Community Polling on Funding Model ZIPs

Governance
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I have my view on the “morality” of the situation and who “ought” to have representation and to what proportion, but the reality is that Zcash exists within context of a system, capitalism, that runs on explicit financial value.

No project that aims to be a store of value/means of exchange can survive and maintain itself without compensating whoever contributes to it not to mention actually functioning as a store of value/means of exchange. Both of these aims are contingent on bringing in and maintaining investors within the ecosystem. There alternative is that there will be little to no funding for the project and it withers and dies.

Increasing and maintaining the financial value of Zcash by returning value to investors, keeping in mind that large investors tend to avoid projects over which they can assert no meaningful control, is the single most important and necessary factor to ensure the long term survival of Zcash.

So unless someone can convince us all that engineers know better than investors how to increase the value of Zcash in a sustainable way, I maintain that we are never going to achieve our aims as a community without giving investors a formal and central role in governance weighted by actual holdings.

I personally believe that people who can only be partially described as investors should also have a significant voice, understanding that most, if not all of us here are storing value in Zcash at least to some extent. I’m also convinced that guard-rails to protect against malign actors need to be in place, which will dilute coinholder control to some degree. But I would have much more confidence in a simple system that just gave coin-weighted holders 100% of governance power than what currently exists now, or proposals that treat coinholders as just one voice amongst many.

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43

The most self-destructive thing you can do as a system that depends on public determination of its value is sit back and say “ehh, the public is full of #!@# and doesn’t know value when it sees it”.

ECC, ZF and other contributing devs/engineers deserve all the respect in the world. They have given us this revolutionary technology that makes pretty much every other crypto project out there look silly. Sure, there’s more Zcash and should do, but ZEC, as it in fact exists today, is the most powerful and useful thing in crypto since Bitcoin, and arguable the best thing from a social good perspective.

And here we are after 8 years, at #101 in market cap behind “Bonk”, “Pepe” and dozens of other coins that were created as a joke and do nothing in particular. Not to mention countless other projects that do nothing meaningful other than better enable mass surveillance and social control by powerful, malign interests.

Something isn’t working, and I don’t think it’s that we need more cowbell.

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44

But 8 years is nothing in the big scheme of things. Especially when you are talkimg about finding the way to harness technology that will change how everyone on earth buys and sells stuff.

Look at Amazon. It was founded in 1994 and by the height of the dotcom boom in 1999 it traded at around $5 a share. By January 2002, (8 years after Bezos founded his world changing project) it was trading at circa $0.45. This was not because the value proposition had changed or really in anyway directly to do with Amazon the company. This was merely a reflection of the bursting of the dotcom bubble after the initial over exuberance at the potential for internet to change the world had worn off in investors’ [often fickle] minds.

Today Amazon trades at around $194 per share and (for good or ill) has completely changed the way the world buys and sells stuff. But it took the best part of 31 years and a once in a 100 years pandemic lockdown to completley solidify Amazon’s position and to fully unlock all the potential that had been brewing within the project since 1994.

Zcash has the potential to be as transformative for global payments as amazon was for buying and selling. But anyone getting exasperated at insufficient progress and low token prices after only 8 years just means they dont understand the time horizons baked into the cake of the opportunity we are investing in and sadly that means such people are likely to sell too soon just like the Amazon investors who sold too soon in the early 2000s.

Just like Amazon, zcash showed early promise which was reflected at times in zcash being high up the list by market cap. The fact thay zcash now languishes far below joke meme coins like Bonk is not however reflective of specific failures within zcash, but rather is reflective of a poorly functioning, badly regulated, crypto market and wider capital markets which seek immediate returns on capital with little interest in the long term objectives or potential of the vehicles in which they are investing.

Just look at the news about encryption and privacy - all over the world today this is under attack from all sides. Zcash is explicitly tied to this and thus it should be obvious to all that as far as investors are concerned 2025 is for privacy projects what the early 2000s were for dotcom businesses.

If Zcash market cap is below a daft meme coin’s market cap this just shows how irrational the market is. It tells me to sell Bonk and buy ZEC. It tells me to sell PEPE and buy ZEC. And when P/E ratios look like they do today this even tells me to sell AMZN and buy ZEC!

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45

I had the same analogy in mind with Amazon.

Tech takes time to mature, so do the macro conditions around it.

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46

@gigantes and @zecmec I think you may be missing the central point that I was making. The analogy is imperfect (seeing as how a ZEC is not a share of profit in a common enterprise), but how is Amazon governed?

It’s been publicly traded since 1997 and is controlled entirely by its largest investors/shareholders.

I’m not advocating that we go for that governance model. But surely there’s something to take away from it.

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47

I appreciate your work here, but I’m getting convinced by the day that full control is a disaster. I will probably vote no on anything 100%.

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48

Exactly, if we are comparing Amazon to Zcash then we should also take a look at the decision making process. Of course Amazon shareholders are limited in their powers. But they have rights such as electing the board of directors (seen as representatives of their shareholders) and voting on major business decisions (e.g. M&A, amendments to its incorporation articles) depending on share class and amount. Some of the rights/votes shareholders can express are non-binding, while some are binding. Some delegate their voting power through proxies, some have enough shares to move the needle themselves. In a capitalistic society often times $$$ has power - you can dislike it, but it is what it is.

Now in comparison Zcash coin holders currently have no power at all. They provide fiat like an ATM betting on the future of ZEC as a technology/SoV/medium of exchange. But to express their opinion they have to go in this forum and argue with people who might have 0 ZEC with no skin in the game. Sure time commitment and effort is the backbone of our progress but once again, without these people who are willing to exchange their fiat to magic internet coins and giving ZEC an actual value in the form of ZEC/USD, no developer would be able to eat and pay his rent. Most of the contributors will not work for free, right? (I am speaking about block reward recipients and I am aware that there is the possibility of external $ funding or even philantropists).

Also do not get it twisted. I am super happy that we have independent professionals like hanh who are pushing forward in topics like coin holder voting. And I am glad that we have a funding mechanism (ZCG) in place to fund such bright minds. But the respect for our contributors should be mirrored with respect to our coin holders as they are the ones risking their financials assets and providing the liquidity.

We should start by having a voting mechanism in place with good UX integrated in our best wallets such as Zashi, Ywallet, Trezor, Keystone, Zingo - even if it is non-binding. We can figure the weighting out later. But right now ZEC holders have no power and no voice - this needs to change!

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49

The lack of interest seems to contradict this. Even doze wont participate, so is it education or do folks simply not care? Someone has to build and test the magic vote box.

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50

I cannot speak for others but I am excited to test out what hanh has cooked up.

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51

Yes sure. I don’t mind ZEC holders assuming a role similar to shareholders.
But just to be clear, shareholders vote once, maybe twice a year on average.
And they don’t vote for the brand of the new coffee machine or where it should be purchased, or if a new secretary should be hired.

Also regarding coin voting, as crypto goes more and more mainstream, people will be involved in 10’s of different projects. So if every project implements coin voting, it will start to be very cumbersome for individuals to manage. And they probably don’t want to wake up one day to see one of their investments go to zero because of some whale acting irrationnaly when they weren’t paying attention.

All in all in crypto as it stands today, I see very little demand for coin voting as the abysmal participation in votes in various projects clearly show.

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Hi @Angst01

Actually I was intending to respond to @outgoing.doze 's earlier comments, rather than disagreeing with yours.

Moreover I agree with your point that my analagy is imperfect in terms of comparing the nature of ZEC as being (in my view) more akin to owning a scarce digital commodity as opposed to owning a share of Amazon which confers rights to a share of the company’s profits.

Having said this, I was not in fact trying to make a direct analagy between ZEC and Amazon shares in terms of what ownership of one or the other represents. It was more that I was exploring the analogous relationship between the motivations of sellers of Amazon stock post dot com crash and sellers of ZEC the commodity in 2025 during this current period that is characterised by permanently negative establishment sentiment towards the concept of privacy in global society. My point was just that regardless of who was running Amazon in 2001 or who is running ECC AND ZF in 2025, in both instances these very different entities were and are at the mercy of events and far greater machinations than themselves have any meaningful control over. The respective asset prices were and are dictated more by external factors over which neither Bezos nor The ECC or ZF have much, if any control.

Another example of my point is Gordon Brown selling around 400 tonnes (around half the UK’s gold reserves) around the turn of the millenium for an average price of $275 per ounce. History has shown this to have been a stupendous blunder and the $3.5billion the UK received at the time would have been closer to $40billion if they had sold today. This shows that even boomers running governements do so at the mercy of events over which they have no real control. Brown and New Labour thought EU and US treasuries were safer assets than gold, so they sold gold and bought the shitCoin Euro deniminated debt instead. In the end reality has a way of catching up with even the most deluded government actors. So shall it be with PEPE, so shall it be with Blackrock’s Bitcoin, so shall it be with BONK. In the end markets will find an equilibrium and they will price things with genuine value and utility at their fair value. Zcash is suffering today not because zcashers and zcash devs are not doing things right, but more because everyone else is doing it wrong and piling money into dumbass projects for all the wrong reasons. This is exactly NOT the time to deviate from our principled cypherPunk strategy, but instead to double down on doing what we know is the right thing to do.

And so in response to your point “something isnt working and i dont think it’s that we need more cowbell” I think my analagy is pertinent. I agree that something is missing. But it is is not something that the zcash community is missing. My contention is that what’s missing is a secular bull market in individual freedom that prioritizes the rights of the individual over those of the corporation and the state. What’s missing is the kind of grown-up, well informed, public good driven regulatory oversight that lays the foundations for great societies to bequeath functioning and sustainable economic models to future generations.

In the continuing global absence of these things, and in a world in which we continue to elect charlatans like Trump, Biden, Macron, Johnson, Obama, Blair, the Clintons et al (all of whom are simply the same breed of nest feathering opportunists draped in alternating team colors) zcash and projects like it will forever be at the mercy of the same rigged economic model that accrues wealth and success arbitrarily in response to the whim of whichever pig’s snout is closest to the trough on any given news cycle.

What I have always loved about zcash is not the programmed scarcity of 21 million tokens, nor the devfund nor even the industry leading zk tech it can boast. Rather I have always been drawn to this community of people who have a common set of principles and intend to use their prowess in building this technology to accomplish (or die trying to accomplish) this set of goals which are based on the very straight forward principles that are dear to us all.

I just think that all we zcashers need to do in order to thrive in the long term is to do the exact opposite of Gordon Brown. Don’t be dazzled by the purveyors of less worthy tech, dont become envious of the riches being gorged on by others who have compromised their principles for a shot at the quick big bucks and above all don’t be duped into selling your actual shielded digital gold for the kind of worthless shit-tokens the UK was duped into exchanging its gold for 25 years ago.

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53

Totally agree with @spectre re. building in Coin holder voting mechanisms into wallets. More decentralisation & more accountability all in one go. These are also the kinds of improved functionality of the network that will in turn engender more liquidity from new investors looking to convert fiat into crypto in a secure and shielded manner.

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54

This debate is not about funding. This debate is about values. Values that must be defended because it’s those that the project are radiating.

To me, @joshs and @aquietinvestor have made statements that contradict each others regarding the place of ZEC holders, but @joshs has the palm of the most conflicting one between this proposal and his very recent comment:

“I believe that coin holders should determine if and how dev funds are distributed.” – Building Consensus. ECC Update - #5 by joshs

I honestly don’t know either why @aquietinvestor offered to help me, given he his behind this very proposal that I am so starkly against, but here we are.

I’m curious where this goes. The ZEC price may crash for a while, but ultimately, once we get PoS, I’m confident it won’t be possible to take advantage of ZEC holders anymore.

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Honestly, I don’t get the logic of most of the people in this thread. You guys are saying that holding coins is not the only way to contribute, and I get that.
But do you think that you would still be here if the coin was at $0.05 ? If yes, why don’t you join ycash? It has the same privacy functionality since it is a fork of zcash and none of the devfund drama (there is no devfund).

To the people who are paid directly or indirectly by the devfund, well, this money comes from the coin holders. They pay your salary since there is no source of revenue. Not doing what they want is like telling your boss that you don’t want to do what they pay you for. You will get fired, won’t you? How is it different here?

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56

Values. Credibility.

We don’t look good under the current leadership.

ZF and ECC want to tarnish their reputation, that’s fine. I don’t want them to helm the dev fund because it’s just not their place to do it, but also because the ZEC holders reputation gets tarnished along with theirs.

Ameen eats BS for breakfast, it’s his specialty. He’s annoyingly good at that.

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57

Even so, if this model is chosen (and it probably won’t happen), the community has absolutely nothing to fear. I’ve already written in the neighboring thread, but it’s not lazy to repeat it as many times as you want. Zcash is the only project on the crypto market that was launched with an information furor, and its issue - all of it - went through the free market from the first day. No presales, no pre-mines, no silence period. You won’t find anything else like it in the first hundred coins.

This is the main reason why people who have ZEC are interested in its development and they will vote in a way that does not harm the project. There is no one on this forum who wants to harm Zcash. There is no one among the whales who wants to harm Zcash either. Give people the opportunity to choose, don’t think that everyone outside this forum is a fool who can’t choose the right path.

This one should be a stakeholder model, in one form or another. But not a zBlock. A block is when something is fenced off from something. Blocs, it’s NATO, it’s sanctions and other kinds of blocks that are afraid of something. Who are we afraid of? The people who support zcash with their money? Where do these thoughts even come from?

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58

I want coin voters to have a voice, just not 100%.

Who are coin holders afraid of? Join the forums… make your voice heard?

OR

They can create a vote app, like hahn did, but then we have folks like doze who think its a shame because the dev fund was used to pay for the work?

The show continues :cowboy_hat_face:

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59

Sure, and they can leave at anytime if they feel like their “Money” isnt being spent correctly.

Two way street, either party can leave at anytime, for any reason, which I think is rather beautiful.

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60

It doesn’t work that way. It’s like telling people: when you’re a congressman, that’s when we’ll listen to you.

Well, no. Look, what we end up approving has consequences. It’s broader implications than it seems. It’s going to be discussed again on Twitter, after the headlines in crypto media about the Zcash community approving… This generates so much negativity every time. It’s fodder for haters, it’s all been choking us for years.

To avoid that, let’s just do the right thing that will be right across a wide range of people. Not just on this forum. We need to do the right things without reservations.

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61

I hate to break it to you, but no matter the outcome, headlines will never be positive,folks will still be critical. Looking for approval on the outside is a black hole. You either believe or you dont. Most are here for the money, which is why sentiment sucks.

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