I reject the assertion that we will not act with integrity. And I in no way feel like I’m in a corner.
Prior to the action that I took last year to dissolve the trademark agreement, consensus was solely determined by ECC and ZF - really the two leaders of the respective orgs. The ECC’s determination of community consensus was arbitrary. The ZF’s determination was based on the ZCAP vote. When I left ECC in 2023, I wrote a long post about the governance model and why it needed to change. When I agreed to come back as ECC’s CEO later that year, I did so with the board’s understanding that I would push for significant changes in governance and push for decentralization. True to my word, I killed the trademark agreement with ZF, rejected direct funding (to ECC’s own detriment) and, as imperfect as the structure is today, here we are, working to improve it, using the model we have to get to a better one moving forward.
Eliminating the trademark agreement opened things up and decentralized decision-making. As there is no formal on-chain voting mechanism in place today, we are doing our best to reach the right conclusion about the community’s will. In my opinion, coin holder votes are a significant part of that.
Ultimately, my opinion only matters a little. If I were to try to push the core devs to implement a change in zcashd that did not have clear consensus, they would refuse. If they did not refuse and ECC implemented changes in zcashd that the community didn’t agree with, a couple of things would happen: we would undermine our credibility with the community, and someone would likely fork the repo and advocate for node operators to use that version instead of ECC’s.
ECC has a voice, but are not the decision-makers on what software is run or considered to be Zcash.