Dev Fund 2024: Community Poll & Discussion Megathread

Governance
251

With all due respect, I find your arguments quite contradictory with your complaints about contrafactual statements.

Although I visibly don’t agree with you, I find your points compelling, interesting, passionate and worth looking into. I would like to understand better your theories on how removing development funding would increase development and overall value of Zcash. Someone that has such an involvement, determination and passion for a vision is worth the understanding.

I’d like to understand more your position and I believe it would be beneficial for the debate if you could help me (and probably others reading) to have elements to think and reflect about it. For that, I would like to ask some questions if you don’t mind. I won’t think less of you if you for some reason can’t or don’t want to answer them. Please don’t feel obliged to. I don’t have any authority either. I just want to propose this as a collective thinking exercise.

That being said, I leave my doubts here.

Given the Dev Fund is terminated, Zcash block rewards will be 100% in the hands of the miner collective. Developers who don’t run mining equipment will have no new ZEC from that point on.

What elements, facts, evidence do we have that could lead us to think that removing the Dev Fund will increase the coin price?

If that becomes being true and coin price rises, what evidence do we have will lead us to think that miners who will be the ones getting the block rewards will contribute to Zcash’s ongoing development?

If a basic budget for Zcash maintenance is not guaranteed, how would the Zcash ecosystem keep maintaining the software it runs on? Who will support its users? How will miners get fixers for their nodes when something breaks, etc.?

It appears from many of your posts that you have a negative feeling about people working on Zcash (being developers or not) getting paid and that Zcash should have non-paid contributions instead.

Why is that so? Aren’t their time and work effort valuable? If that’s not, how can a computational proof of work have monetary value? If work is not worth to be rewarded, isn’t that debunking the proof-of-work theory?

If people should work on Zcash for altruist reasons, to what extent does that also apply to miners? Should miners be altruist too?

Why should people give out their time out of their good will to create a monetary system?

thank you for your time and dedication and sorry for the long post. :heart:

Edit: reordered paragraph and typos here and there

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252

you’ve made many good questions I can’t reorder a full response to each so here is a general response that continues on the previous comment. the zcash devtax has already distributed hundreds of thousands of ZEC for free directly to the ECC ZF and ZCG those coins are terribly lowly valued right now because the crypto market flat out doesnt value whats been happening in Zcash. so my entire point is that its some large part of our history that all these contributors got their safe salaries to do the hard work building zcash into what it is today for the past years and now they want even more by requiring an extension of the devtax even though the results have been so bad. I say that its time to put our money where our mouth is collectively by committing to end the devtax because doing it that way is a way of putting full faith in ZEC getting higher value in the future which is an implication that it goes mainstream which also implies that the devtax teams will see their total funds value increase. if people are only here for the money then ending devtax is a way to thin out the herd those can go find a cushy salary somewhere new. believing in zcash is about the project not the paycheck

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253
  • 50% to ZCG
  • 10% to ECC
  • 10% to ZFND
  • 7.5% to holders as a dividend for enduring years of pain.
  • 22.5% to the miners
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254

Though my perspective is possibly rooted in tradition, based on my experience, I am firmly convinced that when an individual, a team, or a company fails to fulfill their performance objectives, it is not an appropriate decision to grant them additional rewards.
Indeed, such an approach would communicate an unfavorable message to our investors, who might perceive this as a misalignment between performance and incentives, thereby raising concerns regarding the fairness of the project leadership’s decision-making processes.

255

I totally agree. Failure to deliver for years should result in consequences. Fool me once and all that.

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256

Thank you for your response. I understand your posture and I respect it although I don’t fully agree with it.

I share your concerns on the market not accompanying the value of zcash with price. I share the sentiment. I agree that something must be done differently.

Call me a fool, but I honestly don’t think that any contributing person on Zcash is here “for the money”. Frankly, other protocols are distributing way more money than Zcash and most people here could be outperforming their peers on other chains and making a ton of money, but yet, here they are.

Yet, I don’t see as contradictory to be actively contributing to create an economic system like Zcash and also seek to earn a decent living with honest work.

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257

Dev Fund 2024: Town Hall Meeting #2 on Twitter Spaces

@decentralistdan and I are hosting a second Twitter Spaces event on Tuesday, July 11 at 12:00pm PDT / 3:00pm EDT / 19:00 UTC to discuss Dev Fund 2024. Here is the link to set a reminder for the event. We will plan on recording the event for those who are unable to attend live. Community members are welcome to join to listen in, ask questions, and contribute thoughts and ideas. We’ve invited the following participants:

Speakers
Co-Host: @aquietinvestor
Co-Host & Moderator: @decentralistdan
ECC: @nathan-at-least
ZF: @amiller
ZCG: @ambimorph
Community member (support): @januszgrze
Community member (oppose): @hloo of the Ycash Foundation

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258

To clarify, although I vehemently opposed the 2020 extension of the Dev Fund, I take no position on the question of whether the Dev Fund should be extended in 2024 because (via Ycash) I have opted-out of “Zcash Governance” completely.

With that said, I believe I can constructively contribute to this Town Hall because many of the reasons that I opposed the 2020 extension are relevant to the current discussion about 2024.

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259

ZF board member J.W. Verrett will be joining in place of @amiller.

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260

Since I won’t be able attend due to time difference I have a question for you:

Is Halo a useful innovation? Would Halo still have been developed if the dev fund extension didn’t occur in 2020? Will Ycash in any way adopt Halo in the future?

My own answer to the above:
(1) Yes. (2) Yes, but dev fund accelerated its development and implementation into practical use by a few decades. (3) I take no position on the question regarding Ycash future, I’m just a YEC yodler and have no idea about Ycash development.

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261

will the wrapup of the results of the above polls at some point? Interested in getting a summary as someone who doesn’t have that much time to follow all the discussion on the forum yet still has a deep interest in Zcash and the future of private money.

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262

My primary concern is that the DevFund, as implemented, is subject to significant coercion by US Authorities. I am in favor of structural shifts away from that imploding entity. Now is not the time to double-down on investments in Brand USA, now is the time to recognize sunk costs, and shift investment elsewhere.

Frankly I am surprised this hasn’t been dominating the conversation… did I miss it?

Did I just fall Through the Overton Window?!?!

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263

What about QEDIT?

264

Did anyone do a summary of the discussion number 2 that would help us out who cant listen to the whole episode. if no volunteers guess ill have to try and make it :wink:

265

Agreed. I’m surprised it hasn’t been dominating the conversation as well. It is worth noting that it’s the issue that received the most support in the Dev Fund poll.

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We touched on it in the most recent Dev Fund Twitter Spaces event. The discussion starts at 45:00.

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266

This has been a very interesting discussion over the last few months, but how do we condense these ideas where we can decide on a path forward. Changes to the dev fund will require tinkering with proctocol and the halving is 18 months away so we probably need to get a move on

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267

The next step is for community members to synthesize these ideas into concrete proposals, which will likely occur over the next several months. The process that was followed in 2019-2020 (summarized nicely by Dodger here) was “Discussion → Ideas → Concrete Proposals → Voting → Adjustment → Voting → Consensus → Implementation → Activation.”

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268

can a fees structure be out in place alongside the existing structure where there is a transaction fee as a percentage of the transaction value. For example, if I transfer 100, the transaction fee is 50 cents - 1. The transaction fee then gets split

  1. 25% directly to the team who built the app that generated the transaction. This will incentivize third party developers to create apps and fund development themselves. The existing dev fund could focus on creating the tools/SDKs all developers need to create apps and not fund any projects directly
  2. 25% to zcash holders
  3. 25% to dev fund for core SDKs
  4. if zcash moves to POS, 25% would need to go to the hardware for processing.

all % above are placeholders for discussion purposes.

so if a team were to create a stable coin, they would get a % directly from the transaction fee

a transaction fee structure better aligns development with desired results (transactions). more importantly it’s already an accepted standard by people worldwide and it decentralizes development efforts so the dev fund doesn’t need to worry or risk money for creating apps that may or may not work. dev fund can focus on the core platform and create the SDKs all can use equally to create the apps

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269

I’ll start suggesting solutions. Feel free to make your own concrete ideas/adjustments and tell me why it’s better :blush:!

@GGuy’s Concrete Idea

  1. Establish a Dev Fund Committee

  2. Increase the Dev Fund slice to 60%

  3. Split the Dev Fund between 6 parties. Here is an example of 6 parties funded at $39USD after halving:

  • 16% ZCG ($2,455,872 a year)
  • 14% ECC ($2,148,888 a year)
  • 10% ZF ($1,534,920 a year)
  • 10% QEDIT ($1,534,920 a year) (non-US based)
  • 6% SHIELDED LABS ($920,952 a year) (non-US based)
  • 4% HANH ($613,968 a year) (non-US based?)
  1. Enforce a smooth 30% reduction in funding each year. This would mean by the end of 2025 the breakdown at $50.7USD would be:
  • 11.2% ZCG ($2,455,872 for the year)
  • 9.8% ECC ($2,148,888 for the year)
  • 7% ZF ($1,534,920 for the year)
  • 7% QEDIT ($1,534,920 for the year)
  • 4.2% SHIELDED LABS ($920,952 for the year)
  • 2.8% HANH ($613,968 for the year)
  1. The remain portion would be left in the ZSF. This would build up ZSF’s reserves while also freeing up 18% of the Dev Fund to be allocated to existing recipients or new recipients by the end of 2025.

Pros:

  • If ZEC stays around $40 then ECC can fund itself through 2025.
  • If ZEC goes above $40 then ECC can consider expanding its operations again.
  • This moves about 1/3 of our funding to entities based outside the US
  • Most miners sell all their ZEC quickly to cover costs putting downward pressure on the price of ZEC. Dev fund recipients typically hold ZEC for longer periods delaying the downward pressure in the price of ZEC.
  • Dev fund committee could better react to changes in market conditions and adjust funding as necessary.

Cons:

  • We would be accelerating the reduction of mining rewards to the levels of ~3rd halving. Keep in mind Bitcoin will undergo its 4th halving on April 2024.
  • A dev fund committee might not perform as intended and create a giant overhead mess.
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270

The funding model based on token issuance isn’t sustainable is it? A long term sustainable model is needed. One that incentivizes teams to fund their own development. There is a lot of money out there and if teams are not wanting to build on zcash using their own money the question i have is why not?

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