You read my State of the Foundation! Glad you followed those links. I hope you don’t mind following a few more.
Since it’s my opinion, yes, it is true that I feel that way, and those statements are not contradictory. It’s hard for the Foundation to hire the right people without offering the equivalent of “early equity,” but as the past year has (finally) shown with four fantastic engineering hires on the Foundation side it’s not impossible.
Our hiring practices aside, I’m not against upside for ECC employees as I’ve said multiple times here and elsewhere:
Here’s where I still have an issue @mika. In the ECC’s official explanation they said:
However, the Electric Coin Company currently does not see a path to succeed at recruiting and retaining a world-class team, and aligning them around the Zcash mission long-term, if we are constrained by a fiat-denominated funding cap. Unless the Electric Coin Company could find a solution to that issue, we would not accept the funds.
Since ECC wrote “unless they could find a solution to this issue”, I believed it was imperative to brainstorm solutions that would still enable the ECC to accept funds if the community decided they wanted a cap. I encourage you to read my full reply regarding the ECC’s main points, but I’ll quote the germane portion here:
I provided an example of how this solution could work here, and reiterated that it’s possible for employees to still have upside with a cap in other replies.
I asked multiple times for explanations why this solution wouldn’t work, and didn’t get a direct answer until much later in this thread:
@joshs responded here:
I didn’t respond to this comment directly as I wanted the community to move on to focus on polling all available options, but my personal view is that all these issues are manageable within the confines of a cap. Since we’re here now, here’s how I would deal with these issues in the ECC’s shoes:
- Necessary upfront funding of a pool is indeed something that would constrict ECC spending, but it’s manageable by both raising the cap and making promises for existing employees require longer-term vesting while the ECC “saves up” the pool.
- The tipping point could be alleviated by proactively raising the cap, and fully funding the incentive pool is exactly what would need to happen with a cap here.
In other words, it’s harder and it constrains the ECC more — but in my opinion it is still possible to provide long-term ZEC alignment with employees in the presence of a cap. And thus I am still disappointed in their official explanation, particularly since I believed that if a viable solution could be found then the ECC would accept funding with a cap, even with all the constraints it would bring.
That said, the personal, unofficial explanations from @daira, @joshs, and others are much clearer and reasonable to me: they want flexibility not just for employee incentive alignment, but for spending on other initiatives. That makes much more sense to me — as a conscious accountability trade-off as I’ve written above — and is one of the reasons I’m voting for no cap despite my concerns around the official explanation. That is my honest, not-ironic, truth.
Some have privately told me they were surprised and disturbed to see me write about my disappointment about the official explanation. But what would you prefer? That I didn’t challenge the ECC, that I didn’t aim to hold them accountable? That the Foundation didn’t seek to preserve the legitimacy of this discussion and process? That we simply rubber stamped whatever seemed expedient?
Incidentally, do you know what I find more disturbing? After an extraordinarily difficult, protracted, and involved community discussion around dev fund proposals, we are finally reaching some degree of convergence. That convergence is at risk thanks to the calls to participate in a fundamentally flawed staked poll process to “share coinholder voice” about the latest poll because it’s “permissionless and no one can stop them.”
Just because it’s permisionless and on a blockchain doesn’t make it valuable. Even without borrowing ZEC, if the turnout is within an order of magnitude of the last poll, those “coinholder voices” can be easily drowned out by the cacophonous sonic booms of ZEC associated with the ECC or Foundation.
I don’t think either organization should view the results of that poll as anything more than a novelty until a staked-vote process can be constructed that resolves the issues brought up countless times before in the last thread. I fear that someone will aim to use the results of that easily manipulated poll to challenge the results of the Helios vote, which combined a broad swath of Zcash community members from this active forum and the community advisory panel, wherein only a minority of the participants are associated with the ECC or Zcash Foundation.
My opinion above is again borne out of a desire to keep us all accountable. As I replied to you above:
I believe that deeply, and I can understand (and appreciate) your desire to keep me accountable. It’s critical that we do so; one of the best parts of the Zcash community is our ability to have reasoned, civil debate. That’s what helped us get through the trademark dispute, what has motivated this dev fund debate, and what will steer us in future crises.
The responsibility can be frustrating and hard for me, and it routinely strains relationships that I value deeply, but when it comes down to it I value my duty to the Foundation and the Zcash community more — and it comes from the same belief that many at the ECC have expressed so eloquently about the long-term societal benefit for truly private, digital, uncensorable money, and a belief that no single entity (whether the Foundation, ECC, or anyone else) should have unilateral control over that future.
On that note, I was really encouraged to see @zooko’s thoughtful considerations around converting the ECC to a nonprofit; it was a great post that I feel was lost in a flurry of other activity, and I encourage everyone to read it.