Hi Zooko. I appreciate the post. I’m going to say some things now on behalf of myself, not on behalf of the Zcash Foundation. And they’re not going to be particularly positive and maybe not that nice. I apologize in advance for bumming anyone out.
First, I want to be clear that I have always been very bullish on Zcash (the technology) and very bullish on ZEC. I would actually love to be able to adopt the attitude Zooko strawmans onto the Foundation — ie be agnostic about the price of the coin, while being excited about the tech — but I also recognize that all of our development efforts in this space depend on funding.
Some folks will note that I haven’t been that active posting here lately, and that’s not because I don’t support ZEC. It’s because I’m tired. I’m tired of two things:
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The constant pointless bickering between ECC and Zcash Foundation. This has been a source of constant poison and unhappiness in this space. Just get along and work together: stop proposing new weird governance models when the basic problem is that there aren’t enough good stewards doing work.
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The fact (related closely to point #1) that it is functionally impossible to bring any new user-facing features in ZEC because nobody will get behind it and let us fucking build things. And no, NFT strategies that rely on Ethereum for distribution are not “new things”, that’s just fiddling.
I spent a good part of the pandemic time encouraging the Zcash community to support ZSAs because I thought that they would make Zcash more relevant. This was shut down at every turn by ECC, even in the face of broad support from members of the community. Ok, that’s fine: surely there was another priority that ECC could get behind (not, ugh, NFTs) that would bring new users to Zcash. Maybe we could have working private ZEC on Ethereum chains? DeFi and smart contracts in Zcash? Hell: even NFTs on Zcash that didn’t rely on Ethereum to trade would be cool. Something, anything that actually changes users’ experience, beyond (admittedly wonderful) invisible improvements in the core proving technology, which do not motivate adoption at all.
At this point I can get behind anything but the fighting. I am dead tired of people referring to Monero and Tornado Cash and then mentioning Zcash as a footnote. We have the best technology: we should be doing whatever it takes to make people use it.
Instead I read this board and it’s nothing but new power plays to take control of the dev fund and power in the community, while blocking all substantial change.
Ok fine, Zooko. You win. You have exhausted me. If what you want is to have total control of a dying moribund community, then as far as I’m concerned you can have it. Good luck.