WeDear folks:
We’re have another full-blown social controversy! Like the Great ASIC Mining Controversy of the summer of 2018, the less widely-known Zcash Ecosystem Fund Controversy, and numerous other smaller controversies that some of you remember but most of the readers of this note probably don’t.
First of all, I’d like to say: This is fine!
But seriously, this is the sort of vigorous disagreement and passion that you should expect from an open, transparent, and innovative project that really matters. If there were never major decisions being made over vigorous and widespread opposition, then that would mean that project was stalled and was silently sliding into irrelevance.
So this level of disagreement and excitement is what we should expect and embrace going forward. This sort of response is what I expected all along for the Harmony Mining proposal during the last year or so that I’ve been working on it, including especially the time-locking of alg-B mining rewards.
My only warning is: resist the urge to cast aspersions on the character and intention of people who disagree with you, and exclude people who do so from your community and your discussions. Attacking the character and intentions of others will do no good and will do substantial harm, and everyone who does so should be excluded from the discussions among people of good intent, or else those good people will not be able make progress. This is important, and it requires vigilance and courage to execute on it and to silence the contributors who would pollute the culture and ruin it for the vast majority of well-intentioned contributors.
Please be aware that it is natural, when you are a part of a discussion group like the Zcash Community Forum, to feel like the group is the universe. This isn’t even a belief, or a cognitive process at all, it’s a part of our heritage as a group animal to feel like our group is the universe. That’s fine and healthy, but please be aware that the people who participate in the Zcash Community Forum with us are a very small fraction of the larger Zcash community. I could probably name maybe four hundred people whose names I know who are active members of the Zcash community and who I’ve talked to in the last year or two. People like the people who attended Zcon0, the numerous scientists who’ve studied and published science papers about Zcash, the members of the community governance panel, the employees at more or less every company that works on cryptocurrencies, not to mention thousands of people in a dozen countries that I’ve talked with at conferences and meetups, etc. whose names I wouldn’t be able to remember. Out of those four hundred or so that I could probably name, I think fewer than ten of them are active on this forum. So I estimate the size of the larger Zcash community of active, well-educated, engaged contributors to be about 40X the size of this forum. This isn’t counting the legions of fans and traders/investors/holders around the world, of course, which probably number somewhere between 100,000 and a 1,000,000. And it isn’t counting the users that we really need to prioritise and to target: the billions of people who’ve never heard of Zcash but who will come to use it in the coming years if we continue to execute well.
I really value each of your opinions… well, except the people on here who denigrate my character and intentions or that of other folks — those people are invisible to me and I don’t read or reply to any of their messages. But there are only like ~two or three~ one or two [*] of those folks on here that I ignore. For all the rest of you I really value your ideas and opinions and hearing how you feel about these sorts of things, and I’ll be reading as many such post as a I can. Unfortunately, that is fewer than the number of posts that get posted here. I’m sorry! I would read them all if I could.
Sincerely,
Zooko
[*] The one that I ignored the hardest — Trololino — got banned from the forum, now there are almost no ignorables left.