I disagree that this is the optimal forum for such a substantive conversation. Much is a stake.
If not possible with Zcon4, perhaps we look at other avenues. I’ll give it some thought.
Perhaps there are others here with stake in Zcash’s future but not a fund recipient, and with the skills, experience and desire to facilitate this kind of community dialogue.
These two sentences are contradictory.
Can the moderators do anything to shine light into the voting participation in these polls?
I agree with Joris that because of explicit material conflicts of interest among people staffed by the block reward teams (ZCG, ECC, or ZF), the community needs to know exactly how many of them are casting votes, to determine how large of an impact they are attempting to make on this polling effort.
Well, I certainly never intended to suggest or imply that this is the optimal forum, so I apologize if something I said created that impression!
However, I think it would go against the core principles of the Zcash community to ban any discussion about the future of Zcash on these forums, and I, for one, am happy to participate in such discussions.
Again, I apologize if I said something to imply that it would not be possible to have discussions about the future of Zcash at Zcon4.
We’ll certainly have panel sessions at Zcon4 to discuss the future of Zcash.
I think the Town Hall format we used last year worked well but, as always, ZF is open to (constructive) suggestions from the Zcash community, so please speak up if you think there’s a better, more open, inclusive, or transparent way of having this discussion.
I will explore organizing a few community calls / Twitter spaces events in the months leading up to Zcon4. While the forum is an appropriate place to discuss Dev Fund 2024, I agree that the conversation should not be limited to the forum.
Welp, I don’t know about that, I’d rather have the devfund recipients give up their comfort zone after so long. A fork here would mean a failure to listen to the community.
A few quick thoughts on improving the Town Hall format.
-Very necessary to have direct communication via microphones between those on stage and those able to attend in-person (the Discord mediated method was difficult to get a real-time convo going)
-Important to have community representation on stage in addition to boards and executives
-If they so choose, would like to have engineers on stage to add much-needed context (technical challenges and feasibilities) to different high-level questions.
-I would perhaps do two two-hour sessions because (1) discussion is so wide-ranging, (2) this topic is perhaps the most important of all, (3) concentrating discussion to a high bandwidth format may help save a lot of time compared going back and forth async.
David isn’t accepting messages, so by default this is now a thread comment
I get that the leadership in Zcash will champion the Town Hall format, and I’m fine with it happening… but frankly speaking, doing a Zcon4 town hall is quite exclusionary to the majority of the community because so few Zcashers will be in attendance, and even fewer online questions can be fully vetted in series to a live panel.
Town hall events, such as last year’s Zcon, or as in any political situation feel typically staged… for obvious reasons. Visually and functionally a small group of people is placed into a stark, elevated hierarchy for the rest of the (Zcash) community to awe at, and in the negative circumstances, to psychologically bend a knee to their ideas shared from the authority of a mic and a nicely lit stage (but we dear audience members are assured that this Town Hall is different from all of the others). Ideas shared by thought leaders on stage risk by default being received with heavier weight, sometimes regardless of merit.
To really facilitate broad and inclusive Town Hall like events, its got to be done here in the forum or in telegram and discord, or in twitter and facebook, etc etc al… all of the online spaces where Zcashers live.
Online forums (like this) are where debates happen in slow pace, nuances can be deeply covered, and with their long duration, are the most appropriate way to solicit maximum participation, and to create the flattest stage/ greatest access to the symbolic open-mic.
Yes, but there is low hanging fruit I’d like to see get more focus today (e.g. Pay-to-verification-key payments · Issue #2425 · zcash/zcash · GitHub).
Unless you execute a vision for “programmability” soon Zcash may simply forge ahead and organically produce a turing machine of its own.
Please, before everyone goes on stage, discuss in advance with the participants of the dialogue that the price matters. At least for the dev fund. Last time it was a big shock for the community to hear that the price of ZEC does not matter.
Not everyone understands that this is a personal opinion of one person. The leaders of Zcash gather together on the stage and everyone’s opinion is perceived as the opinion of the Zcash’s leader.
Interesting
On a small statistical sample, the results will always depend on the choice of platform.
This is an interesting slice, but I hope each of us here understands that these structures don’t duplicate each other’s functions, but on the contrary critically complement and stabilize the direction of zcash development.
ECC is an engine, ZF is a control system, ZCG is a system that creates additional functions of convenience and comfort of passengers (community). In general, this is a car that is going somewhere. Everything about it is important. We decide where will the car go.
I try to bring different points of view into the discussion. And there is another one that we forgot to remind this time. If we open any crypto project created after bitcoin, then there is always a development fund that developers reserve for themselves. And these are always large sums from 20 to 50%. They are trying to split them into smaller sections, but the fact is that decisions on the sale of these tokens will be carried out solely by the executive body of the developers. You can give me an example of coins like *** or ***, any coin, as if they have no funds, but if we seriously dig into the history of each of these coins, then I guarantee you that you will be surprised how few people mined these coins in the beginning. In fact, these are quiet stages of the pre-mine, about which everyone has long forgotten. And some guys are wearing a white coats today and try to denigrate zcash for allegedly centralization. Many of these people are not public, because they have resorted to all sorts of methods of solving issues, but in fact they are huge whales who also single-handedly decide who should sweeten what here so that their coin is noticed. Zcash is one of the few coins that holds public hearings of different opinions and where developers do not guarantee themselves a sweet future. All zcash’s leaders accumulate coins, at least I know this from informal communication. I can’t guarantee that this is absolutely true, but you can ask them personal questions. I won’t name names, but there are no duplicitous people here. As a rule, you will get a maximally honest answer if you are ready to be as immodest as I am, or you will be politely refused. I just ask everyone to take this point into account, too. We will often be beaten in the crypto community for our straightforwardness and honesty, this always happens, we are not politicians.
what you guys mean by independce of the Zcash Community Grants???
isn’t it independent enough?
i trust the Zcash Foundation holding the funds for them, except that where is the lack of independence??
plz make sure everyone understands what “fully independent” means, before voting.
does it mean they will hold the funds and will get salaries ?
i would not trust the funds to anyone except the Foundation
I don’t trust the Foundation for one. Heh. I support more indendence and competition in order to advance Zcash decentralization.
@noamchom @SexDrugsAndZcash I wanted to provide some context and clarification around this question:
Zcash Community Grants (ZCG) is currently a committee under the Zcash Foundation, which custodies its funds and administers the program. The question is asking whether ZCG should become a separate legal entity that operates autonomously with its own support staff (and is possibly formally integrated into the Zcash governance process). The reason I included this question is because this topic has come up multiple times over the years: during the last dev fund discussions in 2020, after the first year of the program, and it’s been a question that’s asked to prospective ZCG candidates during the pre-election community call.
Shielded Labs is not affiliated with Zcash Community Grants.
How does one become a member of ZCAP?
Okay, looks like a 404 error on the “expand the community Advisory Panel” link. I’ve been following Zcash since 2020. I’ve invested in the long term success of the Zcash network and I’d like to request to be part of the ZCAP. Happy to apply and go through any vetting processes.
