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Self-serving how? The only major example one could bring up was Hanh, since he is a grantee, but then you can look up meeting minutes and see he is highly neutral in his analysis.
This is false. ZCG has never funded sex work.
ZCG funded a Zcash presence at a few adult industry events as a marketing experiment. The events are not even focused on sex work. Please read the grant itself before you criticize it.
EXXXOTICA is primarily a consumer-facing adult entertainment and sexuality expo, not specifically a sex work conference.
Anyone buying embarrassing things should use Zcash.
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THIS. If I only see Zcash payments at the same places I can use my Visa card at, why wouldn’t I just use my Visa card.
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More Zcash users = ZEC go up.
All we should care about is getting more normal people to use Zcash.
If all of the crypto world somehow ends up hating Zcash, who cares. That’s an extremely small market.
Our target audience is any at-risk human that is not using crypto.
Any human with a government is at-risk. But some, such as victims of abuse, surveilled people, non-citizens trying to make ends meet, adult content subscribers, and yes - sex workers - are more at risk than others.
More daily ZEC users makes the price go up faster and more virally than any short term “defund anything I’m afraid might crash the price” thinking.
Fund onboarding more normies to Zcash.
Earth is filled with people you disagree with. That doesn’t matter. More humans using Zcash daily makes you rich.
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Full support for ending ZCG while keeping retroactive grants as they are important for developer incentives. This is an excellent proposal and has been long overdue. ZCG simply has no place in a store of value asset.
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Nailed it Sean.
“I have observed the self-preservation instincts and decision paralysis of your panel.”
This needs to be dealt with immediately or the problem will only get worse.
Excellent. All for shutting down ZCG. This has been a long time coming.
Whatever you decide, make sure dev funding is secured one way or another, even during bear markets in both crypto and stocks.
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Regarding your point about committees now knowing what to fund.
You don’t need thousands of people to accurately allocate capital. You just need smart people. ZCG just got an insane increase in total capital to allocate and it is better that they take their time to adjust than rush to give away the money.
ZCG hired @rigs for DeFi Strategist and he has been doing a great job establishing relationships with the DeFi world. We should spend more time talking about good grants ZCG has done and how that success can be replicated.
Grants used wisely can help grow an ecosystem and be an accelerating factor to further Zcash adoption. ZCG should spend more time and resources towards growing DeFi adoption of ZEC.
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In your proposal, can you please clarify exactly when this will happen? AFAIK, NU7 is in a few days and NU8 details has not been announced nor planned, nor community polled.
Can you list any other examples of ZCG spending against what coinholders want? Include a sample size if you use percents.
From what I can see, and Ive participated in all coinholder votes, what evidence can you share that coinholders are any better than ZCG? My coinholder grant was turned down, for little money, when I was a big part of operating coinholder voting before it got big. This kind of hurt tbh.
Please read this entire thread and see for yourself:
(not speaking on behalf of ZF, as always)
No. Stop ZCG deposits, sure, but don’t steal their treasuries.
Wow. This completely illuminates what is going on in this thread.
First, the completely ignorant take of using “USAID” like it is a bad thing; it was actually one of the few good things coming out from USA. Its cut is estimated to lead to 9 million deaths by 2030. So in a way it’s actually a brilliant analogy.
Second, the blatant puppeteering on display here. These are our overlords’ wishes and we must respect them.
In this thread, replace any instance of “coinholders” with “the Winklevoss” and you see right through everything that is going on.
“Zcap voted against the wishes of the coinholders”? Actually, “Zcap voted against the wishes of the Winklevoss”
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Just so its clear for everyone, can you state your evidence for this? How long as it been in use, how many iterations have been deployed, and which teams have/are building on it.
Do any devs disagree with your opinion here?
I’d like to try and bring some perspective I haven’t seen yet in this discussion. None of this is an attack on anyone, their motives or competence. What I see is an org which was built a long time ago in a more nascent period.
1. The ZCG can only fund the things that are brought to it. If work is also funded via other channels (which it is) and those channels filter more heavily/differently, then inevitably the ZCG is going to end up being left to mop up anything that isn’t covered by other channels. So there is a kind of selection bias there. The ZCG is passive by design right now and has no mechanism for increasing the quality of projects that appear in its inbox.
2. Another structural issue is this: ZCG has no defined goal(s). The closest I can find is this: “The Zcash Community Grants program (formerly known as ZOMG) funds independent teams entering the Zcash ecosystem, to perform major ongoing development (or other work) for the public good of the Zcash ecosystem.”
And then this extremely diverse and loose list of activities:
-
Wallets
- Zcash hardware wallet support
- Key-management tools
- Physical storage (paper wallets or lightweight hardware)
- Shielded wallets for smartphones (iOS/Android/GTK/Plasma Mobile)
- Web or Desktop wallets
- Payment URIs
- Easy one-click shielded payments
- Easy multi-sig tools for Shielded Addresses (e.g. an implementation of FROST in user-facing wallets)
- Point-of-sale for brick and mortar shops
SDK
- Network layer privacy solutions for light client SDKs and libraries
Core
- Developer documentation
- Unified Address support & implementation by exchanges
- R&D Decentralized light client syncing
- Audits for updated Zcash software
Interoperability
- Atomic swaps
- Stablecoins on Zcash, ZUSD
Zapps
- Application on top of Zcash network
- Integrating native ZEC in end user apps
Ongoing Services
- Proving Key Distribution
- Light client servers / infrastructure
Education
- Improving “Zcash Protocol Spec” for developers
- Websites with educational resources
And it’s not clear what from this list has been completed/exists or what the priorities are. Without a defined goal, success is by definition impossible. This creates a further problem in that other stakeholders in zcash will (and now have) ended up holding the ZCG to their own ideas of success, which will obviously conflict.
3. What everyone is saying about committees and incentives and lack of skin in the game is completely correct, obviously. This is not a question of bad motives or incompetence. It is simply a fact that when you have skin in the game you are more likely to take actions that end up in your success and if you don’t have skin in the game you won’t, and if your are receiving money on tap there is zero mechanism to kill off failed models.
But all of this is not an argument against winding up the ZCG as an idea, but rather an argument against its current structure and incentives. In my opinion it is not sensible to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The funding mechanisms Zcash has at the protocol level are likely to be its most powerful tools to achieve its goals, if wielded with the precision and care they require.
There are numerous ways this could be done. Perhaps split the funding into more focussed orgs which are highly accountable, with defined goals, leadership structures, incentive structures, real teams that can get shit done etc, and perhaps with returns that fund even more activities or be used to burn ZEC. The orgs could be time limited or fund limited for example.
Zcash is nowhere near being as successful as I think many of us would hope it to be some day, and there will be many challenges along the way. Throwing away a superpower that can be used to achieve that success and overcome those challenges, simply because the governance over those funds is currently structurally out-of-date, is in my opinion misguided.
To summarise:
- Fix the governance structure and align incentives to the Zcash stakeholders.
- Establish clearly defined goals the stakeholders get behind.
- Put the capital to work.
- Adjust as needed.
That’s exactly how it is. The guys who are working so hard for this don’t realize that it’s a multi-step game, not a one-step move.
First, they remove ZCG and divert the funding directly to themselves, since they’ve had their mining partner buy up all the used equipment they could.
With this move, they simultaneously delegitimize all future ZCAP decisions, since they’re trying to tell us right now that their decision takes precedence over ZСAP’s and guarantee themselves complete sole control going forward.
The next step will be to shut down Lockbox as well, because they can, and it’s a new source of funds to increase their mining share.
I’ll check back in two years to see who remains here after that among those who support this today.
Yes, in fact, they aren’t even trying to hide these plans:
Well, I’ve always taken the miners’ side on this forum. I was just as vehemently opposed when people suggest to take money away from miners: example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4
Because we always need balance. We shouldn’t try to bet on one horse just because something has deviated from the norm. What’s happening right now is mindless euphoria.
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I need to clarify this.
I see a paradox here: when ZEC was worth $20, many were willing to take more from miners to give it to developers. But when ZEC rose above $1,000, people appeared who want to deprive the community of its development funds (believe me, ZCG is just the beginning, the simplest part of the process to fully legitimize Coin Voters’ governance).
If the goal were different, people would be looking for a middle ground for ZCG, but they refuse to do so. That’s a strong red flag.
The elephant in the room is that POW mining operations lead to centralization that then leads to easier hacking. That’s why redundancy with something like Crosslink is simply not optional. Better to anticipate the threats than find out the hard way like the Binance users.
But then the issue is that nothing’s intuitive. Wallets will just display the dominant finalisers who are current miners, and wallets may obviously prioritise stake delegation to the biggest finalisers. It could just as easily turn into a cartel.