Eran, forgive me if I’m misreading any details — I’m typing this hastily on my phone before this airplane takes off and I lose internet service.
I don’t think anyone is calling for unnecessary bureaucracy. What I interpret the vote as is a question of power. Shall the ZF have power over that money, or shall there be a way to manage that money which is independent of ZF.
If the community requires the latter, I believe there are simple and efficient ways to do that. We just have to ensure that ZF cannot appoint or fire or defund or control the people or processes that govern those funds.
I don’t think “that would be hard to implement” is an adequate reason to push back. If the community is okay with the ZF having control (even indirect control) over those funds, that’s fine. ECC advises against that, but if the community supports it, we’ll support it.
However if the community wants governance of the MG funds to be independent of ZF’s control, they can have that. It’s not that difficult, and the principle of separation of power and of honoring the will of the community is worth it.
I think it is important to recognize that while the coinholders who chose to anonymously petition largely agreed with the Community Governance Panel, they diverged sharply on this question alone:
I know that this is controversial, but I do not see a justification for the Foundation ignoring that petition as though it didn’t happen, or for assuming without evidence that those millions of dollars worth of Zcash were somehow being used falsely. This is especially true if — as is the case — the petitioners are expressing a preference for decentralizing power away from the Foundation.
If you remove the profit factor i see several similarities or better said, possible similarities.
Totally agree with this!
Actually i was more interested how the founders reward was registered? As an entity? That’s everything but not off topic in my opinion after we have/should discuss how a MG comittee should/could be setuped, organized.
Hence why i would like to know how the FR was handled. Was it IRS registered and a registered entity as you/others stated that it must be?
Why not collecting some info that might maybe be usefull in a decision how a MG comittee should be “designed” like.
As a side note, i like that you are calling for more accountability and transparency than we had with the FR.
@zooko: is ECC planning on applying for funding from major grants? Because if it is, I think you should be very clear about that. You are making arguments for structuring a committee you intended to ask for funding. The conflict of interest is inherent and very large.
Note, ZFND is ineligible for funding from major grants. This is intentional.
Finally, why are you bring up the coin holder vote? Your own engineers described it as"
so obviously flawed and biased that you’ll have a dozen or more reasons (that have already been mentioned) to reject those results and many more reasons to prefer the Helios vote"
We haven’t made plans to apply for funding from the major grants, and in fact I’m inclined to think that we shouldn’t because of this reason. I think it is important that the receipt of funds be decentralized (for one thing in order to avoid crowding-out — other companies not bothering to apply for the funding because they assume ECC has the inside track). But it is more important for the control of funds to be decentralized, because that is where political power concentrates.
It’s because coinholders are an important part of our community, because they are necessary to the long-term success of our mission, and because ECC and ZF have an obligation as stewards of the Zcash trademark to listen to and honor the community’s voices.
Yes, they are. However, what about the individuals who did not participate in the coin holder vote due to its flaws? I (and several others) did not take part because of this. Not only that, the process to participate was too complex/inconvenient.
I personally do not think those results are an accurate representation of the community’s will.
Also, it’s been established that the coin pollvoteprocess could be gamed for a shockingly low amount of money. So I think that “we should listen to coinholders” and “we should listen to the coin pollvoteprocess” are not even remotely equivalent.
Personally, based on my reading of the forums and interactions with people from the community I have no doubt that everyone is acting in good faith. However, I agree with @zooko it’s a question of balance and power.
If the foundation holds the power of this funding then it creates a very awkward situation if you are interested in building the ecosystem (for which a grant, as principal or seed funding, is critical) but are critical of the foundation, now but especially later on. That’s what we should architect for: that later on moment where ZCash becomes bigger than its builders.
It’s not sufficient to have a 2-2. We should also try to work toward preserving that balance of power between ECC and ZF. Being able to make-or-break new teams or projects is a powerful mantle that doesn’t need to be misused to create some imbalance. I’m trying to brainstorm a solution that streamlines the bureaucratic aspects as much as possible but it’s a challenge. The first idea that comes to mind is that ECC should be involved in that decision process but not allowed from applying (nor the foundation as the ZIP says).
And for the record, I don’t think ZF did a bad job with the current grant funding process but IMHO @tromer the situation is different since the foundation has been invested with much more power and influence. The checks and balances must work both way. Ideally with the least wasting of resources/time possible. I agree it’s not an easy problem.
That has not been established. The claim that it could be gamed for a shockingly low amount of money was speculation. Exactly the same sort of speculation could have been leveled against the forum vote and the Community Advisory Panel but thankfully no-one went there.
Hurm, your last posts seem at odds with this comment. Would you please elaborate?
What happens to the ECC’s 35%?
Why wasn’t this raise as a showstopper to the ECC applying for MG’s before? The question was asked many times and directly answered by the ECC that only caps would cause the ECC not to apply for funding.
How is the advisory panel vote subject to the same concerns?
(Edit to add) I am implicitly ignoring the idea that a panel member’s vote could be purchased. If you assume this is a concern, then we fundamentally differ on our assumptions.
Observe also one inherent bias of the poll: people who largely ignored vocal opposition of the coinholder petition from community members associated with the Zcash Foundation seem less likely to want them to be stewards of the major grants. In fact even assuming the vote was not gamed this seems like the most obvious explanation for the difference between the two vote tallies.
I think the solution here is pretty simple; Zfnd should just refuse to be in charge of the grants, a decision completely within its control. It’s the “safe bet” considering Zfnd would have likely set up an independent committee to manage the funds indirectly anyway.
I’d like you to go there. If there’s some part of the panel vote that I’m not fully appreciating, I’d like to know. Feel free to PM if that’s a better avenue.
I’m not claiming that the referenced vote was representative of all entities whose voices ought to be considered (if it sounded that way, my apologies!). But I am confident that the vote accurately represented the views of those whose votes were sought.
We stated that we’d support whatever decision the community makes, and support the Zcash Foundation’s process for assessing that. But that’s independent from an opinion about how grants should be managed.
I think there may be some confusion here. The 35% allocated to ECC is independent of the oversight of major grants (the separate 40% bucket). The decision on grant funding isn’t a showstopper for ECC.
Can we not go there? It’s a distraction. The Foundation has run a responsible and well-organised process and there is no evidence of anything untoward. There is also no evidence that the petitioners who posted their opinions on the blockchain are anything other than what they say they are. Of course it is always possible to form a conspiracy theory to make people distrust anything. Fortunately Zcash governance is not brittle in this way — it does not rely on any such polling mechanism to be perfect — because instead it relies on the judgment and good stewardship of ZF and ECC (and their ability to point to evidence of the community’s intent, in case of a disagreement between the two orgs). According to what they’ve said, their Board is currently discussing how to resolve Question Number 4 3 from the polling, and based on their track record so far, I have confidence that they’ll propose a good process to resolve it.
