Matt, I’m very disappointed to see you misrepresenting my intentions as being an attempt to gain power or money on my own behalf. That’s entirely false. I sincerely hope that nobody who scrutinizes my track record will find this kind of smear against my character to be credible.
In addition to being false, it’s harmful, both to me personally and to the Zcash community, because insinuations of ulterior motives can be used to derail important conversations that need to happen. I asked this question of the Zcash Foundation — in the O.P. of this thread — because I honestly don’t know the answer, and because I think it is important. I don’t have a hidden agenda.
I have always stated that I know that the people who make up the Zcash Foundation, like you, are honest and well-intentioned people, even when we have different views. Please extend the same presumption of good-will to me.
The rest of your post is a complaint about a lack of building. It’s a real struggle for me to interpret this part charitably since I don’t understand why you seem to be attributing this “lack of building” to ECC, when as far as I can see we’ve never stopped delivering results, but — and I say this with utmost respect to the skilled and hard-working Zcash Foundation employees — the Zcash Foundation hasn’t yet started delivering results in terms of technology development. Here’s my attempt to respond to that part of your post about “building” as charitably as I can:
[edited to add in terms of technology development]
What’s stopping you?
No, seriously, what’s stopping you? How can we help?
The Zcash Foundation was founded in 2017 by donations. I and my family and friends collectively agreed to donate a huge amount of our wealth. Depending on how you count it was between one third and one half of all the money we ever expected to have in our lifetimes. Then I called every other Zcash founder who was due to receive Founders Rewards and asked them to donate too. That included you, and Ian Miers, both of whom are now on the Board of the Zcash Foundation, and Eran Tromer, who is currently active in these discussions. To my surprise, all three of you, as well as almost all of the other Zcash founders, declined to donate.
The only Zcash founders who donated were Andrew Miller (Chair of the Board of Zcash Foundation), Alan Fairless (now Chair of the Board of Bootstrap), Jack Gavigan (now on the Board of, and also the Executive Director of, the Zcash Foundation), and Ariel Gabizon. Those folks had much smaller shares of the Founders Reward, so their donations collectively funded only about 5% of the Zcash Foundation’s initial endowment (even though some of them donated a quite generous proportion of their coins). The other 95% of the Foundation’s initial funding came from that huge, life-changing donation by me and my family and friends. The total of all donations from these five donors was 227,840.13 ZEC.
Then in 2020 the Zcash community decided to institute the Dev Fund, and allocate 5% of all Zcash issuance from 2020–2024 to the Zcash Foundation, plus an additional 8% of the issuance ear-marked to be allocated by the MGRC/ZOMG/ZCG. It’s been about 18 months since the Dev Fund kicked in, so that 5% has been about 98,437 ZEC by now, and the additional 8% has been an additional 157,500 ZEC.
So — and I sincerely mean this with all charity and good-will — What’s stopping you? Is there something that the Zcash community, or that we at ECC, or that I personally can do to help the Zcash Foundation start building and delivering results, in-house, or by using your money to get others to build the things you want to see in the world?
This is a sincere offer. Like with my question about the Zcash Foundation’s policy with regard to ZEC — at the top of this thread — I don’t have an ulterior motive in saying this. I am speaking honestly and from the heart.
P.S. The Zcash Foundation has delivered some results. The main ones that come to my mind are organizing the annual Zcons — which were very successful conferences — and their more hands-on support of the Zcash Community Grants panel in year 2, which appears to be producing results to me. I also continue to have hope that they’re going to start producing more results at a faster rate in the future. I also like the communications and community results that DecentralistDan and Winfred have started producing.