Defund Zcash Foundation from the devfund

General
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Hello dear community,

I want to kickstart the process of defunding Zcash foundation from the devfund. I believe the foundation is using devfund community money for non neutral purposes (politically loaded agenda) as well as unethical process for hiring employees.

Zcash is private money, free for all, but the way the foundation is acting is contrary to its ethics and against the community in my opinion.
Zf is being used and abused by a certain group of people I will simply refer as “bluehair/pronouns” people and clearly stated Zf don’t have Zcash community holders interest at heart.
I would like to see if others agree and ultimately submit the Zf to community voting.

Please advise.
PS: This is not a troll post.

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Hi joris,
I think it is important for individuals or groups to make opinions and pass judgement on core components of the community. If you feel this strongly, can you explain in more detail your concerns? Do you have any direct material or inside knowledge which could be shared?
Possible suggestions:
a) Communicate to each ZF board member to see if there are any goverance issues
b) Try to become elected/appointed to the ZF board
c) Communicate directly with Dodger about your concerns & issues
d) Publish your own action plan for how you would move forward.

Thanks

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I feel compelled to respond to this since I was a member of ZF who recently quit and there might be confusion that I am still at ZF.

I’ve made comments on this forum recently that some may deem inappropriate if I were a member of ZF. I am no longer at the Foundation as I resigned at the beginning of August.

Part of the reason I resigned was so that I could freely address my concerns as someone who holds Zcash, without letting that reflect on the Foundation. My comments on this forum have not necessarily been popular. They may have carried a bit of frustration… but they’ve always come from a well intentioned place as far as Zcash is concerned.

If you’re referencing my hiring by saying ZF has an unethical hiring process, I think that is quite unfair to ZF. I would be more than happy to ask @admin to anonymize this account and going forward I will simply sell all my Zcash and move away from this community, even in the capacity of a community member. There are other privacy coins.

ZF has the community’s interests at heart and I can say that with certainty even as an ex-employee. Rather than accuse them of having bad intentions and push to defund them when they’re doing so much good work, a healthier approach would be to raise your concerns, assume good faith, and give them an opportunity to respond.

Part of the reason I actually left ZF was the frustration of seeing how much good work ZF does while constantly coming under fire from the community as though they’re these terrible villains with self interests. It was demoralising for me personally and it couldn’t be further from true.

So please note, I’m not at the Foundation anymore. The hiring process was quite ethical and included 3 interviews as well as a take home assignment. Ultimately I felt that having a voice as a zodler mattered more than being an employee of ZF.

I’ll repeat again that if this is an issue, I’ll be more than happy to sell every bit of Zcash I own and move on from this community, fully.

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There is nothing personnal in my post, there is just a pattern of failing the zcash community to the benefit of a handful of group of people that by no mean represent the community.

Zf has a long long history of failing at many levels, and the time has come that we ask the question of disolving that entity that shows the characteristics of a parasite. Gavigan and the zcon panel openly spitting at the zcash community was the trigger to raise the merit of funding Zf by community funds.

Projects succeed, others fails. I’m afraid Zf falls in that category and Zcash community deserve a stellar and faithful devfund recipient.

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I don’t keep track of everything, but I do have in mind Michelle’s comments about Zfnd and the many frustration of ZOMG members about the foundation.
The foundation also coopts employees based on social characteristics (bluehair/pronouns) instead of competency.
Zebra node delivery is never ending and its cost is astronomical. We need Senior staff engineers with proven track record that can actually solve issue and deliver code. I have no recollection of Zfnd employee that offered help in solving current Zcash scalability problems.
The communication of Zf is disastrous and goes against Zcash community

I encourage anybody with relevant anecdotes or metarials to post in here

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Is it possible to fund ZF similar to grants, instead of just recieving their % of the mining tax automatically?

That could be a solution to align their funding with their work in a way that theres the option to approve or disapprove based on the best interests of the community/holders.

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Defund everything by not permitting another block reward extension.

I imagine if a vote of no confidence were held today, everything except MGRC would be defunded.

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(Speaking for myself as a Zcash engineer, not ECC)

And indeed, that is what we have. I have zero qualms with the competence of the ZF engineers or the quality of the code they deliver, and very happily collaborate with them on a variety of areas within the Zcash ecosystem.

Creating an application with the complexity of a full node is a large effort for a small team. Creating a consensus-compatible node from scratch, particularly given all the Bitcoin-inherited aspects of the Zcash protocol that were undocumented, is a monumental effort. Projects of this magnitude unavoidably take considerable time and resources.

If you have a problem with how the ZF allocates its resources, take it up with (read: address your posts to) the ZF board and leadership, who are the ones responsible for deciding what the ZF employees work on. The ZF employees should NOT be the target of ire.

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@decentralistdan could you please anonymize my account? I can’t do this on my own. I also can’t delete the account by myself. I’ve got better things to do than to spend my time on Zcash forums engaging in baseless polarizing discussions :slight_smile: Thanks!

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I guess good bye then Winfred, you obviously know very little about the reality of a development shop and the ethics of running a foundation on the back of the community. Accusing people of baseless accusation while the facts shows the foundation is dysfunctionning is laughable. Get a reality check, stop ideology.

Why do some people need to pretend the foundation is fine, while the struggle and the hatred towrds Zcash community is obvious ? Why why why ?

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Again, I don’t want to make this personal. I’m happy for your input, glad if you enjoy working with Zf, I think this is what we all want.

I’m talking here for example of the struggle of a distributed team explained by theor at Zcon, and my question is “WHY should the community suffer the consequences” ? We don’t waste enough money, we need to have remote team at literally the other side of the planet ? We don’t have local talent in the US or in Europe ? There are plenty of people at Google and Meta that knows the harsh reality of running and delivering production code that scales. We need these people at Zf because they have a fucking awesome resume/cv not because they have the pronouns in his twitter bio and he’s friend with a recently hired bluehair guy.

I’m claiming the recruiting process is subpar because the delivery is subpar. Zcash community deserve better. Reality over ideology please.
Maybe we need an audit !

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Bumping this up for @decentralistdan please!

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Can you provide which non neutral purposes?

How exactly is it being used and abused by said persons?

I need further information/explanation before I can decide this rather dramatic idea.

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Most devs out there always talk about “code is law” and for a simple man like me that is true, the hard thing is governance, how can you efficiently govern code that is used to serve humans? without it aligned with the community/users/holders theres always something that can go wrong. Fortunately for zcash, the “funding tax” that has give way to serve groups of people without optionality to the community/users/holders to decide in their doings, can be voted to change in 2024, i can only hope that community, with PoS coming, vote or design a good governance mechanism and use the “funding tax” in a way like the zcash grants work, that way you leave trust in the network holders/users/community, the purest form of governors.

We are blessed with the dev talent surrounding zcash, but tax funding your own R&D comes with great responsibility for a diverse online community, governance is important, and in my opinion we as a community can come with a better solution.

Thanks for opening this discussion, i hope the community engages in this matter, i know there are many people in different fronts trying to make zcash better, for example the paper that talks about the posterity fund, also worth of opening a discussion.

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Yes, Zf is forcing Zcon3 panel with pronouns, which is a clear Left wing ideology funded with Zcash holders money. Moreover, they have been hiring people based on social characteristics. It’s all facts, you can look it up : bluehair and pronouns people => Left wing ideology.

Now, I’m not saying we must never hire pronouns and bluehair people, I’m just saying these people are abusing Zf community money to do that. I claim Zf bad performance in every aspect of it is due to poor hiring ethics.

Indeed, but I ask you to consider something different : the dramatic performance of Zf is reality. I’m just underlining facts, and indeed facts are dramatic. We need to defund Zf and I need @zooko and the whole community to explain how to submit Zf to community voting and reallocate Devfund to more aligned endeavours without political pressure that we see today at Zf.

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I’ll be honest here, best scenario is I wish ECC leads a fork of Zcash with the devfund reallocated in a different way, eg more for the ECC (the only team that delivers value for Zcash, and the only team that respect the community) and the ZCG team.
We leave the Zcash brand to the Zf with their non working node, and let’s compete on merit instead of doing what we do, which is essentially a communist devtax that feeds on the beast.

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A ZIP would work?

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A zip should work, but I’m not good at writing a ZIP… If we have people speaking perfect english with all the nuances of the languages, then I would be happy to join and draft something.

If there is any whistleblower at Zf that want to come to me, go telegram @pairedodue

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I welcome constructive criticism of the Zcash Foundation. If anyone has suggestions for how we can perform better, I want to hear them! I think we should constantly be looking for ways to improve, and I have no desire to construct an echo chamber by silencing anyone who disagrees with or criticises me or the Zcash Foundation (ZF).

I’m also fine with people discussing and advocating for forking Zcash in order to “defund” ZF (or any other Dev Fund recipients, for that matter). That’s effectively what Ycash did, and I’m glad that @hloo, @hanh and other Ycash folks continue to be a part of our community.

So, if you have constructive, intelligent, well-informed criticism, I am very interested in hearing it.

That includes criticism of me personally. Nobody’s perfect - I’m certainly not. I’m more than happy to hear feedback on how I can perform better, and if anyone believes that they could do a better job than me, feel free to submit your resumé! I’d happily step aside for someone who the could serve Zcash and the Zcash Community better! :smiley:

To echo @str4d, criticism of ZF’s performance should be addressed to me. I run ZF. I decide (with advice and input from the ZF board) how to allocate our resources, what work to prioritise, who to hire, what the COVID-related policies for Zcon3 were, and all the other key decisions that affect ZF’s performance.

One of the decisions I’ve made is to embrace diversity. That decision is not motivated by political correctness. It’s a simple business decision, motivated by the fact that there is intense competition for hiring talented people in the technology space in general, and in the blockchain and cryptocurrency sector in particular. Therefore, we aim to cast as wide a net as possible when we’re recruiting, in order to maximize our chances of finding the best person for the job.

Talent, skill and experience don’t care about gender, skin colour, race, nationality, location, or what pronouns someone prefers. The more people apply for a role, the more likely it is that the quality of the candidates who make the shortlist will be higher than if we were to restrict our candidate pool to, for example, “white males from the US or Europe”. Better quality shortlists leads to better quality staff, which means that we can better serve the Zcash community.

Having a diverse team also means that we get a broader range of ideas and suggestions when faced with challenges and problems. That leads to better solutions, which again means that we can better serve the Zcash community.

I wish this went without saying but it clearly doesn’t:

We always hire the person we consider to be the best candidate for the role.

Nobody at ZF was hired because of their gender, skin colour, hair colour, race, nationality, or the pronouns they prefer. The only considerations are whether they can do the job, and whether they’re the best candidate available.

One of the ways we aim to signal the fact that we welcome diverse applicants is by nornalizing the sharing of preferred pronouns (that’s why you saw presenters’ and panellists’ pronouns on the Zcon3 livestream). It involves no cost, negligible effort, and it signals to potential candidates that we don’t just tolerate, but welcome diversity. If that means that we get more applications from diverse candidates, then we’re achieving our objective.

The same goes for the broader Zcash community: The broader and more diverse our community, the more people we have supporting Zcash, the more likely it is that Zcash will succeed.

If members of our community display hostility or intolerance towards others who are different from themselves, that is likely to alienate some of the very people who have the most need for financial privacy, and have the most to contribute to Zcash’s success.

That is why the Zcash Community Code of Conduct (CoC) states that:

We are committed to making participation in this forum a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of a person’s…

  • Level of experience.
  • Gender identity and expression.
  • Sexual orientation.
  • Disability.
  • Personal appearance.
  • Body size.
  • Race.
  • Ethnicity.
  • Age.
  • Religion.
  • Nationality.

and that

Examples of unacceptable behavior include:

  • Trolling and insulting or derogatory comments.

In my estimation, what Joris wrote evinces intolerance and hostility towards people (both within ZF and in the broader Zcash community) in a way that is incompatible with the standards set forth in the CoC. Therefore, I have suspended their forum account for six weeks. If anyone objects to that decision, feel free to message me directly or start a topic in the Meta category.

People are welcome to continue discussing and advocating for forking Zcash in order to “defund” ZF. However, I have two suggestions.

First, I suggest that everyone re-read the CoC, paying particular attention to the first paragraph:

Forum members should strive to be kind, respectful, and interesting. Ideally, your presence in the community should improve the experience for everyone.

Second, be constructive. If you’d like to see ZF defunded, explain why, and explain what we would need to do to change your mind. I emphasize “do” because words are cheap, and actions speak far louder.

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I hate for this to be my first post on the forums in a while, but such is life with two young children. As some of you may remember, I am an ex-ECC employee and helped organize all the previous Zcons (both as an ECC employee and then a contractor for the Foundation). I wanted to throw in my 2 zats of constructive criticism as a community member.

I worry that the way the Foundation is positioning itself alienates potential candidates to employment and simply folks interested in Zcash and want to join the community. As a traditional Catholic, I see the pronoun declarations for the Zcon livestreams as a slap in the face to my values and can imagine there are many others who feel the same.

The normalizing of pronoun use is alienating to a large group of people who might be interested in working on Zcash or for the Foundation’s mission or to join the community. And to particularly call out some in the community for being intolerant in the name of including those who are in need of financial privacy while not understanding your comment also does such towards a different group of people is alarming and perhaps what the original poster caught a glimpse of and was trying to articulate, albeit poorly. Christians are one of the leading groups of persecuted individuals worldwide in Islamic countries and China but these stories are not published as mainstream news and do not get the attention that other instances of persecution that may be more socially acceptable in our modern era. You are simply not going to attract people who come from or are motivated by these communities with pronoun enforcement.

I don’t want to turn this into a debate about ideology but simply point out that there are people who you are excluding when you become more blatant with things such as pronouns for everyone in the livestream of Zcon.

I also don’t intend to say anything about the people who do have preferred pronouns that differ from their biological sex, I’ve very much enjoyed everyone that I’ve worked at ECC and the Foundation and don’t have an opinion on individuals sharing preferred pronouns.

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