its today!
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So do I. Are you happy now?
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Why should I be happy? I would have been happier if I saw some honest and unbiased sandblasting incident report, with full history and nothing swept under the rug. That would mean a lot to rebuilding trust. But I guess I’m what they call “demanding customer”, one of few. Since this discussion is obviously upsetting for you, I’ll abstain of further questions.
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Thanks to everyone who attended today’s Dev Fund Town Hall. If you missed it or want to revisit the discussion, you can find the recording here.
@decentralistdan and I are always looking for ways to improve these events. Please let us know if you have any feedback, suggestions for specific topics you’d like us to cover, or guests you’d like us to invite.
We’re planning two more events in October and will provide the details later this month.
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I listened to the space, and I tried to keep my calm.
From my perspective, there were some significant concerns raised during that meeting regarding the Zcash Devfund. It became apparent that collaboration within the devfund recipients organizations was not meeting expectations. It seemed that a substantial portion of the unrestricted funding was being allocated to individuals with strong personal brands rather than focusing on addressing technical issues and improving the product. I found it frustrating to hear complaints about funding levels, especially when it appeared that these issues had persisted for many years.
Furthermore, I observed that the ECC CTO/CRO, was struggling to stay focused and on topic. It led me to believe that the organization might benefit from insights and practices from larger organizations like Microsoft, particularly in the context of working efficiently in complex systems and distributed teams.
Additionally, I personally found it concerning that there were no tracking tools in place to monitor work progress within the Devfund recipients organizations. Basic tools such as a JIRA board with tasks, spikes, stories, and project details could greatly enhance visibility into the teams’ activities.
In my view, the overall energy of the meeting was quite low, and I had the impression that some individuals within the Devfund recipient organization might be seeking additional funding without delivering substantial benefits to the Zcash community.
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in my opinion, one of the main issues is the strategy of “throwing” on the community some responsibilities, because ECC and ZFND are busy doing their own thing. the main example for that is the lack of a Stable wallet, the Ledger integration and the situation with Hanh, when the greatest minds in the community don’t get utilized to the best possibility.
this is something we should improve with the coming new Dev Fund,
funding a new independent entity which will work on the things that always lacking.
we have great people in the community with skills and experience!
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That is true.
Maintaining the zcashd codebase is probably not a sexy job, but it was important. And this is why we pay people astronomical amount of money. Yet, we witness this diva dragging-feet attitudes, lack of loyalty by wandering in competing privacy-coins project and threathening to stop doing maintenance. Deeply concerning.
Everybody’s at fault here. If there are human resources-related challenges, addressing them might involve strategic recruitment and, when necessary, personnel adjustments. It appears that there has been a degree of complacency within devfund organizations over several years, likely stemming from the security of a steady income regardless of outcomes. Some may perceive this as a breach of trust.
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I don’t recall this being said. ZF uses ZenHub and is switching to GitHub projects. I’m not sure what ECC uses but it’s something similar. They also use these DAGs to keep track of dependencies between issues. (ZF also has them but it’s not as heavily used)
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This is a very ignorant statement. No one is dragging their feet, you just need to monitor commit & PR activity to see that people are working hard. (If there is a problem, is the consistent underestimation of how long things will take, rather than people not working enough.)
And a job is a job. People have the right to move to other project if they want to. No one is “threatening to stop doing maintenance”, it’s just a fact that the space is competitive and people need to pay their bills. Developers are not identured servants who have the obligation to work forever for free on the project.
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Dev Fund 2024: Town Hall #5 on Twitter Spaces
@decentralistdan and I are hosting another Twitter Spaces event on Tuesday, October 10th at 12:00pm PDT / 3:00pm EDT / 19:00 UTC to discuss Dev Fund 2024. This town hall will feature a number of community members. We will discuss criticisms of the current dev fund structure and ways to improve it. Here is the link to set a reminder for the event.
We’ve invited the following participants: @Beth @GGuy @gottabeJay @noamchom @pacu and @pkr. As always, we will record 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.
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For transparency here is my proposal summary for the dev fund.
Dev Fund allocation
Starting at the second Zcash halving in 2024, until the third halving in 2028, 60% of the block subsidy of each block SHALL be allocated to a “Dev Fund” that consists of the following slices. The funds allocated to each recipient will decrease according to a declining schedule, using the function f(x)=(0.7**(1/420769))**x.
- 40% for Miner’s reward;
- 17% for the Bootstrap Project (denoted BP slice);
- 12% for the Zcash Foundation, for general use (denoted ZF slice);
- 5% for QEDIT;
- 5% for Shielded Labs;
- 20% for additional “Major Grants” for large-scale long-term projects (denoted MG slice);
- 1% for Zenate.
The slices are described in more detail below. The fund flow will be implemented at the consensus-rule layer, by sending the corresponding ZEC to the designated address(es) for each block. This Dev Fund will end at the second halving (unless extended/modified by a future ZIP).
Declining Schedule
The funds allocated to each recipient will follow a declining schedule, calculated using the function f(x)=(0.7**(1/420769))**x where x is the number of blocks since the last dev fund allocation was change. This in effect reduced the funding of each recipient by 30% every year. This schedule ensures a gradual decrease in funding, allowing recipients to adapt and plan for changes in future funding. This approach promotes financial sustainability and encourages recipients to seek additional funding sources to support their initiatives.
Moreover, this declining schedule promotes agility and accountability. It allows the development fund recipients to apply for a reevaluation of their funding levels periodically (e.g., annually) through a process overseen by the Zenate. This process enables the Zenate to adjust funding amounts each year dynamically, allocate more funding to high-performing entities, and introduce new recipients. This approach encourages a dynamic and responsive allocation of funds, fostering efficient and effective resource utilization within the Zcash ecosystem.
I mean, since we’re wilding out, why not go all in and get over with it already?
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Zcash Dev Fund: Town Hall #5 TwitterSpace Recording
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What’s most important, having a 21M supply cap or maximizing the success of the project as well as ROI for investors? Shouldn’t we, simply, have an issuance that is as little as possible, for all the life of the project?
Dev fund should be as little as possible (while retaining the great people we have and not interrupting current projects) and likewise, miners (and later validators) should get the lowest revenue that safely ensures the security of the network.
We’re way too scared to get out of the way paved by Bitcoin. We have a dev fund, Bitcoin does not. We’re different and aiming to be better.
Hi @jelly5649, I think it’s important to first define Zcash’s value proposition that differentiates it from other cryptocurrencies. I believe the value proposition for coins is as follows:
Bitcoin - Predictable and safe
Ethereum - On-chain Compute
DogeCoin - Fun, Memes, and Community
Monero - Private Crypto focused on Community Driven Consensus and Decentralization
Zcash - State of the Art Private Cryptocurrency
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, DogeCoin, and Monero have an advantage, they are relatively cheap! Becoming and staying “state of the art” isn’t cheap. That’s what Ethereum and Zcash are, state of the art. It’s incredibly expensive to retain that advantage. That’s why I advocate for an increase in the dev fund, because I believe the core value proposition of Zcash requires it. If Zcash fails to retain its status as the state of the art privacy coin why would anyone continue to care about Zcash?
Are you advocating Zcash’s core value proposition is not providing state of the art privacy, or are you advocating we try to change Zcash’s core value proposition?
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I’m saying I agree with you for the most part.
For me Zcash value proposition is “Private Cash”. The way it was envisioned by Satoshi, as Zooko knows and regularly explains. That’s it. If we succeed at that, we’ll have both 1. made a positive dent to society and 2. made investors whole. And it’s not as easy as I may make it sound. “Private” indeed implies that we retain our position as leaders of crypto-privacy, as well as we manage to figure out a way to massively scale up in a way that would enable the “Cash” part.
“for the most part” because I don’t think taking 60% of the issuance is the right approach. The right approach, to me, is as I said, to issue exactly what we need, not more, not less. You’ve calculated how much is necessary to keep all projects and people funded, great. Now we need to know how much we need to keep the network secure. Add both and you get the issuance we need.
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we need people who understand economics and money. To claim we are creating a currency and then make these arguments is frightening. the competitors creating currencies are going to pass zcash soon if development is not decentralized. zcash privacy tech may be state of the art, but it’s not prime time and it’s not useable for most people. so the privacy tech is largely the equivalent of sitting in the attic. or as some have said, we are just a beta test or sandbox for others to implement privacy. hopefully we get the wallet to work, ledger and SDKs and focus on the blockchain and blockchain assets.
The development fund is a tax. it’s not market based, it does not align development with customers needs. and it does not reward or offer the vast majority of developers a mechanism to build an ecosystem or community. we need to provide a mechanism to build a community of entrepreneurs.
to attract great people we need to offer them a way to create great applications without permission or dependence on anything other than making great applications for customers. and, to fund those ideas themselves, and then to be able to make a lot of money from transaction fees. the markets will force transaction fees to be fair and reasonable.
the dev fund is running out of money because they are not focused on creating useful privacy based blockchain and privacy assets. spending money on advertising, government relations, and so many other things is a waste when wallets dont work, transaction speeds are slow, and we don’t have programmability, zsa. stsblecoins.
you are acting like a government printing fiat. when the currency is weak, your solution is print more money. and then spend the money in a way that causes the currency to weaken more. the correct way is to strengthen the currency not do things that make it worse.
what everyone is missing is that privacy is one piece of the puzzle. it’s not the solution in and of itself. and to focus on one piece at the expense of the others pieces is a major problem. everyone claims privacy is so important; but they don’t charge anyone for it! 100% of the transaction fees are subsidized.
zcash needs to be the blockchain of private money and fully decentralize development. keep the dev fund; but transition to fees vs subsidies. it can be a combination of both. but in the long run, it needs to be fee based and keep the 21 cap.
This is what we are up against. And more is coming…
In a sweeping new upgrade, Solana is setting its sights on becoming a premier privacy-centric blockchain. Their latest v1.16 release has integrated “Confidential Transfers,” which directly competes with established privacy coins like Monero, Dash, and ZCash. According to a tweet by Collin Brown, the new feature offers heightened transaction privacy while also reducing the hardware demands on validators.
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I would google “what are fallacies of presumption” if I were you.
Then, I suggest you assess whether the arguments and logic supporting your proposal to increase the dev fund to 60% of Zcash issuance are rooted in any flagrant presumption fallacies. Whether you’re capable of figuring out where those flaws exist in your arguments or not, I recommend that, either way, you ask yourself, “how well do I truly understand technology markets in general, and marketing in particular?”
Finally after you have reach the conclusion you should definitely be reaching after having answered that last question, you can finish it all off by asking yourself “after all the things I just realised, am I really in a position to be pushing such grandiose recommendations to the Zcash community, or should I just very much delete my proposal because what’s the point of pushing such unfounded nonsense?”
You don’t even need to read your whole proposal to figure out all that I mentioned, you just have to read what you wrote here and it should hit you:
Though it is not unlikely that at least a couple of dev fund recipients heavily salivated when they saw your post, it is just irresponsible to introduce such a blatantly flawed proposal based on such blatantly flawed logic and understanding of the market.
There’s no justification for anchoring such an absurd figure in people’s minds, as when someone else comes around (not unlikely, another fund recipient) and proposes another irresponsible “hail mary” figure (e.g., 50% or 40% of Zcash issuance for the dev fund), as they certainly will, it will appear as a great and reasonable deal in the eyes of the community in comparison to your 60%, even if it would still be catastrophic for Zcash all the same.
Most people here know that Zcash is already moribund, let’s not allow for it to be abused to death.
If we halve the mining reward from 80% to 40% that should still keep us above 50% of the Equihash total network hashrate. I believe ZEN undergoes halving in October 2024 so the Zcash halving shouldn’t cause issues. So to reiterate, 60% dev fund and 40% mining reward.
. I address this in my proposal for the dev fund by including a declining schedule where the amount of funding for the dev fund is reduced every block and the excess ZEC is funneled to the ZSF which can be used at a future date. This reduces the risk of entities being overfunded and increases the communities ability to enforce accountability, transparency, and collaboration.
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