I’m deleting this entire message, because now I understand that what I wrote was caused by great anger and resentment that took place after reading the morning news.
I apologize to anyone I may have offended.
I have received comprehensive answers about this news. And I have to admit that I was hasty with my conclusions. Now I know that we, as Zcash investors, are benefit and don’t lose anything.
I do understand you’re frustration however I don’t agreed with the arguments.
In my view zcash biggest value lies on the shared development, if it was able to monetize it up to date is a different question, but the fact that market is driven by hype and where cloned projects get bigger attention should make you understand we’re still early.
The development fund is something that keeps raising eyebrows, 99% of crypto to seed funding, allocate 30% to the team, etc. This (our) dev fund at best will be 20% of the entire supply and is public shared, audited and almost half of it is used for possible grants. The quality of grants so far (as was extensively discussed in other threads) is something that will require work to capitalize better grants.
Zcash (as is now) is not programmatically and therefore doesn’t have smart contracts where the majority of hype is, it’s value is in its decentralization, the shielded txs and it’s future interoperability with other chains. The chain consistency, scalability and team relation with other foundations is what can/will drive the adoption.
ZSAs as you mention could be the opposite to what you said, and might be what allows this interoperability possible, it will all depend on how the team will manage the opportunity for zcash holders.
And to be honest, to me looks like that everyone here believes that the fact of someone integrate zcash technology makes zcash deprecated. How I see it, it’s exactly the opposite.
Zcash Ethereum and Filecoin missions are entirely different.
Other teams are interested in using Halo 2. Just like ZKPs, ECC devs help anyone who is interested, like I said its a good thing. Filecoin needs recursive proofs, probably matters more than Zcash, but we need it too if we want to increase our TPS (there are tons of blockchains with varying degree of decentralization with really high TPS, it going to be a differentiating factor when crypto goes mainstream for payments). So, Filecoin Foundation & others are paying ECC to continue research on Halo 2. Free money, ZEC holders are not paying for it! IMHO, this is a positive thing. Remember that ECC devs have been looking into adding recursive proofs to HALO 2 system.
Regarding Funding 2024:
Company CEOs get paid with stocks & stock options if company hits certain milestones (revenue or stock price targets). We could do something similar for dev fund. More ZEC gets allocated for dev fund if ZEC goes up!
I have received comprehensive answers about this news. And I have to admit that I was hasty with my conclusions. Now I know that we, as Zcash investors, are benefit and don’t lose anything.
Two years later, I apologize again for my initial post and especially to @zooko.
I’m now absolutely convinced that it was entirely a decision in the best interest of Zcash and Zcashers.