Hello!
Zcash is gaining traction once again. We are observing how individuals and dev teams start to be interested in Zcash Development.
What’s ahead of them? Is it a joyful experience? or is it a “death by a thousand paper cuts” one?
Survivorship Bias
You may have seen this picture in hundreds of motivational BS posts over internet: twitter, linkedin, facebook, hotmail forwarded PPTs (if you are over 30 you know what I’m talking about). IT shows the drawing of a WWII bomber plane that had returned to based after being under enemy fire, where red dots are the bullet holes that these planes presented in average.
What parts of the plane would you strengthen?
The survivorship bias in a nutshell is an analysis bias that comes from making conclusions from a partial sample instead of the whole. In this case, making conclusions from the point of view of planes that made it back instead of also considering those who hadn’t.
My belief is that at this very moment, the Zcash developer ecosystem consists of survivors. That’s of ENORMOUS strength. We have the epic, the experience, the courage, the battle stories from the very trenches, THE LORE, THE MEMETIC!!.. But it’s also a double-edge sword. The list of teams and individuals that have attempted to build on ZEC, failed and left is longer than we would have hoped. I also believe that Unstoppable Private Money needs large, distributed, decentralized but yet coordinated, therefore unstoppable Developer Community.
ATH in collaboration. Then what?
Last Zcon (Zcon VI) I presented this idea which I premiered at Z|ECC Summit.
We are definitely ATH in collaboration. But we are too few people.
How to power up our Developer eXperience so that the “privacy curious”, become devs “privacy advocates”?
How can we 2, 5, 10, 100x our developer community?
In my presentation I put some ideas on this slide.
What success cases do we have? I think @ZecHub is our leading case. And we need to double down our efforts to expand our knowledge base in a decentralized, but yet coordinated way.
How? My presentation has a few ideas. Whatever that is, the stepping stone of any idea is the commitment of all the Zcash Orgs into this DX improvement mission, which involves not only the intent, but also resources.
Let’s think together. We have best Zero-Knowledge cryptography in the world, let’s make it have the Developer Experience Zcash deserves (and that crypto desperately needs!)
Onward!