I am posting here in my own capacity as an independent holder of Zcash, and not in any official capacity related to my role as a Zcash developer at ECC.
Given that there’s a possibility that the community will be unable to come to consensus on development fund changes and that the dev fund would then expire in November, I think it would be valuable to consider what other kinds of changes might be worthwhile to make to the block reward structure.
At present, 80% of the block rewards go to miners, to pay for network security, and 20% of the block reward goes to development organizations. In the event that the dev fund is allowed to expire without other protocol changes, 100% of the block rewards would then go to miners.
From what I can tell, miners are not heavily involved with Zcash - while I’d be happy to be corrected, I know of no miners who are active in the Zcash forum or R&D discord, comment on protocol or wallet development, or otherwise express a commitment to the values of individual sovereignty and privacy that are at the core of the Zcash project. It seems counterintuitive to me to increase the relative funding to a group of ecosystem participants who don’t seem to be deeply committed to the use or improvement of the Zcash protocol. It is unclear the degree to which miners sell ZEC to fund their operations, but AFAICT we have no reason to believe that they don’t just sell everything that they receive.
One possibility that I haven’t seen raised elsewhere is this:
At the point that the dev fund would end, continue to issue 80% (or some other percentage deemed suitable for maintaining the security required by the protocol) of the post-halving block reward to miners, but leave the remaining 20% that has previously gone to development funding unissued (and consequently treated as part of the Zcash Sustainability Fund).
If there is no consensus, then the rules that were set in 2020 should be followed: Zcash development fund has been set for 4 years, then it expires.
So unless there is a clear consensus what to do, then it simply expires and nothing else should happen.
Continuing in the same direction (protocol rewards going into corporate-owned addresses) is something that almost everyone is against, including ECC itself (ECC made a statement that they won’t accept direct funding to their address).
I don’t think any miners go around and shout they are miners, same as some people on this forum might hold millions of dollars of ZEC and don’t go around shouting it, so there’s a temptation to be biased. Also there’s a intersection between holders and miners. Do you see e.g. bitcoin miners vocal on discussion forums, or twitter, or anywhere? I think you’re really biased here. The last vocal guy about mining was Wu Jihan probably and those value-extracting / borderline scammers around ETHW fork.
Bitcoin PoW model is a standard here, everything goes to miners and other funding models create (or could create) perverse incentives.
Keep in mind ECC (Zcash Company originally before renaming) has had 8 years of funding, which was originally supposed to be only 4 years (the original founder’s reward). For the first 4 years they got 10% (2.1M ZEC) of the total supply that will ever exist (21M ZEC), for the next 4 years they will totally receive another 5% (1.05M ZEC), that’s 15% (3.15M ZEC) of the total supply that will ever exist (21M ZEC). That’s already crazy, Satoshi had 5% to compare (and probably lost forever). By ECC’s funding (Zcash Company) in this paragraph I mean all founder’s reward and all zcash developer fund block subsidies.
back then, there was only Zcash Company (Zcash Co.) and only Zcash Company (renamed to ECC in 2019). No Zcash Foundation existed. Investors were invested INTO Zcash company (holding company’s equity as shareholders), founders, employeers and advisors were rewarded based on their contracts with Zcash company. Still don’t see it? In the end, Zcash company got everything and distributed it. Zooko’s document and diagram shows Zcash Foundation, but that also didn’t exist until 2017.
People can calculate absolute values of ZEC by multiplying the percentages by 10.5M (because before the first halving, 50% supply or 10.5M ZEC have been mined).
i.e.
1,344,000 ZEC went to founders and vested employees
315,000 ZEC went to Zcash Foundation
294,000 ZEC went to Electric Coin Company
147,000 ZEC additional ECC Employee Compensation
Total: 2.1M ZEC (10% of the total supply) == the whole founder’s reward
This is not what nuttycom is proposing. The ZSF is not owned by anyone and is basically the pool of unissued ZEC. So effectively what nuttycom is proposing is reducing the issuance by further 20% post-halving.
If the value remains unissued, then it could be considered to be held in reserve for a future multisig retroactive grants program, for example. If there were the desire to do so, that value could also be tracked separately as a “reserve” value separate from the ZSF balance in the protocol. Really, though, there would really be no need to do so; the value of the unissued 20% could be computed exactly if a future network upgrade made multisig-based distribution of that value a possibility. It’s essentially what @skyl describes in Moving the Dev Fund discussion forward - #107 by skyl
The main idea is that there would be no real reason (and that there are in fact nontrivial downsides) to hold such a reserve in UTXOs.
Without Zcash Foundation developing Zebra we would not have a clear path forward towards a modern Zcash codebase. Zcashd is retiring, and that’s a good thing.
Plus who do you think pays for and maintains infrastructure like this forum?
The mining pool keeps accounts, and the miners vote for the mining pool. In fact, miners are the enforcers of this system, and the zcash Foundation and ECC are the legislators. If the legislators and enforcers are the same person, the system will be manipulated. This is why POS can never achieve decentralization like POW.
Another consideration is whether we continue to fund ZCG during this time. Should the whole 20% go to ZSF or just a portion of it to allow ZCG’s continued funding?
Speaking as a holder of zcash too (and not as a recipient of the devfund through grants), agreements should be followed.
If miners are supposed to receive 100% of the reward, they should. It does not matter what they do with the coins. We are getting into a slippery slope if we start putting judgment on coins that are not ours per contract. Of course, I would like the miners to reinvest in Zcash development but it is their decision to make.
There is no agreement with miners that I’m aware of. Miners are mining because there is some implicit agreement that they will get 100% in November and, if we change that, we are breaking this “agreement”? What agreement specifically? Maybe I misunderstand.
How about with the recent development of the overall community sentiment and concern about asic miners non participation why not adopt for a 100% mining reward but to GPU &/or CPU algo that way we have more decentralization &/or more community participation until we have some POS-POW hybrid (depends on community thoughts)
while we can get to mandatory shielded only chain and ZSA & other good swaps
and address funding of zcash development by user donation model like monero
like seriously how come they got so ahead in that field when it comes to decentralized funding model based on donation and non-profits MAGIC Grants
zcash community need to learn from them and make the protocol more secure from regulation by lasa fair decentralization
With all due respect to the discussion, I can’t get past one thing that cuts my ear every time. I know several disparate miners of 5 to 40 Z15 machines that don’t sell ZEC. They don’t sell it at all and have been saving it since the first day they started mining Zcash. They don’t need to sell ZEC that because they cover their expenses with income from other activities. And they have never told me that they are against the Dev Fund.
My comment is intended so that everyone can evaluate the situation fairly and treat the motivation of some private miners with objectivity.
