<gets comfy, puts on my personal hat for a very long rant>
On the effectiveness of the ZF as a force for decentralizing Zcash
I’m the first to admit when we miss our goals, but to say the ZF has not had a measurable impact on decentralization in the Zcash ecosystem is entirely unfair. The ZF has disbursed tens of thousands of ZEC and awarded dozens of grants; some of those grants funded wallets that are now used across the ecosystem (instead of using software directly provided by the ECC). Thanks to the ZF the ECC no longer has unilateral control over the trademark, and we moved from 1-of-1 ECC governance to 2-of-2 multisig governance. The trust and the reputation the ZF has built in this community is a big part of what enabled a productive dev fund discussion to further decentralize Zcash — I daresay we wouldn’t even be having this discussion about decentralizing Zcash on this ZF-supported forum if the ZF hadn’t stewarded this process.
Before the ZF put any effort into a consensus-compatible node implementations, there’s been only a single company focused on a consensus-compatible Zcash node: the ECC. 100% of the network still runs on that node. The ZF having an in-house consensus-compatible node implementation is exactly the sort of decentralizing force that I think the community must fight for.
The ZF originally received pledged donations from the first dev fund/founders reward/whatever we want to call it. Initially those donations were meant to be 260,000 ZEC over 4 years (we’re getting less with everyone’s dilution to fund the ECC). The new dev fund would grant the ZF 262,500 ZEC over 4 years. If I’m doing my math correctly, that’s roughly 50 more ZEC (~$3000) a month in this new reward period, which I wouldn’t categorize as a shift from “no protocol level obligations” to “significant funding from the protocol.”
And the Foundation sought what it thought was minimally acceptable; out of all the proposals that had widespread community support in the first round of sentiment collection, the ZF put its weight behind the one that minimized the amount it was receiving and maximized the amount to third parties through Major Grants. (the possible reward amounts for the Foundation were 50%, 30%, and 25%).
On Conflicts
Edit thanks to point raised by @str4d:
The more I think about it, the more I find it strange (actually, bizarre) that some are exceptionally worried about the hypothetical conflict of ZF not distributing grants because the ZF’s in-house efforts may be threatened by competition. We don’t compete, we’re a nonprofit, everything we do is for the public good. To use the most obvious example: if someone makes a good case for Zcash node software that would be better or complimentary to the ZF’s Rust efforts, why wouldn’t we fund them? Doing so would still decentralize/further our mission and Zcash. If it proves out, our engineering team has plenty of other unsolved problems we could tackle, and we could still contribute upstream.
If you still don’t believe me: we literally just funded someone to work on zcashd — which is a competitor in this framing — to the tune of ~14% of this year’s Grants/Research budget.
Meanwhile, it’s a much more straightforward (and dangerous) conflict to have ECC representatives sit on a committee where they can choose to fund themselves instead of others.
If you want to talk about disentangling influence, it’s far more important to ensure the committee/resulting governance structure is completely free of ECC influence, since without restrictions the ECC can literally give themselves money instead of third parties.
On this and your thoughts about decentralization @avichal, the omission of ECC/focus on ZF are both gravely misplaced and again, strange to me. I don’t know why there’s a blind spot there, but I’m open to hearing your perspective on why the ECC does not merit the same focus.
We’re Blowing Up the Problem Space After Months Spent Reducing It
This thread has resulted in the resurfacing of ideas already discussed and polled, and while there are opportunities for that kind of discussion, I fear people are viewing a very limited ambiguity in the community sentiment poll as an opportunity to blow up the problem space.
I wish I could pin this to the top of the thread, in giant letters, with a blink tag. A great many ideas were suggested during the eight month+ discussion of various approaches, and they were discussed at length across many mediums. We should be focused on the sentiment poll results in ZIP-1014, which showed approval of two approaches! 54 out of 88 members approved of the Foundation having independent authority, while 54 of 88 members approved of the Major Grant Committee operating exactly as specified in ZIP-1014. (with the 20 person either/or overlap) As I posted earlier:
The next step is for the Foundation to reach consensus with the ECC on what that synthesis approach looks like, if not the exact PR the Foundation outlined. If it is close to the Foundation’s approach, then by all means, we should be discussing how the selection/election/term of individual Major Grant Review Committee members and that process. But if that discussion continues, I really think it would be broadly beneficial to constrain ourselves to ZIP-1014 and the limited ambiguity the second sentiment collection poll suggested (an ambiguity of approvals no less!) as we’ve converged there as a community.
) does not provide any scope for an ECC representative on the MG committee. But it also means being accurate about what ZIP 1014 states.
, and moreover in our case there’s enforcement via network upgrades and forking.