Blocktown Proposal for Zcash 2020 Network Upgrade

We decreased expenses in Q1 (started in H2 18), froze hiring, cut marketing, etc. We worked with FR recipients to help increase funding to help us continue and accelerate rather than cut further. That took place in June. The plan was to ramp to $1.1M (hire more engineers, invest in Asia, etc.) through Oct of next year, but that’s dependent on the market. We aren’t anywhere near that now. Also note that some expenses are one-time / once-a-year, such as external security audits.

When do the expense reports for Q1 and Q2 2019 come out? Can you really say that both of those quarterly reports will average under $700k monthly for the ECC?

Likely Thursday, but maybe before for Q1 reporting. The Q2 report will come out in Q4.

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So you aren’t sure if operating expenses in Q2 2019 for the ECC are more than the $700k monthly from 2018?

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Near $1.1 or the 2018 last months $700k?

Sorry, but it isn’t clear to me to which number you are referring.

I don’t have the final Q2 numbers for you now. We’ll release those in Q4.

So this implies that Q2 2019 expenses for the ECC could very well be above $700k a month…

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No, it does not. 20 chars.

If you don’t know the answer, then, yes, it could be above or below $700k.

If you do know the answer, what’s the harm in stating that Q2 is below $700k (as you are willing to say for Q1 2019)?

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Can you explain this some more? For example, would you consider adding a decentralized voting system like what I have proposed to be not suitable?

The Zcash self funding model is unique and is a great advantage for zcash in my opinion. It needs to become more decentralized over time and I think we actually agree about that. But your proposal to quickly erase the dev fund needs to be justified.

Personally, I very much disagree with the ECC’s decision to allocate 15,518 ZEC to the Coinbase Earn campaign. (The 15,518 ZEC was worth a total of 2 million dollars at the time that it was allocated.) Looking at some of the projects that have been funded via the Zcash Foundation’s ZF Grants platform, a lot could have been accomplished with that 2 million dollars.

Since only 50% of the ZEC has actually been given away, I urge the ECC to cancel the second half of the Earn Campaign. If the ECC is contractually obliged to go forward with the second half, I urge them to negotiate with Coinbase to have the contract terminated.

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Everyone can see.

the ECC has established a pattern of increasing spending and then backfilling new funds by appropriating block rewards. The ECC has embraced a new business model: marketing to the community to get more block rewards. Zcash Dev Fund Opinions - Google Docs

Nobody deny this. So true?!

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It resulted in over 120k new Zcashers around the world. More thousands have watched 7 min of video without expectation of earning. We’re still using the content to educate newcomers. Its good educational content that’s hosted on a trusted 3rd party site. It’s significantly outperformed norms for marketing. The rest is earmarked for something else that we aren’t able to talk about. You may not agree with it, but I stand behind it.

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  • new users or just people that took these ZEC and exchanges them immediatly?
  • somehow this isn’t reflected in the active user/adresses statistics.

The video is good, no doubt. If it’s worth $1-2M is another question, but as it was at least an afford i personally see it as one of the least problems where funding went. The $2M lawsuit is much more concerning as these funds will not result in new Zcashers and not in anything educational…

@daira and I made an initial review pass over this PreZIP. This is not a formal part of the proposal process (in particular, @daira is not acting in hir role as ZIP editor); this is just a joint comment between @daira and myself on the current state of the PreZIP.


This needs to be formalized as a ZIP. See the ZIP guide for details.

Reformatting suggestions:

  • There may be content from the introductions of the Executive Summary and in-depth analysis that is suitable for the Motivation section.
  • The TLDR sections would form the Specification. Their preceding text appears generally more suited for Rationale, which could be handled inline instead of in its own section.
    • Inverting the order of each section, i.e. moving the TLDR content to the top of each section, and then making the rationales subsections, would likely be sufficient.

This is making a statement about others’ opinions that may not be true. It should be removed before this becomes a ZIP draft.

Clarify that the proposal’s intended dev fund precedent results in the dev fund amount, denominated in ZEC, quartering every four years.

The rationale explicitly references the earlier analysis, so we take that it is assumed as background here. Per the following quote from the analysis:

The stated rationale is to not assume the fiat price will stay the same. However, per above, the ZEC-denominated dev fund would quarter every four years, and as the proposal claims it would provide sufficient resources for continued development, it is assuming that the fiat price will increase. For a steady-state dev-fund denominated in fiat, the fiat price would need to quadruple every four years. Contrary to what is stated in the background, this could be considered a very optimistic scenario; it should be explicitly stated in the ZIP draft rather than relying on the assumed background. This enables readers of the ZIP to see what claim is being made.

This would go in the Non-requirements section. It should also be clarified that this means the split is not enforced by the consensus rules or the coinbase outputs (which appears to be implied by this section).

Additionally, as the split is not specified in this proposal, the ZIP needs to either specify where the funds are sent to (e.g. a single address, a rotating set of addresses, a multisig address controlled by ZF and ECC, etc.), or a non-requirement should be added stating that this is out-of-scope (and would need to be addressed by a separate ZIP).

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You do it again, why do you think your opinion is correct? For example, I believe that holding such an action without prior distribution did not make sense, and the action itself did not lead to distribution (price, addresses, transactions), there is no expected effect of rapid growth, I believe that the idea was not successful. Initially, for zcash, it is necessary to develop interest so that people would like to own and use it, and then tell 120,000 around the world that there is such a coin, but it turns out that 120,000 users who cannot use it as it was intended (on the moment of the action there were neither easy wallets, nor terminals for payment, no advantages over others - I am aware of confidentiality, but others have it, albeit worse, and not many will sacrifice convenience for such an advantage). This is a different opinion on the situation, it may also be wrong, but at the moment it is confirmed by the lack of interest after the campaign. Therefore, I do not defend my opinion, I try to evaluate it objectively, and if I see that I am wrong (in fact), then my opinion is wrong and I refuse it, then what is missing now in ECC (in my opinion, I want make mistakes).
You need marketing and not simple advertising, you need to answer why use it Zcash and not something else, how to use it already for the second time, the point is in describing real use cases and not the advantages in the form of confidentiality without infrastructure, because as you rightly noticed on exchanges, it makes no sense use z transactions because the exchange knows its client (a kind of bank for cash), give scenarios for life, try on groups and show advantages, this is marketing, and the video about a coin on a third-party resource is already After taking a growth in the use will that be to find new users and give convenient access to registered (which is why the focus on the dissemination of new exchanges does not work, this is mere speculation, no one uses in life, only testing and transfer between exchanges)

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I agree. The timing for the campaign was not good.
It would have made more sense to invest first into the development of state of the art wallet/s.
The development speed of the reference wallet is pretty slow currently.

@joshs When do you expect the reference wallet to be ready?

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We recently brought an iOS person on board and are actively working with wallet providers. My hope is that the first 3rd party release with the reference wallet implementation will come this year, but it’s up to those third parties. There is good progress and signals.

If you want to follow along: https://chat.zcashcommunity.com/channel/community-wallet-team

Last sprint update from Linda:

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We have addressed a number of these concerns in our most recent, formal development fund proposal that adheres more closely to the ZIP format. [ZIP 1006] Blocktown Development Fund Proposal: 10% to a 2-of-3 multisig with community involved Third Entity

Closed per Blocktown request. Please follow the latest discussion in their most recent thread: [ZIP 1006] Blocktown Development Fund Proposal: 10% to a 2-of-3 multisig with community involved Third Entity