTTPS, it must be a website on privacy and I must use a browser privacy. "
It is these major changes in standards and technical protocols that Wilcox believes should occur in the next decade. Once at the Detroit airport and ready to take his flight, Wilcox sent me one last thought to start our conversation: a quote.
"We continue to overestimate the changes that will occur over the next two years and underestimate those that will occur over the next ten years." – Bill Gates
Zooko Wilcox picture by Christine Kim
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