Dev Fund 2024: Community Poll & Discussion Megathread

Governance
237

Hi! Zingo encourages migration of funds from the transparent pool to Orchard (Sapling to Orchard is also encouraged). I believe this is inline with @joris’s desire to make t-addresses (paraphrase: “2nd class”).

With Zingo, you CAN:

  • send to a t-address (the transparent pool)
  • receive at a t-address (the transparent pool)

This means that a Zingo User has the OPTION to engage with t-address-using counterparties.
As Far As I Know (AFAIK) this is necessary, if a User wishes to transact with any modern centralized exchange.

With Zingo, you CANNOT:

  • send funds from the transparent pool to any counterparty except your own Orchard address

Many people might reasonably object that this policy is overweaning, and it’s not a wallet’s job to dictate User behavior… rather we should simply offer options. In principle, I agree with this… and eventually we may do the work to implement an Advanced setting that allows Users to expose themselves by sending FROM the transparent pool, in a non-Shield transaction.

As currently implemented Zingo, offers a convenient “Path To Privacy” where it receives transparent funds, and then, at the User’s option, migrates those funds to Orchard.

This supports moving value from transparent (and Sapling) into Orchard. We believe that’s an important process.

We believe that maximizing the size of the Shielded pool is critical to Zcash’s value proposition.

8 Likes
238

I first had the same policy in YWallet: Absolutely no transactions from a transparent address. Eventually, it was revised after listening to customer feedback. The optimizer will make transparent transactions as the last resort and warns the user of its low privacy.

12 Likes
239

“And now for something completely different”…

Just a reminder to everyone about why the Dev fund is 20%. The dev fund being 20% is an arbitrary % that was inherited from the founders reward. It was probably chosen for the founders reward because it’s too hard to argue “it’s only 30%” for a founder reward. “It’s only 20%” seemed small enough that it might be an argument the Zcash team could win. I believe that was the likely the basis for the decision. Doesn’t seem like the best basis for deciding how much of the block reward should be used for supporting the development and sustainability of Zcash. If someone has a better theory on why 20% if the best figure for the dev fund reward I’m all ears.

I applaud those who have argued for a change in the dev fund % lower then 20% (but greater then 0%). While I don’t agree with you, anyone attempting to make compelling arguments “outside the box” is a win in my books. But where are the people willing to argue for a dev fund % greater then 20%? ECC recently cut about 50% of their staff, the community agree this will impact Zcash’s ability to deliver future innovation (e.g. scalability) and yet who in the community is arguing for an increase in the dev fund % to offset this lose. A lose that was primarily triggered due to funding pressures. :person_shrugging:

If ECC and/or ZF were standing infront of a VC right now they’d be arguing why halving their funding in 2024 (i.e. reward halving) will have a major and catastrophic impact to their organisations and the wider Zcash ecosystem and community. They’d probably argue that the VC(s) should provide atleast equal (in USD), or possibly more, funding for the next 4 years so they can continue to innovate and build and advocate for amazing things for Zcash. Why has neither ECC or ZF done this with the community? ZCG also should be doing the same. If we want ZCG to fund more then QEDIT, Hahn, and a few underfunded wallets/basic infrastructure into the future they will also need more funding.

I feel alone in publically advocated for ECC, ZF, and ZCG :person_facepalming:. Why is everyone so willing to advocate for the Zcash organisations to receive half of the already inadequate funding over the next 4year funding period by continuing the 20% reward :broken_heart:?

12 Likes
240

100% agree with you. We need more dry powder to fund our talent, not less, and now more than ever.

I advocate for continuing the development fund but some sliding scale to maintain current levels. In other words, we give more to our key organizations now during a bear market when the $ price is low (greater than 20%), and then less as the price increases but with a guarantee of no less than 20%. I say no less than 20% b/c talent should be incentivized not penalized as price increases. I say more now to ensure Zcash development maintains it key developers.

There, you have one person advocating for something more than 20% and I say it with pride.

Full disclosure, I am not a member of any Zcash related organization but I have been on this forum since November 2016 and I am “all in” on Zcash.

6 Likes
241

Interesting you say this. I’ve started floating the idea of a smoothed dev fund decrease to the recipients ever year. We pick an arbitrary figure (e.g. 30%) and decrease the funding for the dev fund recipients over their funding period. If the ZEC price stays neutral (or decreases) the dev fund recipients can apply to restore their previous funding levels. If the ZEC price increases the dev fund recipients won’t need to reapply to increase their funding levels.

This might be a practical way of restoring the dev fund to lower levels which would allow a ZSF to more naturally build a pool of future reserves and/or allow new entities to apply to be dev fund recipients. Currently adding a new recipient to the dev fund would naturally require us to forcibly decrease existing recipients % which might be hard to do in practice and cause issues, arguments, and hurt some people’s feelings. I think is at least a small part of the reason why we haven’t seen a new dev fund recipient yet :disappointed:.

There is a lot more to this idea I won’t go into now. There are also many other governance mechanisms I think would help support this funding model (e.g. a “Development Fund Committee”) but thats something that might need some deep thinking before I get too far into the weeds on the topic.

4 Likes
242

Again, I concur that this should be explored. We have one of the finest development teams in the world. We would deeply hurt this project’s ability to innovate by reducing funding further. Talent does not work for free and frankly, for the amount these folks are presently being paid given their level of talent, they deserve more from our community. Any attempt to reduce or sunset the development fund is a grave error in my opinion.

243

A very predictable shift in the conversation. See my prophecy from a full 2 years ago:

June 16, 2021. Mark my words. Here is my prediction: Immediately after the next Zcash block halving, assuming that Zcash is still using proof-of-work, miners will get LESS than 80% of the block reward.

5 Likes
244

Love Ycash and support it @hloo.

And I know we can both agree that without Zcash’s developers and funding, Ycash does not exist.

Regardless of your prediction (which I applaud btw), we can respectfully disagree with each other on the development fund and still support each’s position and goals for both projects :pray:t3:

2 Likes
245

What if there were more avenues for a zcash holder to directly fund their own priorities? Would the existence of such a mechanism change how you think about funding development with block rewards?

2 Likes
246

Directly fund with what? Isn’t the dev fund the mechanism we use to subsidise the inadequate amounts creators receive from donors?

1 Like
248

How many times is this post going to get served by the same counter factutual redherring idea. Across crypto and many other areas of innovation there are hundreds of examples of breakthrough innovations being made without compensation or for small relative amounts. If all the devs here at zcash are doing it for the money and would abandon ship without the money then probably time to have that friction and move beyond it. compensation isnt what could make zcash great whats needed is people with a belief that its truly important work for humanity. Setting up some argument that the devtax is needed only because we have to pay the devs and managers is borderline crazy. if thats really your argument then what makes zcash any different from your cookie cutter multinational software company. all of the Electric Coin Company, Zcash Foundation, and ZCG have at least five million dollars of liquid money to spend thats enough for a couple years easily. the real point of a problem for all of us is that zcash coins are so under valued and its caused all the teams to have to let people go or start changing the focus of their work. fixing the value of zcash coins is what can fix the problems of today and itll give everyone a chance to realize devtax is not what makes zcash run and go mainstream in the future. what is going to make zcash go mainstream is the story behind it and the people working here in the community with a genuine belief in zcash not just here for a reliable $200000 a year paycheck.

249

You say “DevTax”, we say Dev Fund. And yes, the Dev Fund is not what makes Zcash run (I remind you the “z” in Zcash is capitalized) though it sure helps allow Zcash to innovate so quickly.

While I respect your POV and reasoning, I disagree entirely. Zcash requires talent, and the talent working on Zcash is already working at a significant discount given the value of their time and skill set.

I’m on record: Zcash takes a massive and potentially catastrophic step backwards if the Dev Fund is discontinued.

5 Likes
250

I’m sure I dont have all the information, but boy does this smell bad.

1 Like
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

3 Likes
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

1 Like
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
3 Likes
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.

1 Like
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.

4 Likes
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

23 Likes