Hudson Jameson announces his candidacy for an MGRC position

Governance
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8/25/20 Update

Here is a link to my “MGRC Q&A Live Session” that I participated in with @cburniske & @jmsjsph:

Below I have my campaign pitch as well as responses to the MGRC Open Questions.

Summary of Campaign Pitch

I advocate for pragmatism while working together to better the Zcash ecosystem. If elected, I would lean on my extensive experience being a leader in the cryptocurrency community to do the leg work behind proposals and set up of the structures behind the MGRC, optimizing for public communication/transparency. My experience in other cryptocurrency ecosystems as an organizer and leader will lend itself to providing a different perspective from those who may be very embedded in the Zcash community. I appreciate you taking the time to review the candidates and hope that you consider me for a spot on the MGRC committee. :slight_smile:

MGRC Open Questions

  1. ZIP Ambiguity: The ZIP-1014 language has some ambiguities. Where would you stand on how to interpret and implement operational activities when there is no explicit language to guide you? How should the MGRC consider community will/preference?

Answer: Fortunately for the MGRC, the Zcash Foundation has provided some excellent guidance in this video on how the fund structure will operate on a legal and structural level. However, if there are ambiguities I would propose basing our decisions on the values outlined in the Zcash Foundation’s “Values and Goals” page as well as feedback from the community. I think transparency, inclusivity, and humility are values that should be at the front of our minds.

  1. MGRC Role: Should MGRC be a “driving actor” or provide sourcing, oversight and review? [context]. Should MGRC be more of a bureaucracy (with hierarchy, continuity, defined rules, and expertise) or can it be an adhocracy (decentralized and flexible)?

Answer: Like Andrew, I am torn on this answer and get the feeling that the MGRC will start as an entity that provides sourcing/oversight/review to test the waters and may need to morph into a more “actively driven” entity. The reasons for this are the following:

  1. We do not yet know the capabilities and time commitments of the MGRC members.
  2. We do not fully know if there will be a lot of grant applications coming in at first, as well as the quality of these applications. If there is a lack of applications or lack in quality of applications the MGRC may need to seek out grantees more actively.

Although I feel like this is how things will unfold, I am completely open to taking a more active role from the start.

I will be advocating for a decentralized/flexible structure for the MGRC. Much of the time a bureaucracy comes with a lot of red tape and distractions. I have experience participating in DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) and would advocate for that type of model (or something similar if not an actual DAO). It would be cool to use Zcash technology to set-up a DAO.

  1. Teamwork: Have you had previous experiences of being put together rather arbitrarily in a team before? If so, how did you manage? How will you go about managing disagreements between 1) yourself and another MGRC member and 2) other MGRC members with each other?

Answer: I have extensive experience participating in teams that are arbitrarily put together. My primary example is my participation in Moloch DAO, which is a grant funding DAO operating on Ethereum. Every member of the DAO gets voting shares proportional to their contribution to the DAO. Their contributions are used to fund public goods projects for the Ethereum ecosystem. I also have experience as an EIP editor (similar to a ZIP editor, but on Ethereum) where I have to work with a group of editors to make decisions about EIP approvals and issues. I would lean on this experience to help write up a proposal (in collaboration with the other MGRC members) for how grant applicants should submit their proposals and how the MGRC should decide on proposals.

  1. Processes: If you were elected to the MGRC, what processes and frameworks would you attempt to set in place in order to allow frictionless collaboration between the members of the MGRC? Is it a conflict of interest for a member of another cryptocurrency project to be on the MGRC?

Answer: I would propose the following set-up:

  • Single chat room service (something like Discord) to allow for real time communication. If necessary, I have experience setting up “chat bridges” between services for those who have reservations using certain chat providers.
  • Bi-weekly videoconference meetings with the MGRC members to start. If things start to operate smoothly we could move to monthly meetings.
  • Blog or forum (I hope we don’t use something like Medium and set-up our own site) for long-form announcements to the community on which grants are accepted and other news. We may be able to utilize the Zcash forums for this.

I do not believe it is a conflict of interest for a member of another cryptocurrency project to be on the MGRC for the same reason I wouldn’t disallow a grantee to be working on more than one cryptocurrency project at a time: the cryptocurrency space is small/niche with a lot of overlap of technologies, philosophies, and collaborations. Both the ECC and Zcash Foundation have collaborated with teams outside of the Zcash ecosystem with fruitful results (examples: Ethereum Foundation collaboration with ECC and Zcash Foundation collaboration with Parity Technologies). Note that although I support potentially funding grantees that work on more than one cryptocurrency project, a grant application must “further the Zcash cryptocurrency and it’s ecosystem” as written in ZIP-1014.

Original Post

Hello all!

I am announcing my candidacy for a position on the Major Grant Review Committee. You may remember me from my Dev Fund Review post last November. I feel that I am uniquely qualified to fill one of the seats on the committee and am looking forward to hearing everyone’s opinion in this thread.

My platform: I am uniquely qualified to be on the MGRC because I bring with me less bias and a wealth of experience in the cryptocurrency space.

I have been involved in the cryptocurrency ecosystem since 2011, originally enticed by the decentralization/censorship resistant aspects of Bitcoin. I was mostly a lurker on the forums at the time, but did mine on CPUs, and later GPUs/ASICs, through the years. Around 2014-2015 I was involved in the Darkcoin (now called Dash) cryptocurrency as an active community member. Around the time Darkcoin became Dash I left that community and became active in the Ethereum community. Since 2015 I have been involved in a number of leadership positions both within the Ethereum community and my place of employment, the Ethereum Foundation.

I strongly feel that Ethereum and Zcash are best friends, and have been since some of the earliest days of Ethereum. There has been numerous collaborations between researchers of Ethereum and Zcash that I have been involved in, including the Baby ZoE project, Project Alchemy, Zooko speaking at Devcon’s Two and Four, and myself speaking at Zcon0. The announcement from the ECC for the Zcash developer alliance is also promising for cross-compatibility between Zcash and other blockchains like Ethereum. I mention this to point out that I understand the importance and intricacies of cross-collaboration between projects.

Although much of my time has been spent in the Ethereum ecosystem, there is a special place in my heart for Zcash. I highly value privacy focused initiatives and believe privacy is a right. The Zcash community has always struck me as accepting and pragmatic above all else, which is rare to find in a community. I believe that because I am in some ways “an outsider” from the Zcash community (not very active in the forums, etc.) and therefore can assess grant applications with fewer biases. If elected I will make the time necessary to thoughtfully, but swiftly, look through the grant applications and work pragmatically with the other people on the committee.

A few final points:

  1. I am not currently involved in any initiatives of the ECC or ZFND besides being a member of the Community Advisory Panel since 2018, participating in this forum, and participating in some Zcash Telegram channels (that may or may not be officially connected with the ECC/ZFND).
  2. I have participated in the 2018 and 2019 Community Advisor Panel votes. In the spirit of transparency I am making my voting decisions from the Zcash Dev Fund Community Sentiment Poll public at this link. Do not hesitate to ask me questions about it.
  3. I do not currently have a stance on whether or how the committee members should be compensated for their positions and am open to hearing all opinions.

Thanks for taking the time to read this!

You can find my blog at hudsonjameson.com and @hudsonjameson on Twitter. My DMs are open and my e-mail is hudson@hudsonjameson.com.

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The only issue I would have giving my vote to you, is the potential conflict of interest that may come from your involvement with The Ethereum Foundation.

If you would make a commitment to abstain from voting on proposals from The Ethereum Foundation and its affiliates I would be interested enough to support you with my vote as a ZCAP rep.

I appreciate your commitment to the developer alliance, but hope you see where I am coming from to maintain a healthy neutral MGRC nomination with my vote.

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I completely understand and would abstain from voting on proposals from the Ethereum Foundation. The word “affiliates” will need to be better defined. The reason is that the Ethereum Foundation has an extensive grants program that funds nearly every major Ethereum client across both Eth 1.0 and Eth 2.0 along with a plethora of other projects. We also at times work with the Ethereum entity that is a part of the developer alliance, Consensys. However, Consensys is separate from the Ethereum Foundation.

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Hi Hudson,

Could you give your thoughts on what you think should be done regarding dev funding after the 4 years of the major grants committee? Should it be continued after the 2nd halvening (year 8), or be discontinued in favor of something else?

Personally I would like to eventually move toward something more decentralized, such as coin holder voting on dev funding.

A decentralized coin holder voting system for dev funding allocation is something that could be funded by the major grants committee.

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Thanks for the question!

tl:dr:

I believe block reward funding in Zcash us powerful and good for the ecosystem. We should re-asess everything about on-chain funding after 2-3 years to see how well it is working so far and adjust. At that point other options that involve verified Zcash community members or Zcash related organizations may be viable to implement alongside or to replace the current system.

Long form answer:

I believe that block reward funding can only work if you start the cryptocurrency with it built in. Retroactively putting it in (or re-applying it after taking it out) is problematic because it takes an extraordinary amount of community coordination. I say this because Zcash has something special in this type of funding and should not take it away without a lot of thought. Providing built-in protocol incentives for Zcash to became a better system is very effective from my vantage point.

Ideally you would want to move towards something more decentralized, but from my research and experience dealing with governance issues on Ethereum that is difficult. On-chain governance solutions generally turn into oligarchies very quickly (see Lisk, EOS, Kusama, Steem). The key to making on-chain governance (like coin holder votes) effective is to:

  1. Have the cryptocurrency somewhat evenly spread out so no major group of entities can collude. This is very difficult to achieve with centralized exchanges.

  2. Have a system where you can have a 1 vote-1 entity system so you can’t have people pretending to be more than one person. BrightID is taking steps towards this, but it is still very early.

I find the likelihood of coming up with a system that meets the criteria above (or at least point 2) in the next 4 years highly unlikely, but let’s hope for the best and pursue the most fair, decentralized solution possible. Maybe creating a “governance token” that is fairly distributed to validated entities could help solve #1. My thinking is that we should be assessing new, innovative solutions as we go along and it is too early for me to have a strong opinion on what should be done with dev funding in the future.

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With respect to your “final point 3”:

Would you be willing to take a pro-significant compensation position?

I’m inclined to vote for candidates who pledge to make the MGRC membership a well-paid full-time post. Anything else runs afoul problems with ambiguous biases. I take it as given that all members will be biased, and that explicit biases are better than implicit (denied?) ones.

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@zancas I’m not following how paying the MGRC members a full-time salary avoids ambiguous bias. Could you elaborate?

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If MGRC members were unpaid for their role, then they would need another source of income. That source would be left unspecified.
If an MGRC were paid a salary then they could be said to “work for” the MGRC, instead of some other unspecified employer.

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If they worked for MGRC they would be legally responsible for the conflicts of interest they turn into anything more than a conflict of interest.

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Hi @Souptacular I’ve changed my mind about full-time vs. other-time.

I think I don’t know how much work being an MGRC member is.

I am in favor of MGRC members receiving Zcash on a vesting schedule.

Would you support this?

I am opposed to limiting/regulating/policing investment behavior on the part of MGRC members.

Do you support MGRC-member policing? (e.g. investment regulation?)

I hear about “conflict of interest”, what about “confluence of interest”? I am persuaded that your current affiliation with ethereum and your historical experience with Dash are features.

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I’m inclined in the exact opposite direction: I’m not casting my vote for any candidate advocating compensation for committee members. Let’s not forget that the last round of community panel voting showed that it was a toss-up whether this committee should even exist in the first place.

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Hi @hloo I think @sarahjamielewis does a far more thorough and thoughtful analysis of how much effort is likely, and why it implies significant (full-time, for some) work:

I think you should check out her argument. Notice it’s not the radical proposition I once floated of all members being full time, all the time. Rather her position is more thought out, and nuanced.

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My first instinct was to think “Yeah, a vesting schedule makes sense”, but thinking about it more has led me to believe that it wouldn’t be ideal. The MGRC is a grant giving group and not a VC firm or group of advisors to projects. A vesting schedule is implemented to groups of advisors or investors so they don’t undermine the project they are assisting by “cashing out early” and manipulating the worth of the project. It is looking more and more like the MGRC is going to be quite a commitment and I don’t see a reason to need a vesting schedule. I’m open to being convinced otherwise.

I do not support this.

This is an excellent term to use to describe why I think I would play a unique role on the MGRC. I’ve come to realize recently that I’ve been in an “Ethereum echo chamber” for a long time. Stepping more actively into the Zcash community has been important for me because it allowed me to see different perspectives and ideas, especially when it comes to governance of protocols. There are many grant giving structures I’ve been exposed to during my time in the Ethereum space, from for-profits, non-profits, and DAOs. I would use my experiences learned from these endeavors to shape my thinking when coordinating structures needed for the MGRC.

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I have updated my post with a short campaign pitch and answers to the MGRC Open Questions.

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Thank you for your application, after listening to @alchemydc bring up your contributions (I was unaware of until now) to the dev fund, I support your candidacy for MGRC & take back my concern about your affiliations.

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Thanks @PhusionPhil!

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Hello @Souptacular For my vote, please answer my questions frankly:

  1. Are you pro BTC? If yes, Why? If not, Why?
  2. What is the largest account size you’ve handled in USD? How many end users did it impact?
  3. MGRC will control 8640 ZEC per month or 25920 per quarter, how will this be roughly spent? (provide napkin calculation).
  4. MGRC announcement attracts 100s of applicants from all over the world with all random ideas, all matching your goals, how would you evaluate them?
  5. KPIs aren’t entirely possible on a privacy preserving payments protocol project’s level, it’s all z2z, how will you evaluate funded team’s impact?
  6. DeFi fever made ETH run 2x compared to every cryptocurrency this year, thoughts?
  7. What locals, regions, languages, ethnicities, educational backgrounds of people have you worked with? What are your preferences of assembling teams that deliver?
  8. We live in a remote world now, how do you evaluate applicants for grants?
  9. Projects in Zcash are going to go through a huge change beyond the handful, driven teams funded via Zcash Foundation, thoughts?
  10. Zcash is a protocol at its core, ZEC price is volatile. How will you handle a single digit ZEC? ($9 x 8640/month = $77,760) How will you handle a 5 digit ZEC? ($21,000 x 8640/month = $181.44MM) Thoughts…
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Thank you for the questions @aiyadt!

  1. Are you pro BTC? If yes, Why? If not, Why?
    Answer: This is a complicated topic. When I first started getting involved in Bitcoin in 2011, I was encapsulated by the idea of decentralized, non-government manipulated, censorship resistant peer-to-peer currency. Over time it seems that the goals have changed to where Bitcoin is now “digital gold” and it is more difficult to see a future where a family can quickly and easily send Bitcoin across international borders with small fees. At this point, I think Bitcoin can still be a really good censorship resistant store of value, but I don’t support it as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Zcash has a much better opportunity to be that.

  2. What is the largest account size you’ve handled in USD? How many end users did it impact?
    Answer: Although I have been deeply involved in operations at the non-profit I’ve worked at over the years (Ethereum Foundation), I have never been directly involved in the finances. I was previously involved in an IoT blockchain start-up called Oaken Innovations as COO which handled $500k of early investor funds (friends and family round) from about 10 people/entities. Other than those 2 experiences, I have only handled my own personal accounts.

  3. MGRC will control 8640 ZEC per month or 25920 per quarter, how will this be roughly spent? (provide napkin calculation).
    Answer: This will be entirely dependent on the amount and quality of applications we receive. It would be unwise to speculate how much of the budget should be used monthly before we are at a place to start to understand the cadence of applications and other details.

  4. MGRC announcement attracts 100s of applicants from all over the world with all random ideas, all matching your goals, how would you evaluate them?
    Answer: My hope is that the MGRC members would construct a way to funnel these applications into different buckets based on priority and other factors. A sorting and ranking system for initial applications would help us figure out what to focus the bulk of our time on and make sure we don’t focus on applications that do not meet the goals and edict of the MGRC.

  5. KPIs aren’t entirely possible on a privacy preserving payments protocol project’s level, it’s all z2z, how will you evaluate funded team’s impact?
    Answer: Although you can’t necessarily provide KPIs on things at a low technical level, such as z2z transactions, it is possible to gather other KPIs. Examples may include number of downloads for a mobile app built to facilitate Zcash transactions or social media traffic. As I mentioned on the call, I want there to be grants focused on non-technical aspects of Zcash, such as marketing. Marketing endeavors have a lot of KPIs.

  6. DeFi fever made ETH run 2x compared to every cryptocurrency this year, thoughts?
    Answer: As someone who is very deep in the Ethereum ecosystem, the DeFi explosion feels both like a greedy surprise and natural progression. The popularity of DeFi has driven up the transaction fee prices to a point where the average user is priced out of participating. Some of the drivers behind DeFi are greed and hoarding wealth which isn’t good because that creates a larger wealth gap. One the other hand, the promise of DeFi, to enable anyone to get involved in exciting new financial instruments without being an “accredited investor”, is still alive. DeFi is not what I imaged when I signed up to build Ethereum, but I think experiments like the ones we see today push forward Ethereum in many ways and puts pressure to innovate to do things like alleviate transaction fee woes. In a tweet I posted Sept. 3rd I explained in part how I was feeling:

I struggle to reconcile participating in the greediness of DeFi. Sometimes I’m unsure a net positive will come out of all of this if DeFi dominates as the primary Ethereum use case forever. However, I still believe Ethereum will greatly empower the disenfranchised at some point.

  1. What locals, regions, languages, ethnicities, educational backgrounds of people have you worked with? What are your preferences of assembling teams that deliver?
    Answer: I currently work at a non-profit based in Switzerland without a central physical headquarters. Almost everyone at the organization works remotely (although there are some concentrated groups of people who rent co-working spaces in major cities). Blockchain technology attracts people from all around the world and I’ve been lucky enough to work with people from everywhere, including Europe, Latin America, and Asia. I work with a range of ages, experiences, and academic backgrounds. An interesting trend I’ve noticed is the amount of college drop-outs in the blockchain space.
    I greatly value diversity in the teams I work with. It’s important to have BIPOC representation on your teams as well as other marginalized groups. People who are driven to succeed and get along well with others are traits that I value in team members.

  2. We live in a remote world now, how do you evaluate applicants for grants?
    Answer: Carefully. With the support of the other MGRC members I believe we can set-up the proper systems to divide-and-conquer the applications submitted and flush out the ones that don’t fit with our goals. It is really interesting how remote collaboration has negated the need for physical workspaces and I imagine that will affect the line items listed on the grant applications.

  3. Projects in Zcash are going to go through a huge change beyond the handful, driven teams funded via Zcash Foundation, thoughts?
    Answer: I think this is a positive thing and a natural progression to increase the decentralization of a project. It helps create less central points of failure. The MGRC will help accelerate this process and my hope is that the funds are utilized in a way that keeps decentralization in mind.

  4. Zcash is a protocol at its core, ZEC price is volatile. How will you handle a single digit ZEC? ($9 x 8640/month = $77,760) How will you handle a 5 digit ZEC? ($21,000 x 8640/month = $181.44MM) Thoughts…
    Answer: The MGRC will need to adjust for the constantly changing price of ZEC. The volatility in price increases the need for speedy processing of applications and grant dispersal after terms are agreed upon between the MGRC, Zcash Foundation, and applicant. Because I do not have experience handling grants, I would lean on others in the MGRC to learn and activate strategies resulting in minimizing volatility.

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Good Luck Mr. Jameson

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