December 7th, 2018 - Weekly update (Fun week edition)

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This week concludes a 2-week engineering sprint. You can check out last week’s update for recent updates on community and communications.

This week’s update is slightly different for a couple reasons: we postponed the engineering update from Thanksgiving week and did a larger update last week. This past week was also fun week at Zcash Company where employees chose a project to hack on the entire week. So instead of official team updates, we’ll share some of the fun week projects.

Note: Zcashd 2.0.2 was released at the beginning this week. If you haven’t updated your software, we highly recommend doing so. Read more about changes in the 2.0.2 release announcement.

Fun week projects
With permission by individuals from the company working on fun week projects, here’s a list of some of what’s being hacked on this week:

  • "How Cryptocurrency Exchanges Work” - a presentation/demo with some tips on trading on exchanges
  • “What if Zcash was a city?” - A short video exploring the concept of Zcash as a city
  • “Link PTO request form to the company calendar” - Linking the paid-time-off request form to the internal Zcash Company calendar so people don’t have to put PTO info in a bunch of places
  • “Create Content Calendar” - Create a calendar that integrates with planned content to coordinate authors, reviewers and deadlines
  • “Matryoshka curves” - Creating arbitrarily-nested pairing-friendly curves that don’t form cycles
  • “Hack Zcash” - Look for security bugs anywhere you might find some, or try to break into the company’s infrastructure from the outside.
  • “Unify RPC documentation” - Combine bitcoin RPCs into the extended Zcash API for merging into Zcash docs so we can move away from linking to third-party Bitcoin references

Edit: a quick reminder to the community for next Friday: Technical AMA w/ Zcash team December 14, 2018 noon PST

That’s all for this week! :heart: :zcash: :sapling:
We’ll resume our regularly formatted updates next week!

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With the market in a current downturn and with the recent closing of ETC. How much cash reserve does Zcash have to pay its employees? 3 months, 6 months?

I know you guys were running when Zcash was this price before; however you had fewer employees, and this does change the bottom line.

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ETC never had a funding system like Zcash does. At 10% of the block reward and current Zcash prices, you have 120$/hr generated and employees only work 40 out of 168, so you’re getting 20160 a week or 504$ per working hour. At 40$/h average employees, that’s 11 people or so (with everything rounded down) and that’s before any additional fundraising or profits coming from other sources (i.e. insider trading). All in all, Zcash is in a significantly more healthy position than ETC ever was.

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i laughed out loud reading this

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Given Zooko’s view of transparency the idea of an earning spending report isn’t too far-fetched (although they aren’t legally required to do anything like that)(the report above is fairly comprehensive)
Also it’s more of a thing between the payer and the payee

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Stumbled across some resources that may (not) be useful in hacking the site (identify vulnerabilities)