@mhluongo, responding to a couple of things you said during the Protocol Hangout today:
[the easing function ensures that] the Foundation doesn’t make gobs and gobs of money
The Foundation is a nonprofit, and legally required to put this money to well-specified use. Moreiver, it uses some of this money to support grants to many third parties. So it’s weird to consider it a threat for this entity to have excess resources, but then not cap the USD received by external for-profit entrepreneurs, for which none of the above applies.
Also, you mentioned that as an entrepreneur, you’re uncomfortable with the Zcash Foundation grant process, even if the grant amounts are scaled to the magnitude your team requires. Can you please explain what are the problems? Let’s try to fix them within grant program!
Plus, to be blunt: for millions of dollars a year, it’s fine if funding candidates would need to sweat a little and prepare some written plans in the form of a grant proposal.
How many of the staff/advisors/board members at the foundation are being paid currently?
What’s the average % of the used funds for foundation wages/expeneses and % that is used in the grant proposal program?
And i’am curious to see how much has been spent last or two, three months ago for grant proposals?
I understand the Foundation is a non-profit. I’m describing a governance mechanism that’s bigger than the ZF – assuming the ZF will always allocate funds well, especially if the funds are on the order of many millions per month, is optimistic.
I’m working on a more robust response here, but to be clear, I’m not suggesting grant writing is hard. I’ve raised millions of dollars, and gone through far more significant diligence processes in my career than the ZF grant process. I’m not afraid to write a grant – I believe it’s the wrong tool for the job.
If you don’t intuitively understand an entrepreneur’s discomfort building a business model chasing grants, I suggest you step back and question why, rather than assuming incompetence. I’ll continue struggling to better explain it.
As a stepping stone, on the call last night the analogy to “hiring someone to tell you what your problems are, and fix them” versus “putting out an RFP” is a great way to look at dev fee recipients vs grant recipients discussion. Sometimes you know what problem you want solved; other times, you hire experts to identify problems for you and fix them.
How many of the staff/advisors/board members at the foundation are being paid currently?
All eight employees receive salaries. I don’t know what our arrangement is with Eran, and that’d be his info to disclose (or not) anyway. None of the board members are paid.
What’s the average % of the used funds for foundation wages/expeneses and % that is used in the grant proposal program?
We’re going to release our 2018 990 soon, so you’ll get more details about last year soon. Also: Expect another “State of the Foundation” post from Josh in the next couple of months, reviewing 2019 and forecasting 2020. That will include budgetary info.
And i’am curious to see how much has been spent last or two, three months ago for grant proposals?
This is public. I don’t think we’ve made any grants outside of ZF Grants since the platform was debuted.
I concur with Matt. It’s worth noting that Zcash, as a project / ecosystem, has to compete for high-level devs or teams. Those people have options, so we need to offer them something good. One-off grants are just not enticing enough. We should view this more like a recruiting process, where we try to sell devs on joining Zcash, not the other way around.
In terms of outside contributions, Zcash has coasted for a long time on the fascinating technology. But we need to appeal to devs and teams based on their own rational self-interest — economic self-interest. Otherwise we’re stuck with a motley crew of nerds (which I love! but we need real businesses to come work on Zcash, given our goals for the project).
Edit: Getting in close to the ground floor, making a skin-in-the-game bet that working on Zcash will result in status and money for you and your firm, is very different & much more exciting than taking a contract from ZF.
@mhluongo, I very much look for an explanation of why the existing grant program doesn’t match your needs. I didn’t mean to imply incompetence, but I must admit that indeed, reluctance to do the hard work of grant writing (most of which is really project planning) did cross my mind as an explanation, in the absence of others.
In particular, this one doesn’t make sense to me:
The Zfnd grant programs (past and present) have been very much on the side you want: asking people to come up with any important problem/need/opportunity related to Zcash + a way to solve it. The proposer is free to identify and such goal, as long as they make a good case for it. And the Foundation indeed ended up funding a whole lot of projects that it never even thought to ask for.
Within its grant program, the closest the Foundation has come to “hire someone to solve a specific problem” is having a page with some open-ended ideas for grants. (And there’s also a mechanism in the platform to issue targeted Call for Proposals, but it’s never been used yet.)
I think it’s less that grants are hard or whatever, and more, why would you settle for a grant when some other ecosystem is offering you an arrangement with way more leverage and freedom?
I don’t understand this argument. This proposals calls for
“outside development fee” [to] development teams, chosen semi-annually by the Foundation
How is this any more enticing, or any different, than the same team getting funded to do the same work with the same amount of effort and uncertainty, by sequence of “one-off grants” of the same ZEC amount? In both cases, the teams have to show up every 6 months with plans justifying the continued receipt of funds. Which sounds good to me! Do we want something else?
A one-off $10k grant isn’t interesting to my business. A $50k grant, despite being real money, is… well, if I’m going to reorient part of my business, hire, train, roadmap, plan – it’s not going to cut it. There are too many other opportunities in the space that will pay an order of magnitude more than that. On the other hand, $50k or $100k a month sustainably is an amount that’s material and that arguably justifies my opportunity cost.
It also is worth pointing out that larger “grant”-style programs exist in government contracting, largely won by huge contractors rather than small or medium sized teams. I hope the misaligned incentives and poor outcomes there are clear, though I’m not an expert by any means.
A grant is pretty similar to a standard contract. We negotiate XYZ specific deliverables.
What Matt proposes is, IMO, more like allocating a revenue stream, and then judging based on results.
Analogy: Grants are like handing over “honey do” list of chores. What Matt is proposing is like saying, “Clean up the house.” More autonomy and room for judgment calls.
I don’t see why this is an issue. I would be 100% comfortable with the Zfnd grant program paying an outside team $50k or $100k/month, through a series of semi-annual grants, if that team make a good case for its use of these funds and show ongoing success. I would also lobby the Zcash Foundation board to ensure sufficient funds are allocated to the grant program.
It also is worth pointing out that larger “grant”-style programs exist in government contracting, largely won by huge contractors rather than small or medium sized teams. I hope the misaligned incentives and poor outcomes there are clear, though I’m not an expert by any means.
Sure, that too happens. But million-dollar-scale grants are also used to fund research by small academic teams (I would know, my team has been on the receiving end of several such grants). In fact, most academic research is funded this way, from both government and charitable sources. The work is typically determined by the proposer (within some confines), and the researchers typical get extreme leeway in execution, and often pivot as circumstances call for. This is the model I have in mind.
A grant is pretty similar to a standard contract. We negotiate XYZ specific deliverables.
Analogy: Grants are like handing over “honey do” list of chores.
Some grants are like that. Many aren’t. The ones I have in mind here are more like eating at a restaurant: they convince you to walk in and choose the expensive dish, and you agree to pay them in hope that it will be tasty. They may even show you a picture. But then you put your trust in their execution, because yes of course you can’t write a spec for a good meal, and maybe they ran out of parsley today. If you’re disappointed, you don’t eat there again.
Matt, to keep the conversation civil and productive, I suggest explaining your views rather than relying on demagogy and people’s imagination (and then faulting them for guessing wrong). In this case: would you care to explain the pertinent difference between funding open-ended academic research for the public good, vs. open-ended Zcash R&D for the public good?
Also, please address my question above. None of this discussion makes sense, if you say X is good and Y is bad when X=Y.
Let’s say you have a belief, which we can label A (for instance, “middle school students should wear uniforms”), and that you’re in disagreement with someone who believes some form of ¬A. Double cruxing with that person means that you’re both in search of a second statement B, with the following properties:
You and your partner both disagree about B as well (you think B, your partner thinks ¬B).
The belief B is crucial for your belief in A; it is one of the cruxes of the argument. If it turned out that B was not true, that would be sufficient to make you think A was false, too.
The belief ¬B is crucial for your partner’s belief in ¬A, in a similar fashion.
In the example about school uniforms, B might be a statement like “uniforms help smooth out unhelpful class distinctions by making it harder for rich and poor students to judge one another through clothing,” which your partner might sum up as “optimistic bullshit.” Ideally, B is a statement that is somewhat closer to reality than A—it’s more concrete, grounded, well-defined, discoverable, etc. It’s less about principles and summed-up, induced conclusions, and more of a glimpse into the structure that led to those conclusions.
[…]
If B, then A. Furthermore, if ¬B, then ¬A. You’ve both agreed that the states of B are crucial for the states of A, and in this way your continuing “agreement to disagree” isn’t just “well, you take your truth and I’ll take mine,” but rather “okay, well, let’s see what the evidence shows.” Progress! And (more importantly) collaboration!
Edit: As a general approach, doesn’t need to be formulaic.
@tromer is the voice of reason when it comes to this particular proposal.
Let me get this straight, @mhluongo, you think it’s a good idea to siphon off 50% of a new dev fund to teams that won’t even be working on Zcash full time?
As I read through this thread, all I could hear in the back of my head, over and over again, was the voice of @secparam saying, “Beware the governance science fair, AKA governance fair.”
I think it’s a good idea to attract other teams to Zcash, and decentralize the project. This proposal leaves team selection to the ZF, giving them a ton of latitude for additional legal agreements, etc. How can I make that more clear?
Regarding involving more teams: If we don’t value decentralization in this discussion, that’s okay… it just won’t be a project I contribute to. Continuing to give the ECC an overly privileged position, without a clear path to growing other teams’ involvement, will leave Zcash as a centralized project.
Cool shirt! But bad take. This proposal is about involving more teams and growing the talent pool, not “a Go implementation” – that’s a straw man. Happy to share a robust proposal of what our team would like to do with Zcash over the next couple years, though I’d rather wait until this discussion is resolved to avoid poisoning the well.
I’d be interested in where you think this proposal can be improved. How are @tromer’s perspectives “the voice of reason”, exactly?
Agreed! That’s the intent of this proposal as well, I just don’t want to exclude cross-chain work. If we can convince strong dev teams from eg Ethereum to work on Zcash, so much the better.
I am running out of patience with the back-and-forth assumptions of bad faith in this thread. You can’t read each other’s minds, so stop acting like it. Enough with the facile passive-aggressive asides — you’re not clever, you’re failing to exercise professional self-control.* Knock it off.
*I’ve been there, on this very forum in fact! High-stakes conflicts are always stressful and upsetting. We’re all humans and therefore fallible. However, my role as a moderator is to notice when the conversation is going in an unproductive direction so that I can course-correct.
Feel free to call me out in the future if you notice similar behavior on my part, or you can message one of the other mods if you’re not comfortable doing it directly.
