Dev Fund 2024: Community Poll & Discussion Megathread

Governance
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That space was a good one, although future moderation could be stricter in order to keep the discussion concise and related to the topic. But it’s never easy, good job to the ones involved this is super useful for the community.

Absolutely! For the next call, I’d like to have an official answer from devfund recipients if they participated in any kind of embezzlement of devfund (for political activism & promotion of it, diversity & inclusion instead of meritocracy, etc… you know the drill).
It’s a topic that devfund recipients are constantly avoiding answering, and now’s a good time to know if zodlers’ money went to attract the best or to buy virtue signaling at the expense of zodlers & Zcash’s performance. Regardless, I want the next devfund to be extremely clear that devfund is neutral money only to advance Zcash and to benefit Zodlers, not people or political opinions.

Additionally, there’s a critical topic that isn’t brought up a lot, it’s the trademark that belongs to ZF. I said in the past I’m in favor of defunding ZF, but this could jeopardize Zcash’s future because devfund is consensus and consensus is the trademark essentially. I firmly reject the assumption that ZF should be a permanent devfund recipient (it’s not a right, it’s a privilege). I believe ZF could leverage the trademark to oppose a hypothetical pink slip.

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Hey @BrunchTime.

I just want to clarify something here that I think may be misunderstood, appreciating that it may not affect your assessment of what you believe is worthwhile - though I believe it very much is…

The PGP for crypto podcast was recently created for a very select audience in and around Washington DC in order to build support for our narratives and keep policy doors open. It’s the only one of its kind.

The podcast is only one part of a broader PGP initiative that includes our exclusive PGP for Crypto monthly brunch series at Georgetown for the industry, think tanks, academia and policy makers to come together to network and share off-the-record updates. Former Toomey staffer, Zcasher and now Coin Center Policy Counsel told me that it has become the most important regular event in DC for the industry.

It also includes the PGP hill series that we just started. I was out in DC last week thanks to House Majority WHIP Emmer and his team to speak at the Capitol on the importance of privacy and Zcash to a room full of congressional staffers, the people that influence what their bosses know and say, and who write much of the policy that is enacted. Many of them have only a cursory understanding of crypto and the implications of the lack of privacy due to public chains. “Privacy is Normal” is being said in the halls of Congress.

It takes a long time to build these kind of relationships and ECC is in a unique position to educate and influence thanks to this work. Paul Brigner is leading these efforts for ECC in Washington and it is making a meaningful difference.

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218

Maybe it ought to be renamed / rebranded to eliminate “dev” from the name. :wink:

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Sometimes when something is not a problem, we can take it for granted. The fact that Zcash is legal and available in the US may be one of those things.

I haven’t done a full audit of all the resources that have gone into the regulatory branch of the Dev Fund, but I don’t have the time or need for that. Josh and others who manage that have a lot of my trust.

Also, while Zcash has minimal brand recognition in the mainstream, the targeted education, outreach, and networking in the regulatory realm is a form of marketing, just not necessarily the kind that results in adoption (although it allows for a playing field where adoption is possible).

Education goes two ways - learning from people on the other side, whether they are users, devs, or in our case also regulators, is an important part of the overall picture of bringing something to the market. While I sort of feel like we as a community (or maybe just myself) don’t have the best consensus about the end-to-end concerns and needs for users and devs, I do feel like we have a really good picture of the concerns of the regulatory constituency. And that in turn informs strategies for addressing them.

In addition, it is important to note that each type of communication has to be targeted for its audience. “Know your audience” is one of the cardinal rules for communication. So the numbers for subscribers, etc. may not matter as much as the fact that the material is reaching its intended audience. I wouldn’t necessarily expect detailed discussions of policy to be interesting to a mass audience.

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220

It shouldn’t be too hard to perform an extract of usernames+choice from the DB.

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Thanks for the reply. You’re right that this doesn’t change my assessment. It’s about what I expected.

The idea that an open media project on an important topic, that’s shared publicly and frequently, actually isn’t supposed to have a following much beyond 100 people… It’s tough to swallow.

But, as long as ECC is dedicating resources to these efforts, I’ll still, of course, wish you good luck, and hope you can show us some great results that prove me wrong for doubting! :slight_smile:

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223

Why are we using subscriber metrics to measure the success of PGP? Aren’t the recordings for PGP a value add? My understanding is simply having those discussions and meetings in the first place is a substantial part of the value. And the recordings are the value add where people that couldn’t attend or need to watch it again can.

It’d be like creating YouTube videos of @earthrise’s audits and saying “but it only got 50” views. :person_shrugging:. The value isn’t in how many people see the videos, the value is in the work itself and the small group of people that DO need to see it to make decisions that can drastically change the course of Zcash’s viability into the future.

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224

Absolute strawman.

Sure, @earthrise is contributing value directly to the product. Showing how the sausage factory is up to standard, is not the same as creating a YT channel that is designed to reach and educate a broad audience. Not sure how that’s achievable with such a dismal audience…

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@pkr So you’re saying PGP presenting arguments for privacy to a room full of people who directly have influence on government policies on privacy isn’t achieving anything of substantial value because the YouTube metrics don’t show it? PGP* (Pretty Good Policy) for Crypto Briefing: PRIVACY-ENHANCING TECHNOLOGIES IN CRYPTO - YouTube

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I think subscriber count is a refreshingly measurable metric, and I think public opinion matters to elected officials. It’s obviously lower than anyone doing messaging would want.

But I do think your point has merit, and sub count is far from the most important reason I doubt the effectiveness of regulatory outreach, so to keep us from getting into the weeds I formally withdraw my dogging on the acknowledged low subscriber count of PGP

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Nah, I definitely didn’t say that.

There’s this weird juxtaposition of the ECC claiming that the content posted on this YT channel is what is happening behind closed doors with politicians, but guess what? People elect politicians. Therefore, it’d be in the best interest to actually promote the channel to the general public (aka the voters).

… or maybe it’s just there in case some curious party wonders what the ECC is spending dev fund money on?

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How many of us in the forum are equity holders of Least Authority Enterprises LLC?

In a gracious act of sharing, Daira has revealed possession of an equity position which makes me assume that there are more than one of us. Because of the recently noted loan that ECC owes to Least Authority Enterprises LLC (an amount of approximately $3,750,000), we’ve got to assume that de-dev-funding the ECC would logically increase the risk of default on the loan. Equity holders in Least Authority Enterprises LLC have a material interest to minimize ECC loan default risk.

These sorts of individual financial impact (potential) biases should not be influencing the long term vision for what Zcash does (uses cases, the roadmap), or how it is technically built/ who does the building (ZF Zebra vs ECC Zcashd vs etc al), upgraded (Halo, Proof of Stake, Recursive proofs), and maintained (emergency mode) over time.

For the sake of the community, it would be helpful to understand who all of the individuals are in here sharing their Dev Fund opinions, while they’re also personally involved as equity holders of a third-party LLC that has loan(s) owed to it by ECC, or whom are directly compensated by salary or grants from the Dev-Fund mechanism.

There are some other Zcash forum members who probably go without saying, who also are equity holders in this third-party LLC. In a post-Dev Fund world, we’ll have the luxury of not needing to air out this sort of diligence because in a post-Dev Fund world the ECC and equity holders and its creditors can mind their own business and act in their own best interest - without creating the risk of tarnishing the Zcash brand perception as a vast web of LLCs and non-profits and Dev Fund organizations stirring around compensation, grants, debts, and credits without conventionally sharing conflict of interest disclosures.

In a post-Dev Fund world, bygones can still be bygones while the allegations that our project is a giant Honeypot will fade away. The Dev Fund is a Meme lets upgrade (remove) it to a positive & inclusive one in 2024.

Thanks @Cruisezodler @januszgrze for the compliments above, I’ll be interested to participate in the next episodes of the community Dev Fund talks. I believe that given time, details, and some objective critical thinking, we’ll find that many more in the Zcash community do support the Dev Fund removal solution - but it will not be a snap of the fingers, changing one’s perception of things takes patience.

Let me also again call into concern the USA based regulatory risk that the Dev-Fund model creates for the ZCG, ZF, and ECC in context of today’s debatably shocking headline - The SEC sues Coinbase for unregistered securities brokering/ offering

Reducing Regulatory risk (and reducing centralization) is presumably a shared ideal across the Zcash ecosystem - among both Americans and non-Americans alike.

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Great minds have been so far defeated trying to make the current ZEC work in the browser. This is a tremendously difficult problem. I could draw up some wireframes in 5 minutes. I could make an entire interface with gpt4 in a few hours. The user interface is trivial compared to having a solid wallet API with sync that runs in the browser. You need an extremely rare developer to make a ZEC browser wallet. Not something that can simply be contracted.

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You can already see the cracks here:

Stuff like this, the most often presented mission of ECC, to push and showcase Zcash, and the wallet page is still from 2021 - missing some of the newest wallets.

They dont even care.

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You expect the ECC to actually do any real work? They can’t even update the copyright year on that website.

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What do you suggest we do?

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Chatgpt developer extraordinaire

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I’m working on organizing another Dev Fund 2024 Twitter Spaces event for early July. If any community members are interested in participating as a speaker, please comment below or DM me.

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Happy to discuss my idea that all dev fund entities should prioritize programs that further redistribute block rewards.

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Shouldn’t we treat this decision like we are all running a business? As such I propose we start discussing budgets and cost for all the upcoming work we expect requires funding between Jan-2024 and Dec-2028 (~5years). Today I’ll start really simply and try calculating the funds available with a 20% Dev fund allocation. For lack of a better value I’ve started at $30 with an increase in ZEC price of 30% per year.

+------+-------------------+--------------------+------------------+------------------------+--------------+
| Year | Total ZEC Reward  | Miner ZEC Reward   | Dev Fund ZEC     | Projected ZECUSD Price | Dev Fund USD |
+------+-------------------+--------------------+------------------+------------------------+--------------+
| 2024 | 1244107.5         | 995286             | 248821.5         | $30                    | $7,464,645   |
| 2025 | 655948.8          | 524759.04          | 131189.76        | $39                    | $5,116,400   |
| 2026 | 655948.8          | 524759.04          | 131189.76        | $50.7                  | $6,651,320   |
| 2027 | 655948.8          | 524759.04          | 131189.76        | $65.91                 | $8,646,717   |
| 2028 | 584368.2208       | 524759.04          | 116873.64416     | $85.683                | $10,014,084  |
+------+-------------------+--------------------+------------------+------------------------+--------------+
|                                                                                     Total | $37,893,166  |

So the estimations above are for the next 5 years if the ZEC price hovers somewhere between $30 and $90. Even after ECC’s recent resource action both ECC’s and ZF’s costs are somewhere between $300,000 - $500,000 each per month. That adds up to a cost of (~$800,000 * 12) $9,600,000 per year.

Can someone check my calculations? Because to me it appears if we continue the current dev fund allocation ECC and ZF may have to undergo another resource action event and tighten their budgets before 2025. What’s our strategy to mitigate this? Pray :pray:?

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