I’m a little late to this thread but I want to weigh in. Not on the link Zooko posted, but on the subsequent discussion.
First: It’s not true that the governance process participants came from some kind of elitist closed group. @Shawn pointed out that I posted a broad call for participation here, and I made several similar entreaties on Twitter. We only rejected two of the people who applied. One was a known bad actor and the other was someone who didn’t seem to have any actual interest in Zcash.
@Dodger once said it like this: “Decisions are made by those who show up.” (Not sure who coined the line originally, but Dodger introduced me to it.) Anyone who can’t be bothered to fill out a brief application form and respond to a couple of emails is choosing not to have an impact, through their own inaction.
All of that said, there was no universe in which the Foundation was going to immediately fork to “GPU-only Zcash” or whatever. Like @str4d said, and like @daira has said many times, Zcash is a complex technology. You can’t make changes on the fly without a high risk of catastrophe.
But anyway, I can answer this question:
Yes. Virtually anyone who has discussed the future of Zcash with the ZcashCo team has hit on this topic. Zooko has pondered it publicly on Twitter, IIRC. No one has made any kind of final decision (to my knowledge). Because again, Zcash is complex.
I also want to respond to a post from earlier up in the thread:
It seems like this is the crux of the issue: “Who gets to make changes, and who decides who gets to make changes?”
That’s what the GPUs versus ASICs conversation is about, beneath the surface. That’s largely what the ZEF kerfuffle was about. As @acityinohio and I wrote at the time:
The Foundation opposes any change to the Zcash Founders’ Reward, even those that may benefit our balance sheet. Without overwhelmingly broad consensus, monetary policy changes cannot be supported — particularly ones that redistribute a longstanding disbursement to the protocols’ critical contributors. Our own governance process revealed split opinions on whether we should even discuss changing monetary policy, which bolsters this view.
Of course, recipients of the Founders’ Reward can use their funds however they choose, and that is distinct from altering Zcash monetary policy. We are grateful that some of them have chosen to pledge portions of their funds to the Foundation.
“Who gets to make changes, and who decides who gets to make changes?” Well, the realpolitik answer is: Whoever controls the node software, the GitHub repo, and the trademark. So right now, it’s the Zcash Company and anyone able to influence its executives’ decisions.
But that’s only if you care about being called Zcash. Under any other name, the answer is, whoever can get enough developers and users to sustain a fork or a clone. (For example, Horizen seems to be chugging along.)
One of the great things about the cryptocurrency world is that there is competition and you can choose exit over voice. You can move your funds into cybercoins that you like better, or find more reliable, or whatever. Or you can muster a group of fellow exiters to make your own thing.
But perhaps that’s a discussion for the other thread… The future of Zcash in the year 2020