While ECC has published their stance on the funding, it would be easy for community to decide if they share their broader goals and vision for next 4 years (post 2020). or do they expect community to provide the manifesto?
Does community really want to use block rewards for marketing? If that’s the case, then we shouldn’t call it DEVFUND. Let’s get the naming right this time (unlike Founder’s reward).
IMHO, we should be spending all resources on increasing shielded address adoption to 100%, everything else should come next including scalability (we simply don’t want to compete with Coda protocol without 100% shielded transactions).
I feel the community has been betrayed on the marketing side of this project.
The foundation with it’s grants has done much more in spreading the word than what the ECC was able to do (video lessons with coinbase, a new website and adding confusion with the company rebrand xD)
I’m being surely naive, but marketing and PR, from an external point of view, has been ineffective.
you know it man. In a utopic world this should’ve been done and ready a year ago and it would’ve been nice concentrating on smart contract or other features that actually add value for individuals and companys alike.
I think this depends on what facet of the ecosystem you are looking at. The PR and outreach work with governments and regulators, for example, has been very valuable (see: NYDFS and Gemini). Also note this paragraph from the transparency report:
Although not directly tied to Awareness and Education, the Electric Coin Company
spent considerable time and budget securing and protecting trademarks against
scammers and thieves. This represented over 18% of marketing expenses excluding
employee salaries.
Protecting users from scams seems to me like an effective use of funds given how devastating they can be (see e.g. the users reporting in this forum that they fell victim to phishing attacks around the Ycash launch). But it concretely meant 20% less budget for spending on other marketing work.
Oh, I would have loved to be in that utopia - it would have saved me many grey hairs! But that would have required a significantly-larger spend on engineering, which definitely wasn’t feasible in the bear market. A year ago, Sapling hadn’t even activated yet, and Sprout was just too heavy for 100% adoption to be realistic at Zcash’s ecosystem size. Since then we’ve made tremendous progress building out Sapling’s functionality and writing the backend libraries that are needed by the ecosystem. I’m personally very optimistic that we’ll see significant Sapling adoption by NU3, once the libraries have percolated into the various custom stacks within the wider ecosystem.
yes! lack of marketing is one of the reasons 10-15 large twitter accounts have been able to harm zcash’s brand. these accounts are on full offense, but a marketing campaign would force them to play defense. also, marketing is important for brand awareness. regular people don’t know the difference between BTC/ZEC. i could go on, but i feel lack of marketing has retarded ZEC’s growth.
Sure, a dev fund could be used for marketing. What else would you call it? Growth fund? Dev as in “business development” could be inclusive of that anyway
Everyone sees marketing as PR, but it’s not. Marketing is the ability to sell a product, for example, ZCASH does not have enough applications, but there are ways such as wallet and payment for goods, but why use ZCASH, you can pay with another currency. Therefore, marketing must answer the question of why the user should use this product in his life, but confidentiality, and what is stored in coins is not profitable, so this feature will not work, if it is not possible to stop the price, then you need to think of an instant payment method when the user does not losing money holding a coin and an area where privacy is needed. Further, when the course ceases to fall, add preservation functions, and with growth add investment ones.
I just have one question Andrew: In the event the community chooses to include a percentage of block rewards to the ZF but without ECC included, can ZF handle all of the necessary work that needs to be done to take Zcash to the next level? Tech development, marketing, brand awareness, regulatory education, etc?
Development is a broad term that can be used to describe business and marketing related functions as well as software development. But I don’t think anyone is hung up on that term.
ECC is focusing business development efforts on shielded adoption, as are team members focused on the reference wallet implementations, etc. The strategy has been to gain widespread adoption in the most well-regarded wallets and exchanges globally, and then to begin to transition to shielded adoption over time. This week’s Flexa announcement is an example. Sapling now makes it possible for that transition but it’s not plug-and-play. That’s why the reference wallet work is so important. That’s why one of our team was recently at a large exchange to help them with phase 1 of a three phased approach to shielded adoption.
Shielded adoption also requires regulatory, education and tech support. There are powerful players, both internal and external to the industry, that do not want to see privacy on a public blockchain.
“Marketing” is an often trivialized word / function and frequently misunderstood. But I hear the concerns. We are listening.
I still wonder why the zcash[.]com domain isn’t allready an asset of the ECC and and as i see no updates/answers in the thread i made about 6 months ago that the ECC/Foundation should get their hands on the zcash domain i have some problems with the phrase “protecting trademarks”…
So far we know only that the person holding the Zcash domain is somehow close to Zcash, but after nothing is done in protecting the domain i ask myself how close this person is?
Seriously, if you use protecting trademarks you guys should finally begin with the easiest one, getting the zcash com domain where it should be.
Flexa is surely a great milestone to Zcash’s resumé, but doesnt quite drive adoption since those merchants aren’t literally accepting crypto as payment. Users are paying a third party who then converts the crypto asset into fiat and pays the merchant. That’s not the vision of crypto and adoption. And if we keep playing by the powerful players’ rules, we will be waiting a lifetime before anything gets accepted. Crypto is supposed to disrupt the old system, not kiss the ring of lawmakers and regulators or having to KYC/AML at every corner street. I applaud Monero for that. Maybe Zcash should rethink this strategy.
The fund likes company posts and company fund posts, and there are no problems.
Three years of the coin and only now speak about the paramount importance of the reference wallet, there are no problems at all, everything should be so, I invent a car, sell the drawings and the users make it themselves, everything is so, no problems.
Now what is happening in the fund, the company in the market suits you? How the community and the public treat the coin are comfortable with everything, and if not, what is preventing you from succeeding in the project, I mean intermediate success, after 4 years of existence (to find your niche in the market)
According to our attorney can’t necessarily be compelled to give up the domain. Certain behaviors will allow us to more easily trigger a claim. The owners were approached through a claimed intermediary who was an original investor but he has not been responsive. We are tracking it, but it has been a lower priority.
Though anecdotal, here’s what happened this week: A Gemini account was setup by someone that was willing to be kyc’d. Zcash was sent to that peson. That Zcash was then sent to a dozen college students in the Bronx on newly installed Exodus wallets. They then transferred a portion of that money to Flexa wallets to try to use it in their community. They went out to stores and bought makeup, electronics and ice cream. Through that process, they got into various conversations with their community about what all this was about and explaining crypto, financial sovereignty and the importance of privacy. Btw, some of these kids are undocumented. They don’t have access to financial services. One of these kids is planning to get their father on-boarded so that he can bypass Western Union. Another wants to take all this information to teach others in Uganda. They formed a telegram group so that they can keep conversations flowing. They are talking about what they can do to get others in their community engaged.
I encourage each person in this forum, those that want to see this succeed, to do the same thing these kids from the Bronx did this week. They dug in, they played with it, they went out, they spent and they educated. This is how widespread adoption will happen. Bring those stories back and we’ll elevate them and inspire others to do the same.
Let me try to fit it up. The Zcash com domain is for sale, everybody can buy it and use it for a scam & phishing site after it is bought meanwhile, enough he is willing to pay for it. If i remember right the price than back was $100k, mostly cheaper now after the domain holder is aware that there is a process on the track to get the domain somehow.
If this is not really of higher priority, having in mind it is as well a financial asset, sounds at least strange to me, hence it leaves the taste that because the holder is an early investor is the reason in not obtaining the domain at all or for now.
Get a better attorney familar with trademark issues. Seriously, this is not making sense. Yahoo for example has aquired 100’s of domains like yahooplace.com or yahooooo or yahooxxx, what’s left for a direct tradmark domain. Again: The wipo makes such decisions pretty fast and their should be even no doubt that such domain dispute will result in anything else than having the ECC winning this case.
But than again, as long as you don’t even try and dispute you won’t find out …
Deviated question to the current topic at hand, if ZEC reaches final line of support dropping to $45, how can ECC justify getting $1 million per month granted by a community of stakeholders, miners, investors knowing it will be causing more massive sell pressure to keep the lights on? That sort of adoption you are referring to will take decades to take shape, and its pretty clear short term speculators and mainstream long term holders arent so enthusiastic about holding ZEC. I for one am a ZEC holder and yes i am here for a positive future ROI, that is if the financial world isn’t denominated in ZEC in the years to come.
If you haven’t already, please propose the model that you believe is in the best interest of the community and drives the appropriate level of accountability. We’ll work with you to create a prezip and provide a public assessment per the blog I posted yesterday.
