Alarm bells! 🚨 re ZOMG

[tromer]

@nultinator

instead of giving ZEC away, what if we burned ZOMG money to increase scarcity

Interesting idea.
I’ve always been dubious about the idea that burning coins automatically increases the value of the rest, because I don’t quite understand the mechanism that makes it happen. But if we believe that the mechanism is supply-and-demand on the trading markets, obliviously to any systematically-calculated fundamentals, then I wonder…

ZEC that is gathering dust in the ZOMG treasury is off the trading markets, just like burned ZEC. So wouldn’t it have the same effect on price, until it’s used?

Of course, the mechanism may instead (or in addition) be people reasoning about some fundamental total coin value = market cap, and dividing it by the amount of current or future (unburned) supply, in which case burning is different.

I have no idea which is more right and under what conditions, but it’s worth thinking about whether burning actually buys you anything in the rational economic/tokenomic sense.

And then there are the optics/memetics of burning, which are an even greater mystery to me.

[dismad]

@nultinator

Acknowledges that more government might not be what we all need

[inner thoughts] I almost feel like people should self fund until they are actually ready to govern. Right now it seems most are not ready and the timing feels off. Find folks organically, build, have fun. When the time comes, groups of independently funded DAO’s could then request relief (if needed!) after Proof of Governance has been established? [/inner thoughts] OK, enough ramblin, thanks for your thoughts again! <3

[PhusionPhil]

@zooko

I’ll be honest: I always thought the MGRC/ZOMG had structural problems that could lead to these kinds of outcomes.

I was suggesting making this into a game show, like Dragons Den or Sharks Tank, so we can get publicity as well as let the candidates have the attention (with a minor amount of exposure for their own ventures) for a biography about the gate keepers who approve or disapprove the grants.

I still think this would be a practical way to mediate these concerns and get more public (outside ZEC) opinions about the model of our grant committee. We want to be trend setters, but maybe we can change the game that Kevin O’Leary started.

One of the hosts from those game show networks, I think his name is Mark Cuban, has some crypto.

I really do have hopes as high as the sky for this part of the Zcash ecosystem, and maybe that idealist mind state has blinded me.

[mistfpga]

I thought burning got a hard no from legal or the SEC. I remember it was never on the table when we were having the discussions (“Don’t mention burn!”). I forget the exact reason tho.

[artkor]

Friends, I know that for proposals I need to write ZIP and all that, but I’m such a noob in this, and even if I write in my clumsy English, few people will understand anything.

Just consider my proposal. The essence is simple. ZOMG should have a financing mechanism not only for projects on proposal, but also for some other useful things.

For example, I would really like ZOMG to finance some advertising budget in social networks in which there is paid promotion. Well, for example, such wonderful tweets like this one:

deepcandles 🛡

But I don’t know how and why I should apply for this proposal, and what is my function, because I am not a moderator of this process. However, crypto twitter is the driving force that will allow increasing ZOMG fund and our own fund in ZEC ;), which I myself am ready to spend on promoting my site about Zcash. I believe that advertising is an intensive way of increasing the price, and therefore increasing the size of all funds. All in all, this increases our opportunities for the development of Zcash.

[tm3k]

I agree to an extent but technically paying people to tweet financial advice is … fraud? Just would be a bad look coming from professionals. Maybe what deepcandles said but without the first sentence. Or just paying influencers to educate people that bitcoin has a privacy problem that zcash addresses.

[artkor]

What if it programm will promoting random tweets?

[tm3k]

I would love to see a whole educational series created and promoted!

[covfefe]

I think the inaugural ZOMG committee have done a great job this year, it has obviously been a heavy lift to get things up and running (taking more time than anticipated). But I think the committee members have worked well together, been extremely transparent and have gone above and beyond regularly.

I really think this just needs a few tweaks, it hasn’t been the failure that some seem to think it is.

My main issue is the chance that all committee members can be potentially replaced in a single election cycle, that would be disastrous in my opinion, so I am fully on board with 2 or 3 members serving 12 month terms and the other members serving 18 month terms. I think that should be implemented as soon as possible.

For the increased time and compensation aspect, I’d like to see how the additional support from ZF plays out, if they can absorb a lot of the operational activities coupled with the fact that we’re heading into year 2 which hopefully means we don’t have the same level of effort required that we do when setting up a function from scratch, I think 5 to 10 hours a month may still be enough. We also don’t want to alienate very capable people with other full time commitments.

Ideally we would have some existing members elected for another term and then get their input in say 3 months to see if there is any improvement, at which point we can plan to increase the compensation accordingly in line with the additional time commitment, i.e. we need more data from the impact of the new ZF hires before we can act effectively and in an informed way.

The one thing we haven’t seen is the larger established teams coming in to build on Zcash, but that is not in any way the fault of ZOMG, it is a community wide effort to attract talent, and maybe the upcoming developments in Zcash can also act as a catalyst to get more people involved.

Longer term I’d be open to more drastic changes for ZOMG, such as using more novel Blockchain governance structures like a DAO for example. This would help reduce the current US center of gravity, I agree with this sentiment: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1433399828906577926?s=20

But that would be a longer term goal that I think could work well, in the immediate term I would like more of the same please (with some minor tweaks!).

[mistfpga]

@zooko

Is the ECC putting forward a candidate this year?

If not, why not?

cheers,

steve

[anon21505042]

I’m currently of the opinion that each branch of Zcash should hold a seat, to make sure their interests and expertise are represented. The final two seats would go to highly comped, highly skilled dream candidates we can tap for ideas like maples.

[joris]

What do you mean by branch ?

[anon21505042]

As I understand, Zcash is compromised of ECC, the Zcash Foundation, and the Zcash Community.

If officially represented in ZOMG, ECC would be able to identify proposals that bridge their technical work to the broader community, Zcash Foundation could further projects that most align with the spirit and intent of the Foundation, and the Zcash Community could further projects that they feel best serve the everyday needs of the end user and attract more of them. The other 2 superstars could identify potential and furnish ideas none of us might have considered.

[secparam]

That was actually the idea most of us had when developing it. IIRC there’s even a provision somewhere that at most one representative from ZFND and ECC can be on ZOMG. But they have to get elected and DC at ECC was like a vote or two votes short from getting a seat.

[anon21505042]

No group may hold more than one— I’d rather see each group guaranteed a seat at the table. Even if each group endorses more than one candidate, and elected members hold endorsements from several, or ideally, all branches.

IMO, we can’t afford to lose the input of, or alienate, any parts of the Zcash decentralized organism.

[secparam]

I think it might be mostly moot, the entire plan was for ZOMG to be structured towards a goal that, for no fault of their own, isn’t viable. ZOMG cannot merely approve outside grants that people file for because there are not enough of them. This was the point i was trying to make in the other thread

@secparam

We need to understand a key thing: the root cause of ZOMGs problems is it was setup for the wrong purpose. Recall, the community left it to ZFND in ZIP1014 to decide how major grants were handed out. ZFND decided to have an elected committee. Later it was decided they would be paid for 5 hours of work per week (out of ZFNDs funds, not the ZOMG funds). All of this was with the idea that we’d get a number of grant applications and ZOMG merely needed to approve them. ZFND would then handle grant admin. We can quibble if this was the perfect setup, but we will never know because the grants never came. There are simply not a large number of qualified groups submitting good grants. ZOMG had the wrong purpose.

[tromer]

@secparam

the entire plan was for ZOMG to be structured towards a goal that, for no fault of their own, isn’t viable. ZOMG cannot merely approve outside grants that people file for because there are not enough of them

I don’t disagree, but I also don’t draw the same conclusion.

If no major team wants to work on Zcash, then no rejiggling of ZIPs and committees will change that, so fiddling with governance won’t help.

If there are major teams that can and want to work on Zcash, then making them into ZOMG seems wrong.

Either way, I wouldn’t substantially change ZOMG’s role with respect to major grants, I would just support it better in the spirit of what @dodger proposed.

As for minor grants, well we could decide to formalize the repurposing of ZOMG as ZOMinorGrants… Or we could decide that this should go back to the in-house ZF model. I don’t recall explicit discussion of this crucial point.

[anon21505042]

@zooko

RFPs (Requests For Proposals) and targeted outreach where you pick domain experts and court them. It has higher risk of bias or self-dealing, but the quality of the people/teams you get into the boat that way is 10X the quality of the people you get by inbound.

@tromer
Let’s not assume that the majors don’t want to work with Zcash. Consider that maybe they don’t know how to, or that it hasn’t occurred to them.
The No Wallflower Clause: We don’t need to stand in the shadows waiting for someone to ask us to dance, let’s come up with a plan to go after the applicants we want and will best serve the various parts of the community.

[tromer]

Agreed, courting major wallflowers is valuable. I think it’s consistent with the letter and spirit of ZIP 1014, though it does take more time and justifies commensurate compensation.

It’s the dealing with minor grants, whether active or passive, that is (to my mind) an important and little-discussed question.

[anon21505042]

Ummm. We have been the wallflowers but you, as a strong-zebra-not-wallflower, could ostensibly court wallflowers, or any other metaphor you like, to help make Zcash the Zelle of the Ball.