Sure, I hope this helps @aristarchus see my perspective as well. It’s a matter of when you account for the ZEC you’re disbursing to employees, and whether you’re building a ZEC “pool” for employee retention.
In the current proposal, ECC receives 7656 ZEC per month subject to the cap. Let’s say the average exchange rate is $50 USD / ZEC when this starts…so we’re not close to the cap. In what I’m describing ECC would consider some amount of ZEC spent for a collective pool for employees every month. For simplicity let’s assume its $100k a month, which would be 2000 ZEC. The ECC would incur a cost of $100k against their cap to supply 2000 ZEC into this retention pool every month.
Again to keep things simple, let’s just say it stays at $50 USD / ZEC for a full year. Without any contracts you make to employees, you’d have 24000 ZEC in this pool which would not be subject to any cap, since you already incurred the cost to fund the pool early on.
Throughout the year, you hire 4 employees, and guarantee them each 4000 ZEC over a four year vesting cycle. You’d be able to guarantee they have the full rights to that ZEC since you already incurred the cost and couldn’t use that ZEC for any other purpose. You’d have spent 16000 ZEC from that pool in present and future obligations, and have 8000 ZEC left at the end of the year. If employees decide to leave, you can put their unvested ZEC back into the collective pool, which still wouldn’t be subject to the cap. I think this method of accounting is generally a better practice anyway since you incur costs earlier and it’s more conservative.
If we get close to the cap, either the ECC modifies its budget to add more to the pool or we can use the process in modified ZIP 1012 to raise it.
Therefore in my view the proposal as written encourages financial restraint but does not prevent ECC employee upside. As much as I appreciate @tromer’s compromise I don’t really think it’s necessary. If the cap is too low then we should consider higher starting options, or see if community members want to eliminate it entirely. But I don’t think the concept of a monthly cap is at odds with employee retention and incentive alignment (for either the ECC or ZF).