I have some questions for organizations seeking part of a future dev fund:
- Looking back on Zcash since it launched, what were the biggest factors (positive and negative) that impacted adoption? What should we have done more of? What should we have done differently?
- What are the biggest roadblocks to adoption you see in Zcash’s future? How do you think we can overcome them?
- The value of a network (like Zcash) is proportional to the number of connections between users, which can be proportional to the number of users squared. This implies that we can grow the value of the Zcash network—without necessarily adding users—by better-connecting existing users to each other. How can we achieve this?
- I hold the opinion that the current dev fund model is ineffective, since organizations receiving funds have not been held accountable to specific outcomes, like measurably increasing adoption, despite generally executing well on their own roadmaps.
- How should we measure the positive impact that dev fund recipients have on Zcash, and how should they be held accountable?
- How should we balance accountability at the organization level with individual engineers’ needs to have a predictable salary?
- How should we balance accountability with the fact that luck is involved—i.e. even when everything is done as best as possible, external factors can mean that we still don’t achieve our goals? How can we distinguish bad luck from bad strategy?
- Related to the previous question, which specific metrics are the most important for the community to watch over the next ~years to evaluate the performance of funding recipients?
- How can we do better at completing the “last mile” of getting Zcash into the hands of users and developer-users? My stance on Zcash adoption has been that while we have great technology, we haven’t made the necessary efforts to make it easy to use and work with. This is reflected in what @skyl recently wrote about how it’s important for projects to make themselves accessible to newbie developers. Do you agree that Zcash has been lacking in that area, and if so, how can we address it? How should we balance the cost of developing new protocol features with the cost of building usable libraries and writing excellent documentation for existing or in-the-works features?
- How can we make the community more cohesive, optimistically working towards a common goal, with less political division, more eagerness to collaborate, and more interoperability between distinct projects?
I’m also interested in the general community’s answers to these questions.
When I vote for who to give funding to, I’m looking for (a) an honest understanding of what has gone well and what has gone wrong, (b) an understanding of the current challenges and plans to address them, (c) leadership that inspires togetherness and optimism within the community, and (d) ensuring that we retain the talent we need to ensure the security of the network.
(edit: whoops, I just noticed I posted this in the wrong thread… there are so many of them!)