For those involved in writing ZIPs, or potentially receiving funding, I urge you to read the following carefully.
As I’ve mentioned previously, we believe everyone receiving or potentially receiving funding from the protocol should obtain legal counsel and advice, and we would contact ours regarding dev fund structures and share any feedback here, to the extent we are able.
After our internal work, we maintain that continuing a direct funding model is not in the best interest of Zcash and its community. Instead, if the dev fund is to continue, it is important to move to a more decentralized funding model as soon as possible (within months, not years) with a clear roadmap on how we’ll get there.
ECC has stated that it recommends moving to a non-direct model but that we would continue to receive direct funding for up to a year to work with the community on the design and implementation of a non-direct, grants-based model. We cannot accept direct funding beyond that window and maintain that no one should. If there is no mandate to move to a non-direct or grants-based model, our position is that the dev fund should expire as planned. We strongly encourage the Zcash community to move deliberately and decisively toward greater decentralization to reflect the greatest breadth and diversity of participants and consider its options carefully.
Zcash has been a marvel of engineering from the beginning. I do not code myself, but Zcash code is known to be clearly written for one that is rather complex.
In that spirit and given your role, I think it may be beneficial at this juncture that you define who, is the community that is supposed to take this decision, and how is it supposed to happen in a way that is as clear and auditable as the Zcash code.
I would personally argue that it is prime time for using ZEC tokens to vote, and that ECC/ZF should be all hands on deck to help @hanh in any way possible.
What is possibly gained from 1-year of more subsidy ZEC? (unlikely to even total $4 million dollars)
It’s time to read the writing on the wall, the block subsidy has already run far beyond its functional life.
What is possibly gained by sinking the engineering efforts in, and taking on the regulatory risks, of hard coding the ECC and ZF back into the Zcash protocol for another 12 months?
This ought to be about more than money at this point in time.
Zcash has been looking into the abyss for long enough.
Let’s undertake something courageous.
Let’s pull ourselves up by the Bootstraps (not the shell corporation controlling ECC, btw).
Let’s build something radical.
Let’s build something bigger than a couple of American 501cs.