If indeed the top priority goal is shielded usability+adoption, then how about baking a corresponding incentive into the Dev Fund?
Proposal “10%+10% weighed by shielded adoption”:
Of each block reward,
X% to ECC + X% to the Zcash Foundation
where X = 10% × [fraction of total issued ZEC that’s shielded at the beginning of the block],
and the rest of the 20% get burned (or deferred for later),
for 4 years.
This incentives successful delivery of feature-complete and usable shielded transactions, and converges to 20% split between the ECC and the Foundation when t-addresses have been phased out.
There are some obvious issues:
- The quantitative incentive is tilted towards migrating big ZEC holders to shielded, rather than focusing on small and “retail” holders (who may have different needs). So to some extent this can be skewed or gamed. Still, regardless of what fraction of the ZEC are held by “whales”, there always remains an incentive to help the remaining users migrate.
- The initial funding levels may be very low due to slow adoption outside the control of ECC and the Foundation. They may have to subsist on their reserves until shielded adoption picks up pace.
- Some essential aspects are not reflected by the fraction of ZEC that is shielded, such as security and salability. However, to the extent that these aspects affect the coins’ market value, they are still incentivized.
- It does not differentiate the contributions of ECC vs. Zcash Foundation to shielded adoption (how could it?..), so in principle there’s a free rider problem. None the less, regardless of what one party does, the other is still incentivized to help the effort, until the last user is migrated.
A nice property is that it creates the focused incentives on increasing shielded adoption right away, even before the dev fund kicks in.