Announcing my resignation from the ZOMG

Please @sarah report it to @mods there is no place for this here. we have one very strong disagreement. but I wouldnt want to see you victimised.

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Diversity of opinion indeed makes us stronger.

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Yes you are correct! ZOMG is the third pillar for sure, but we are so new and have funded so few initiatives our true power hasn’t been built up yet imo.

It is not on her behalf, she can think for herself. I’m calling it out myself and will learn in the process if people believe I am right or wrong about my assumptions.

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Please note that Sarah’s original post does not address sexism directly, the follow up posts by Hudson and Holmes do bring up the topic of sexism.

I certainly hope that Sarah did not feel discriminated against while on the ZOMG, and if she felt discrimination by other ZOMG members (including myself) then I hope she would feel compelled to post it.

I’m on the ZOMG and did not personally witness any discrimination by other ZOMG members towards Sarah, but I cannot speak to Sarah’s perspective.

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I just saw this tweet from Sarah, which made me start to rethink my OP in this thread.

I regret that I brought up sexism first in a list of things that were problems when the focus should be on what she actually typed. Now it has detracted from her main point. My apologies everyone.

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I believe that compassion is a general solution to the problem the suffering that our actions can intentionally and unintentionally cause in others.

I am concerned that the invocation of sexism (first by @holmesworcester in this thread, if I recall correctly (IIRC)) can lead to an environment of second-guessing the unknowable intentions of the other.

It’s widely understood that even our own intentions are often mislabeled and misunderstood… much less the intentions of someone else!

If we frame our discussion where a nebulous accusation of ill-intent on the part of another can be used to justify courses of action… well then… there’s a famous way of describing that called “thought crime”. Indeed ascribed unknowable intention is a fantastically useful political tool, because… after all, I can at any time be delegitimized by an accusation of some impure thought.

For example, suppose that I believed that @alchemydc was not very-representative of unheard perspectives. Perhaps I would then seek to justify arguing against his assumption of a role on the ZOMG. A potent argument would be that sexism is corroding the value of the ZOMG… and @alchemydc is male so…

For What It’s Worth, I am in favor of an outsider. If @ml_sudo was still available and interested, and I could vote, I would vote for her… but it wouldn’t have anything to do with vague notions of sexism.

So… long and short I am pro-diversity, AND if people are being accused of harmful behavior, let’s be specific:

Who did what to whom?

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Part of this problem is just inherent to the development of distributed protocols. R&D induces uncertainty, and uncertainty at the consensus-protocol can be difficult for anyone building on it. This isn’t specific to Zcash. Random example: some Ethereum developers’ plans were badly derailed because some planned precompiles were eventually dropped from a consensus upgrade.

Another part of the problem is that ECC is sometimes reluctant to announce decisions, for the opposite reason: not because ECC wants to keep decisions behind close doors, but because they want to avoid forcing (or being perceived as forcing) decisions on the rest of the community. For example, if by some magic there emerged a community consensus on the desirable transaction fee rules, I believe ECC would gladly follow it. That such a consensus fails to emerge is hardly the default of excessive centralization; if anything, it points to lack of coordination.

But yes, a third part of the problem is ECC keeping cards close to its chest and failing to communicate effectively. A current important example is the proposed Orchard/Halo/ZIP 224 upgrade, which is being aggressively pushed as ready for activation within a few months, leading many to think deployment is feit accompli; while actual technical descriptions and plans have been very slow to appear and still have huge gaps. I was particularly disappointed that ECC pointedly abstained from having any representative in the recent Community Call on Halo, which was specifically planned for discussing requirements for this deployment. I’d hate to be an ecosystem developer whose livlihood depends on correctly predicting when and whether the major Orchard upgrade will happen.

(To be clear: I am not criticizing the technical aspects of Orchard, many of which I haven’t even seen yet. I am criticizing the communication, marketing, planning and coordination… which are very relevant to the issue that @buildwithrust is pointing out.)

For true FOSS projects, one has the autonomy to build solutions freely and users can choose to use it or not. In Bitcoin it is clear that miners have a voice and no single corporation has undue influence on what Bitcoin is. The fight over the Zcash trademark demonstrated that both ECC and ZF care deeply about controlling the definition of Zcash. This is problematic when outside developers, even with community support have a different vision for Zcash and want to retain that name.

This trademark criticism is a red herring. Technically, in principle, if ECC and ZF colluded they could temporarily use their trademark power to veto community consensus. In practice, this has never happened, I cannot imagine it happening under their current management, and I’m pretty sure this could be legally challenged (based on the nonprofits’ own legally-committed purpose) if it ever did happen.

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I sincerely hope the ZOMG doesn’t accept an unearned sense of guilt and draws straws in the name of diversity, thereby eroding the mandate of the ZCAP’s vote.

I voted for panel members because I have confidence in what they can contribute to the Zcash ecosystem – for their abilities and passion, not biological characteristics.

There’s no need to fall on a sword here, and add insult to injury.

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What happens when a ZOMG member departs isn’t specifically defined by ZIP-1014, @zancas has started a new thread on the subject:

Not Hudson’s fault, but I think the sexist thing set off some things. Part of that’s a good thing, we should all make sure we’re not being unconsciously sexist. It’s really easy to do and not ok. And that may have happened to Sarah, for example in her candidacy thread for ZOMG when discussions about zero-days came up. But that has nothing to do with @adityapk00’s response. And I’m afraid he’s going to get tarred with it unfairly. That would be wrong and a disservice to adityapk00’s contributions.

For those of you who don’t know, @sarahjamielewis publicly announced a vulnerability in zec wallet some time ago without really notifying @adityapk00. There are reasons to do this and reasons not to, its a debated topic in infosec with no resolution. And some of the sexism I saw in this forum was over debating Sarah on this and basically concern trolling what is a totally valid security stance. But, when you publicly disclose a vulnerability with no notice, you are going to make life a pain for the developer and they are not going to like you at all. Not in some pretty personal way, but in a “you intentionally made my life harder and stressful and wronged me professionally” kinda way. Particularly if your justification is

“My reasons for ethically disclosing this via a tweet and not a private email is that I’m very high and I found and created a PoC to this in 20 minutes and so it’s inevitable that any dedicated attacker has found and is exploiting this in the 8 hours this app has been released.”"
https://twitter.com/SarahJamieLewis/status/1236139783711121408"

So, there’s bad blood between @adityapk00 and Sarah for completely valid reasons. Even if no one was in the wrong.

And Sarah is the one who announces that ZOMG isn’t funding zecwallet long term. (edit: but suggests long term funding might be available later, here’s 2 months of funding now. There’s some room for interpretation here on how much of a rejection this was, but it’s clear how it was taken.)
And it’s done for concerns about “duplication” of work @adityapk00 is already doing and no one else is. I actually can understand what ZOMG was getting at here and I suggested what I still think is a good compromise , but the announcement was tone deaf and pretty much guaranteed to cause problems . As were some of the clarifications. This whole thing would probably have been resolved better with a phone call. But it wasn’t. So Sarah resigned, which I think was the right call because it helps resolve the issue, and here we all are.

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I think @secparam perfectly captured it!! Partially what I was thinking, couldn’t put it in words. Sequence of events explain it as well.

Not sure if resignation was the right call, we all need to have thick skin as we are building the groundwork for private digital money, and the upcoming attacks and challenges from outside the community are going to be of a much larger magnitude to deal with. Yes, we must communicate, learn and improve.

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THANK YOU. This is my point.

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While I don’t see a reason state names in this thread, this clearly appears false. Its pretty obvious that the majority of the community would like to see t addresses go away eventually. Public statements from ECC management on willingness to acquiesce to this community desire have been inconsistent at best. It remains one of the most consistent friction points and a critical one to ability to attract privacy focused ecosystem development.

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Touché. I agree.

Edit: On second thought, it’s more nuanced. Deprecating t-addresses is widely supported by denizens of this forum, but not necessarily by other important ecosystem participants who are not well-represented here, such as exchanges. I think that ECC is very attuned to the latter, and this explains some of the discrepancy.

Anyway, let’s not discuss this further on this thread, since there are several other threads dedicated to t-address deprecation.

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@secparam Hit it spot on. And now there is this tweet:

The problem is bigger than he did this or she did that. It’s what they didn’t do, which is communicate effectively!

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This is a good point. I will try to bring more attention to this issue so we can coordinate and reach consensus.

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I’m grateful that people like you and @Matthewdgreen brought attention to this. When we have the potential to preempt issues by coordinating better we should at least try to do so prior to issuing press releases. It’s hard to see any advantage in not even showing up for such an important call.

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https://twitter.com/IamNomad/status/1345960914789556224

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