Arjun Balaji's "2019 predictions"

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

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And it didnt raise any red flags when only 64 people showed up to vote? Clearly the call for participation wasnt heard by the majority. Even now after reading the call to vote, It still sounds like it wasnt a open vote for anyone that wanted to be involved.

It is intended to be “a broad collection of people who have contributed in some way to the Zcash community via some public & visible presence.”

Does that sound like, ANYONE who uses Zcash can come and vote! ANYONE!..no it does not.

Once again, only 64 people showed up, Zcash has THOUSANDS of people, how did this not raise any red flags? Evidently the call to vote was not heard. I was very active at the time, I also remember reading about the vote. Nowhere in the post did it sound like the average user was able to apply. It sounded like people that have contributed to Zcash were being allowed. Not OPEN TO ANYONE that used Zcash.

Lets say Zcash has 1000 users(Its probly ATLEAST 10x this)…64 people voted out of 1000…WOW a 0.64% turn out rate…Its probly orders of magnitude worse. As str4d kept saying “how representative is it of the community?”

And this is the problem. The community was against ASICs, yet here we are fully ASIC. Will the same happen with the funding vote? We have no control, you guys have 100% control. Just like with ASICs, the majority was against them, even if you dont want to be belive it, because “your vote” was different. We had no say in this decision, even though you said we “voted for it”, that is complete BS, the MAJORITY was against ASICs.

This is what I am worried about. Sure you can say we voted and were heard. But clearly that did not represent the majority. Even if we voted “NO” for ASICs, you guys keep saying there was “NO TIME” to add the algo change. So even if we DID vote to fork, it would of not happened anytime soon anyway. So basically, does not matter what we vote.

But keep blaming your users for not getting out to vote…

Just a thought, perhaps a better definition of what a member of the community actually is would help…?

I would suggest -

  1. Has been involved for some time (forum regular)
  2. Has skin in the game (owns ZEC)

I’m sure the forum can support polls, maybe link a forum account to a taddr balance for those who want to vote? A bit like staking coins.

Might give a better ‘voice of the community’, quite how that gets included in any decision making process is another matter.

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17 posts were merged into an existing topic: Let’s talk about ASIC mining

Ok, thanks again Shawn, Sorry I come off so …“Bitchy”? I guess that word works…

Just a little upset over how the votes had zero effect…keep up the great job!

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This thread totally derailed and has by now nothing in common with the headline of the topic …
All the asic voting discusion should be moved to the “Let’s talk about asics” topic and only posts about predictions for 2019 left here.

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Agree, moved. Please keep this thread on the article Zooko started.

Discussion about voting or the future of Zcash Developer funding can be continued in The future of Zcash in the year 2020

Discussion about ASICs can be discussed in Let’s talk about ASIC mining

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