Hey all,
After 6 months of Research & Development, we would love to be able to finance more study, keep our works, and experiment new projects using Zcash as a privacy layer, already extensively described here:
For those arriving now, a bit of context and the 40 minutes video presentation.
Just adding some few more fresh updates,
https://telegra.ph/ΚΣ-Labs---Brazil---July-2021-07-27
I’m generally not in favor of funding research & development. In my opinion, R&D doesn’t present actionable deliverables and tends to bundle together many tasks of various complexity, size, and benefit.
Generally, In the end, the community has a hard time figuring out what exactly is being worked on and to what extend the deliverables fit the right goals.
I think that’s not what R&D is about. If you do research, we (the community) should know what paper you plan to publish and how it benefits zcash. Also, I’d like to know who will review your research and verify its correctness. At this moment, it’s unclear what contacts you have with other researchers in the industry.
If it is about development, then we should know what product you intend to create. We should have a design, technical specifications, and some kind of business plan.
As it stands, the proposal is a rather long list of items. In the past, this has led to underwhelming results where only the small tasks were delivered.
You are looking for a 1-year commitment. Personally, I’d need to do more due diligence before backing your proposal.
Thank you for the support @SexDrugsAndZcash! We also believe that spreading multi-disciplinary groups across the globe, genuine aligned with ECC’s mission is the way to build a culture and decentralize innovation. A Team proposal like ours represent less than 2% of the actual (and growing) Dev Fund, but probably we were too excited talking among ourselves for too long about ideas and projects using Zcash as a privacy layer and could not explicitly synthesize goals as bulletproof points in the expected “deliverable” ways here.
We understand that we would have to adapt into business-oriented ways to be able to grant our work, while we see it as a non-orthodox list of projects, researches and open working intentions. But, as an example, if we break 3 devs full-time job getting 150/h (as many proposed accepted grants did) we are talking about $854k a year. This is not what we want, neither believe it is fair with the Dev Fund. A few people here realized how it is cheap comparing to the probable long-term outcome, and the result of talented people with time to experiment.
@hanh, thank your for your thoughts on that. Comparing to ECC’s researchers, our R&D might sound a joke, yes. Anyhow, having zooko and many supporting the rude guy calling our proposal a joke was very humiliating. Marina’s articles are mostly in Portuguese in the Critical Social Science fields of Technology and Culture, with her Phd on Ideology, Discourse and Net Neutrality (PDF [https://bit.ly/3irrnlU]). She is part of the very few academics elite groups in Brazil, as Edmilson Paraná [https://amzn.to/3xszYJm] and Lúcia Santaella [https://amzn.to/3xq9FDB] jumping deep into these subjects, and interested in share their researchers as books out of restrict academic journals. Books on how to get rich speculating with cryptos are thousands - the Brazilian’s Amazon Top 5, but books from researchers with academic background are really few, and reading in English is far from most of the population, even within academics. Also: most of the relevant Sociologists publishing papers/books on this new economic system are extremely critical - in a bad way - with the anarchic economy to come, see [https://amzn.to/3fBQOj1]. We believe we should help to make people aware, embracing and coursing what is coming in good collective directions, not rejecting or falling into the speculative trap.
Remember, our humble 6k grant was spread in between many collaborators for the last 6 months and we kept working til our POC worked… and nice things were built out of the scope, like Zinkretik, or the first API generating Qrcodes on the top of new Brazilian Central Bank System that started in Nov’20, enabled by that first grant - in which even 250 dollars from “our” pockets became donations (in ZEC) for some communal kitchens.
We are not here for the money, and it is a bit tragic that we might have to leave this 6 months of experimental developed concepts, tools and platforms for traditional shit jobs (those who are hungry are in a hurry!) cze we write delusional proposals in wrong languages and were not really interested in making a business models out of Moeda to be self-funded, while some are taking thousands per projects (some fundamental! but) that doesn’t bring any real innovation or social impact.
This grant request is now canceled, but let’s keep it Open for Public Review.
We are sorry, but, unfortunately, a Team’s member had to accept a job proposal, as we were fearing; people have bills to pay and families to feed. 
Since we wrote it collectively, doesn’t make sense to keep it without her.
A business-oriented developers-only request is already Pending.
Hi Rafael, I think your project is really great. I only meant to like the other guy’s post for the expression of gratitude to zomg for their transparency, sorry for not thinking through it more the whole package. Loved the video presentation, it was really clear. The UX looks really excellent too. It’s also pretty interesting to hear about compliance with Brazil banking rules like showing name only but hiding the z address and other details
I’m looking forward to following more closely the proposal you’re working on you mentioned
i did wonder a bit at the privacy model. Basically showing a hash of the z address vs showing the z address doesn’t make much of a difference, in either case you can tell when two transactions are coming from the same account
It’s also pretty interesting to hear about compliance with Brazil banking rules like showing name only but hiding the z address and other details
It is been a bit more than one month now that we’ve stopped the development to write the docs, and soon did the Deep Dive presentation. A week later submitted this group proposal, and it is already a few days now that the new devs-only social-less Proposal is “being reviewed”. It is been tough to access limited “Empowering” support; having that 6k as the only income in the year for a group of devs working with inspiring academics in a crazy year where most of us lost relatives… By myself, having those to feed, I’m sadly already scheduling unrelated jobs interviews, despite really willing to work on this.
VC is so far from our reality that I had to google it’s meaning and wonder how people have so much spare money to invest, when others are hungry and we have a burning world to regenerate now. In our tradition, extra money feeds people who can’t. Anyhow, a VC sounds too Unitedstadian-bubbled, I’m not even sure we have something similar to this private institutional supports outside traditional Banks - which explains why I am running for an European University and why we are here struggling to have access to be able to build what we believe is a relevant tool in Brazil.
Hey @extrapo!
I’m from ZOMG. You mentioned that the grant request is “now cancelled”, but that you want to “keep it Open for Public Review”. I wanted clarity on if you are going ahead with submission of the grant proposal or not. If you are no longer wanting the grant proposal to be active please close it on your end or I can do it on our end. Thank you!
Hi @Souptacular,
A week ago we’ve submitted a much more modest proposal still “being reviewed”. Gonna close this one as soon the other is active. Good to see you are back around. Thank you.
