Oh, and who do you think gets the money? Where does everyone think the money goes to when these are killed? As I previously analysed, @maxdesalle works for Winklevosses, who invest in Cypherpunk. Cutting the rewards directly benefits their bottom line from mining profits by over $30M a year.
AND it centralises everything!
Even if we took this at face value, you’re saying you rather 600k go to an exxxotica booth instead of going to miners that secure the network?
These grants are absolutely out of control man. Millions poured into ZSA’s which has a 98.6% disapproval rate by people with coins. And don’t get me started on not everyone wants to vote, if the vote had went the other way everyone on ZSA side would have said the voting mechanism is pristine.
I fully agree on ZSAs. In fact, I have been one of the most vocal opposers of it ever since I learned about it, and most people who I asked about ZSAs have not actually been able to answer why they support ZSAs, they aren’t even NFTs or programmable!
But look at it this way: the ZCG has been extremely conservative in every other area.
I am not saying the funding should not be tapered, it absolutely should be, maybe even ended, but we should reliably establish a mechanism to make sure ZCG can live indefinitely on the money it HAS gotten so far, namely, via a fiat trust.
As for everyone who will scream “fiat is not very cypherpunk!”, I would say the proposition to developers to “borrow from others until coinholder grants” very much involves loans and venture capital, which is about as bubbly non-cypherpunk as it gets.
Yeah, very fair take
Would love for readers to fill this out: Gauging community opinion about ZCG
I was thinking out loud. My own thoughts seemed irrational, but so did some of the arguments being made.
I think it’s time to put all these debates aside. If we want to eliminate ZCG, let’s eliminate Coinholder as well. After all, projects like Linux and Bitcoin don’t have this kind of funding mechanism either.
We could even burn all the funds that have accumulated so far.
Let all block rewards go to miners instead. In other words, let them go to the BIG INVESTORS who put money into mining and producing coins. Surely, these investors will later spend millions of dollars of their own capital to finance Zcash’s development. Right?
I’m being completely serious.
Because abandoning ZCG and relying solely on Coinholder is, in my opinion, a completely irrational approach.
“The people who own the money should have a say in how it is spent.”
Yes, I agree with that. But the real question is: How responsibly are they exercising that right? We have no way of knowing how thoroughly these stakeholders research and evaluate the proposals they vote on.
You can criticize ZCG because its decisions are made by a five-member committee that evaluates proposals and gauges the community’s sentiment. But who questions Coinholder’s decisions? Why don’t we see the same critical attitude toward it?
Whenever I raise a question, the response I get is that the voting amount was too small.
So let’s look at a concrete example.
During the latest Coinholder voting round, a project that had been used by only 17 people over 75 days received 1.5 million votes. This happened in the context of the connections established by the people who sponsored the project and founded Zcash Labs.
Let me emphasize this again: We are talking about an application that was used by just 17 people over a period of 75 days. I’m not concerned with Peer becoming part of the main organization now. That wasn’t the case when the vote took place.
Meanwhile, ShieldedScan, which requested just $4,000, was rejected with 1.6 million votes.
Why?
Because it didn’t have powerful connections. We say we want alternatives in the ecosystem, yet even a $4,000 alternative can be rejected by such an overwhelming margin.
I think this is the real issue we should be discussing: Are Coinholder votes actually measuring the value of projects, or are they reflecting the connections and financial influence behind certain projects?
And this is only the beginning. We may see 100 different proposals in the next round. How many Coinholders do you think will actually review and evaluate every single one of them? My concern is that the vast majority of proposals will be voted on without being properly examined.
I could present many more concrete arguments on this subject. But honestly, I’m not sure how productive that would be. This debate is exhausting, and it seems we’ll be having it all over again every two months.
So let’s be a little bold.
Let’s eliminate both ZCG and the Coinholder funding mechanism entirely.
Let’s see how Zcash development progresses through independent funding and private capital. Let’s expect the market and major investors to take responsibility for funding development.
Then we can all watch what happens.
If we don’t trust the existing systems, why eliminate only one while treating the other as beyond question?
A major investor didn’t like what you are building. You are no longer funded. Good f*cking luck.
A major investor sees you’re from Russia. You are no longer funded. Good f*cking luck.
The United States President hates your country. Your country is sanctioned. You are no longer funded. Good f*cking luck.
The Wall Street is very sad. VCs are going crazy. You are no longer funded. Good f*cking luck.
The CCP is offering more state-funded payments than the German government. You are no longer funded, your ideas now overtaken by Chinese developers who don’t give a shit about trademark law. Good f*cking luck.
A very Cypherpunk approach for a cryptocurrency that once existed to fight centralisation. I like the “we are just another arm of the US Treasury” approach, we are truly on the road to become truly compliant. Even moreso than Ethereum, and now I don’t understand why people oppose Crosslink here. Clearly they have no problems with the development being dictated by Proof of Stake, why should they be opposed to mining dictated by PoS? It’s bonkers really.
Josh seems to agree with this idea:
The timing is just wrong in my opinion. You don’t haste into structural changes like these in the midst of a credit crunch and at the eve of a financial crisis where all liquidity will evaporate and funding will become scarce.
Agreed. Either remove both or remove neither. I supported introducing some coinholder voting when we didn’t have any, but I don’t trust large whales to steer all the development of Zcash.
If you think ZCG is unfair because people get diluted to fund projects they don’t want, then coinholder voting is still unfair because the majority still gets to dilute the minority who don’t want certain projects. True coinholder voting is each coinholder putting their money where their mouth is and funding the projects they want themselves using their own coins.
I bet that 90% of the major whales, mining companies, and people currently defending this argument would be completely opposed to the idea of eliminating Coinholder entirely. 
Because it’s clear what this is really about.
We saw a small example of this in the first voting round. In the future, we could see much bigger and more controversial decisions. But who will hold those responsible to account?
Why would nobody be held accountable? Because the people making these decisions are coinholders, and they’re anonymous.
The problem isn’t that coinholders have a say. The problem is that large amounts of capital can be used to influence decisions, create an uneven playing field for projects, and do all of this without revealing who is behind the votes.
If we’re questioning ZCG’s accountability, we must apply the same critical standards to Coinholder. Otherwise, what we’re defending isn’t a principle; it’s simply a governance model that suits our interests.
Having worked in the bitcoin ecosystem for a bit now, I can echo that these funding models are sufficient and drive competition amongst hobbyists and not-for-profit efforts which improves their products/offerings.
I will also share that this means not everything gets funded. Bitcoin has many hobbyists who run community projects with no funding. This would likely mean a lot of community efforts, which have been historically funded in Zcash, would likely not receive grants and financial support as they are not core infrastructure.
This then turns to businesses, who hopefully are profitable, providing sponsorships to ecosystem projects in return for marketing coverage.
For example, I ran a research project that analyzed offchain transaction protocols. Grant orgs didn’t want to fund it because it was simply research, no real impact on core protocol dev or direction. But, projects did sponsor me (I didn’t take the money fwiw) for marketing services so I could continue writing research if I wanted to.
While this would be painful for a number of hobbyist, community, and/or non-engineering projects, I think that ZCG should finally be abolished and by proxy of this a number of projects that are funded today would no longer receive support.
Committees are not abolished in this model, to be clear. But a decentralization of committees and decision making is healthy(ish) and funding is probably solely directed to engineering efforts and for-profit endeavors.
Also, parties (directly or indirectly through professional affiliation) who are advocating for coinholder voting, whilst having previously benefited from the founders reward and/or personal token grants via the Dev Fund, should be met with extreme skepticism. Replacing so called “socialist practices” with anarchocapitalist-themed oligarchies is equally centralizing and is short-sighted at best, at worst malicious.
Best of luck to you all.
you cant take bad money out of circulation
radbro offers the most elegant solution
You know what, I’ll take you at your word. Take our project, Skyhook and ESMASTe: Cross-chain Bridging, Messaging and Execution Layer
Name just three organisations who fund projects like these for the amounts involved.
If you can find even one who says yes, I will immediately support your viewpoint.
In summary, you can’t advocate for winding up ZCG and, in the same breath, push for Coinholder grants to continue. 
End the Dev Fund once and for all. No more taxation, as it is often referred to.
Monsignoree is that you ?
If by “Is that you?” you’re asking if @januszgrze is me, nah, it’s not me.
Complete support here. Its clear ZCG has no place in managing such a critical community in our future sovereign living standard.
Does the sovereign living include sovereign wealth funds being even more wealthy? Even that aside, why keep coinholder grants?
Although I agree with these conclusions, I would prefer to keep at least the “Lockbox” if we see truly broad support for this solution within the ZCAP community and during the coinholder vote. After all, we simply don’t know what the future holds for Zcash.
Completely abandoning the option to has a reserve fund would be an overly confident decision that seems more like being carried away by success than stable management.