Thread by @roommatemusing

I think escape velocity is an important concept for the #Zcash community to consider.

Escape velocity is the velocity needed to escape the gravitational pull back to a massive object.

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If you don’t expend enough energy to escape the Earth’s gravity, you will always fall back to Earth.

In physics, escape velocity is easy to calculate. For a crypto project, it is not.

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The gravitational object #Zcash is trying to escape is the mass of crypto projects that are sort of on the sidelines, trying to get worldwide recognition and adoption.

Pretty much everything but #Bitcoin and #Ethereum have yet to escape orbit IMO

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#Zcash is mainly trying to be private, hard-capped, decentralized digital money - an incredibly abstract concept.

Most ppl don’t think about which money they use - it is preordained by the country in which they are born.

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#Zcash is trying to be an opt-in currency. That means people have to know about it and why it is beneficial for them to opt-in.

Right now, it is safe to say ~100% of the world’s population does not know about #Zcash.

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How can people possibly know about it without a significant, worldwide, ongoing outreach effort?

Do we hope and pray that word of mouth efforts will successfully educate the world about this incredibly nuanced and abstract thing?

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Do we do nothing and when it fails say, “I guess people just don’t care about private, hard-capped digital money?”

After all, failure is much more likely than success, especially given that most ppl don’t even realize they don’t have privacy:

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https://twitter.com/naomibrockwell/status/1546580766552899584

Trying to reach escape velocity and become one of the best-known and used #cryptocurrencies is a dubious psychological task, on top of a difficult practical one.

Why is it psychological?

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Because for each “launch” that doesn’t escape orbit, it is very easy to say, “oh that didn’t work, it was a waste.”

This basically leads to a self-defeating attitude that it is impossible to escape orbit, “we’ve already tried!”

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Instead, the real answer is not that what has been tried was a wasted effort and it’s just not going to happen but that what has been tried was actually *not enough*.

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In my view, there are two paths:

1) put everything we have into escaping gravity

2) attempt meager, safe solutions that preserve our resources.

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In the first path, we can either escape orbit or die trying.

In the second path, we have a slow, incremental death as the value of $zec dwindles and eventually can’t support development, let alone network security.

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Only in the first option is there any chance of success, while standing still and acting conservatively will lead to certain, if at least prolonged, decay.

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In other words, in the ultra-competitive world of digital, open-source money, choices that may appear “safe” on the surface are the most dangerous.

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To sum it up, let’s use the rocket fuel we have (dev fund) to do everything we can to break out of the orbit, or be doomed to look up at the stars and ask “what could have been?”

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Opinions expressed here are solely my own and reflect nothing but my own thinking.

Fin/