Announcing Halo 2

I won’t dispute the perspective you outlined, and I do recall many of the incidents you’re referring to, but I often feel as though regardless of what we do, there will be something we “didn’t engage with the community” about and it’ll be exaggerated by a few people. This thread has two good examples of this already.

People in this industry buy worthless companies for $140M just to flex with trademarks, and then announce “we’re adding Sapling to TRON!” The research we’ve done for Zcash has been incorporated in millions of dollars worth of other businesses in the ecosystem. The intention is clear and in good faith: let’s try to preserve some of the value of our research and development efforts in the period of time before we can realize it in our project. We can all disagree about whether the license is effective in doing this (in fact, I’ve been bearish about it so far), but we don’t have to act like posting some code unrelated to Zcash under a different open-source license “blindsides” the community. If the bar is that low for us to blindside the community, people will find failure in everything we try to do.

The other example of course is that we can’t even announce that we’ve received a grant from EF to do development of Halo, and that we’re excited to post benchmarks and other details soon once we’ve finished implementing it, without getting it shot down as an impossible waste of time because… we haven’t posted the benchmarks yet.

Perhaps I’m missing the vibe of encouragement as people in the community try new things and solve problems.

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