I think someone proposed this already somewhere and I can’t find it.
What if instead of forcing ZCG to fund the NSM with 50,000 ZEC, ZCG donated part of that money with the binding mandate that FPF establishes a non-profit mining operation that funded a grant program instead?
Then when the dev fund ends there’s no need to actually have a dev fund because there’s a mining operation that its sole purpose is to donate to a program that funds Zcash adoption and development. In fact, the dev fund could expire the moment that mining pool mines its first mainnet block. period.
edit: I repeat. This idea is not mine. I’ve read it somewhere else and the credit is deserved to those who wrote it and I shall only receive the credit for having very poor retention capacity these days.
Edit 2: I’m posting this as an exercise of lateral thinking. Zcash has historically had a different approach to problems and I firmly believe that it is a value that we must not put aside.
Edit 3: this mining operation could be pooling evenly to all current mining pools. Keeping decentralization as it is right now. Centralization brings regulation risks we don’t want anywhere near. Mining Proceedings could be partly sent to the NSM to secure the protocol in the future as well as adoption and R&D grants.
Edit 4: this idea eliminates the status quo and establishes that there is one way to secure the network: mining blocks. But it retains the resiliency properties that the dev fund proved to provide.
Edit 5: this addenda is compatible with crosslink as well.