No. That’s not going to happen. This is the last time I’ll post in this thread. I’ve passed my limit.
For the people on the internet who are just reading all this with no background, you should know that before I wrote up this grant application, there was a period of a few weeks where I communicated in calls with an ambassador from the grant committee. I told them that in the process of talking about the original Birdcalls integration grant, we’d become aware of the BTCPay problem, and that the BTCPay problem seemed urgent and important to take care of immediately. I asked the committee if they had anyone internally who could take care of the BTCPay problem because I didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes, and they told me that the only people talking about it were people who didn’t have a great reputation for follow-through on previous grants, and so our help would be appreciated, and to please submit the grant proposal.
So just to make this very clear to internet readers: what you’re witnessing here was a solicited grant application.
Another thing that has me at my breaking point:
Quote from the Birdcalls proposal:
What’s surreal and exhausting about this repeated critique is that not only did I directly address it already in the application itself, but I’m pretty sure I’m the person who brought awareness to the Zcash community grants team that maintenance was important in the first place:
When we first submitted our analysis of the Zcash BTCPay module two years ago, we realized that the Zcash ecosystem was littered with projects that had been completed for grant funding and then abandoned. So when I wrote up the original Birdcalls updated grant two years ago, I specifically included that milestone payout for 1 year of repository maintenance. I remember that it was really scary to put that in because it wasn’t the way that things were done back then and I was afraid I’d get ripped up in the forums for asking for it. But I saw that there was a toxic culture in the community where people didn’t understand that it’s always their continued responsibility to maintain their code, so I thought it might be helpful to model out a structural fix in the form of a milestone payout specifically for maintenance.
I didn’t do a maintenance milestone payout here, because when I talked to the committee ahead of time, I told them that it sounded like they had a minor emergency on their hands that needed to be dealt with as quickly as possible. So I just wrote up the grant proposal as quickly as I could, so that we could get to solving the immediate problem as quickly as possible.
Another thing that’s surreal to me is that y’all don’t seem to care that BTCPay is talking bad about you. If I were a decision maker here, and I saw that a big, reputable payment gateway service like BTCPay was calling out Zcash for shoddy work, I would consider that a reputation emergency to be fixed immediately.
Don’t y’all live or die based on the value of ZEC? Don’t individuals make their decision to buy, hold, or sell based on the reputation of the coin? If I were trying to decide whether or not to hold ZEC, and so I did an internet search, and I came across that BTCPay thread where BTCPay is calling out Zcash for shoddy work, seeing something like that would make me change my mind, not buy ZEC, and go buy another coin instead.
It just seems so clear to me that it’s a reputation emergency, and as such, it ought to be taken care of quickly, and done well.
What I’m hearing here is that you want my developers to do their work for free, immediately after lowballing us over and over. It’s so, so disrespectful. I’m not going to show up for it any more.
Another thing I thought would be very clear is that Birdcalls is competent to solve this problem. We pointed out the problem to you TWO YEARS AGO. Now BTCPay is echoing what we said you TWO YEARS AGO. Isn’t the fact that we pointed this out to you two years ago proof enough that we can handle fixing the problem in a way that will make BTCPay happy and help restore your good reputation?
I agree that it’s disrespectful. I really tried hard to be more diplomatic, but it got to the point where so much disrespect was being flung at me that I felt like the best way to maintain my dignity was to just speak truthfully and plainly. It’s great that hanh has done such great work with YWallet. I’m so glad that the community has him in that capacity. I don’t know anything about that. All I know is that, in this forum, regarding BTCPay, while he was responsive yes, a lot of time that he was responding he would ignore the parts of the critique that were valid and instead try to deflect attention onto something that put him in a better light. I thought this would be obvious to other people reading the forum and that I wouldn’t have to be rude and point it out, but here we are. Apparently only aggressiveness is rewarded in this culture. Real prisoner’s dilemma you got here.
This is another thing that’s surreal to me. If you go back to the original discussions about there being a problem with hanh’s BTCPay module, for a while hanh kept trying to insist that there was nothing wrong with his BTCPay module except that people didn’t use it.
So then he built up this whole deflection thing that turned into the commission-based salespeople idea. The idea itself is good and I told him so in an earlier post:
But I want to make it clear here that the whole reason that this became a theme that bubbled up to the top of the grant committee notes, is that hanh was trying as hard as possible to not have to take accountability for the criticisms that BTCPay was leveling on him.
I’m not saying this to be aggressive. I’m saying this because as a project manager who wants Zcash to be healthy, I think that’s a really scary trait to see in your culture. If the culture rewards problems being swept under the rug, then you’re doomed.
That being said, though, I think that probably the reason that hanh does it, is because this forum IS genuinely psychologically unsafe. To be clear, the definition of “psychological safety” in teams is that team members believe that they can take risks without being shamed by other team members.
Wikipedia ought to put a link to this forum in a section on examples of psychologically unsafe spaces.
What is the goal of this forum? Is one of the goals to attract new competent developers who might want to submit a grant proposal to Zcash in the future? How many competent developers might be silently reading this thread this week, and are now silently thinking to themselves, “Wow, remind me to never submit a Zcash grant.”
Furthermore, how many people this last month saw the BTCPay thread calling out Zcash and then silently sold their ZEC?
And, how many BTCPay businesses over the last few years told their developers, “We’d love to support multiple coins, I don’t know which, you decide," and then the developer implemented Monero but not Zcash because Monero was the one that clearly worked?
At Birdcalls, we call things like this “silent killers.” It’s so easy to ignore them. It’s so easy to pretend that they don’t exist. And then you have no idea why you’re failing.
This theme is the absolute final straw breaking point for me. This part seems like just straight up gaslighting on the part of the entire Zcash community. I just can’t even. Y’all paid hanh $120k to build the original BTCPay Zcash module in a way that BTCPay themselves said wasn’t usable. Hanh also didn’t document it properly and he didn’t maintain it. Nobody in the community ever expressed any sentiment that this original $120k was an exorbitant price that shouldn’t have been paid. So it just seemed logical to me that if Birdcalls were going to rebuild the module in a way that BTCPay approves of, properly document it in a way that BTCPay approves of, and then maintain it like respectable developers, that surely a logical, reasonable price point for this ask would be 1.2X of the original. What didn’t I understand? Maybe the thing I didn’t understand is that there’s a secret double standard in the community? Is it that there’s prices that Hanh can charge, and then there’s a different set of price points for outsiders? I’m genuinely bewildered here.
Birdcalls was genuinely just trying to help. But, at this point, from the beginning of my calls with the committee, this process has taken a month of my life. It was a miserable experience. I don’t think you realized that while you were interviewing us we were also interviewing you.
We care about value-alignment. One of our core values is to be able to warmly embrace uncomfortable truths and discuss them productively and cooperatively. In this coliseum-esque defend-to-the-death, grant-proposer-alone-against-the-community forum culture, I have seen no evidence that Zcash is currently capable of that. For that reason, Birdcalls withdraws our grant proposal. We are no longer interested in fixing the BTCPay module for Zcash.
Over and out,
Sunny @ Birdcalls
PS For anyone else out there, Birdcalls is a team of developers who run The Internet Phone Booth. We also function as mercenaries-for-hire. If you’d like to hire us to do a job, - perhaps build a payment gateway! - we’re available.
I don’t love social media, but recently we’ve been experimenting with hanging out on ig. It’s pretty relaxed over there. You’re welcome to say hello.