MGRC now has the task of helping end ZEC’s multiyear tailspin. volume is currently drying up, halving pump looks like it will be underwhelming, ZEC has dropped out of the top 30, and zcash will suffer with high inflation for another 4 years. really hope MGRC members will be capable of combating these issues.
part of my net worth is now in your hands - net worth is something i take very seriously. good luck!
legendary concession ^
Now we support those who were elected, because that’s how we win.
They are supported immensely by ZF and ECC and ZCAP:
3 of 5 elected have already been getting Zcash directly from ZF, none indicated any hodling.
Other 2 are “outsiders”, but showed up SOLELY for devfund debate and now, MGRC, with theatrical PR statements:
1 is Zooko’s fave VC’s boy (even Elena paid to promote placeholder thesis on Shawn’s board) and the other announced his candidacy the same day Zooko extended call for candidates. No major positions here, either. ETH, maybe.
5 of 5 are part-time…
Not sure if they are aligned with hodlers more than they are themselves… I hope it trickles down!
If you’d stop following me around & twisting my words, that’d be great.
To correct a misconception I thought I had already corrected, I believe I’ve already linked you to Open Privacy’s 2019 annual report (as let’s be clear again I, personally have never directly received Zcash from ZF. Open Privacy, an organization I am affiliated with, received a single donation - these are different things).
In any case, if you want to continue under the assumption that myself and Open Privacy are synonymous (this would be incorrect…Open Privacy is its own legal entity, governed by an independent board…but regardless…)
In the report I linked is a link to our financial statements (https://openprivacy.ca/assets/reports/2019/NttR-Open%20Privacy%20Research%20Society%20February%2010,%202020.pdf) which states that as of February 2020 Open Privacy maintained short term investment positions (i.e. cryptocurrency holdings) of $115,870 - much of that is still in Zcash. Also worth noting that Open Privacy has also accepted donations in Zcash long before we received one from ZF, so we’ve been managing such assets for a little while now. (And as noted previously, I’ve personally been running at least one full node since launch day). Which ever way you cut it personally or professionally I do have an interest in seeing Zcash succeed.
Indeed, the long term value of cryptocurrency holdings is something that I spent a lot of time as Executive Director concerning myself with, as I mentioned in my candidacy thread:
Finally:
The path towards fixing this issue (and I agree it is likely an issue impacting the efficacy of the MGRC) has already been laid out in the thread, I look forward to reading the ZIP that fixes this.
Financially and emotionally, they are OVERLY supported by ECC/ZF/VCs, as we can tell. Approval voting is self congratulatory. Cannot support with silence
agree with a lot of what @boxalex just wrote in the wen mewn thread. think MGRC is going to be handcuffed by a bad ZIP that ZCAP voted in favor of for some reason. i’m going to write a new ZIP for the “Zcash Ecosystem Committee” that will allow them to operate in a much more aggressive manner.
I’m really grateful for peoples’ support, and also to everyone who ran, and to everyone on the ZCAP who participated.
@kek I think if we’re doing everything we can to advance Zcash privacy and usability, we’re on the right track to increasing demand and market cap. I promise I’ll work hard in this direction!
@ml_sudo I’m really interested in the case you make for engaging in policy / regulatory / PR battles, and it would be great to discuss this more. I’m really glad that you’re willing and able to stay engaged, and I think we’re all grateful for that.
@ml_sudo, @aristarchus, @covfefe, @daira I also agree that we should discuss adjusting the voting mechanism in some way, to give ZCAP members who believe panel diversity matters a good way to express that belief in their vote. I’ll start a thread on this and link here, if there isn’t one already! (To be super clear, since changing the voting mechanism should not be done lightly, I’m saying I think we should give ZCAP members a way in the next MGRC election to express their own specific preferences for diversity, pending a ZCAP vote on whether and how to do so.)
@jmsjsph Looking at this as if it were a security bug, I think I can see the threat you’re proposing. Is it something like: Sarah and I mutually agree—perhaps implicitly without ever communicating about it, in some multi-round prisoners’ dilemma way—to vote for funding each others’ organizations, so that even while we each recuse ourselves, our organization each gets an increased chance of funding?
It should be possible to address this. One way would be to exclude all members receiving funds from voting on any other members receiving funds, and excluding anyone who votes on another members project from applying, within some timeframe. The strictest possible way would be to exclude any grant recipient from being on the MGRC or any MGRC member from receiving a grant, forever, but that might mean that we exclude some perspectives from the MGRC. (For example, leading wallets will likely be MGRC-funded, and ZCAP members might decide it’s good to have the perspective of a leading wallet developer on the MGRC.)
For my part, I went into this with the expectation that being on the MGRC would make it harder to apply for funds, so I’m open to ideas for how to close this loophole. Would you like to start a separate thread on this?
I am a founder and I do have a board seat (1 of 8), but we explicitly govern by consensus and so I do not hold a rank higher than another other member (and as Exec Director, and an employee, I am explicitly forbidden by our CoI policy, and by law, in some instances from participating in votes in which I hold a financial, or other significant, interest). See:
I would expect the MGRC to derive an equally or more explicitly robust CoI policy.
It was explicitly an unrestricted donation: Zcash Foundation Donation to Open Privacy - zcash foundation - and I have already linked our 2019 End of Year report.
The Foundation’s donation to Open Privacy was unrestricted, meaning that the organization can use the funding for any of its programs and activities.
Also @jmsjsph there are a lot of people in the nonprofit space, especially at small nonprofits, who take their ethical commitments very seriously, and I’m not aware of any reason to think @sarahjamielewis isn’t one such person.
So it’s good to assume good faith, while also pushing for the best possible policies to root out conflicts, which I agree can be really subtle and insidious, and which I’m totally willing to delve into in the most creatively paranoid way 
I’d be happy to talk more about this with you sometime on voice/video too, if you’d like to.
Nice! Free money and free promo on DCG’s CoinDesk! ZCAP obviously embraces you. Looking forward to cwtch (very similar to zbay! Work together and get it done?! Look at zecwallet and nighthawk go!!! 
)
If I’m not mistaken, you and Holmes earned 2 of the top 3 BIGGEST ZF grants.
[Moderation edit by @daira to restore missing context from this quote (shown in square brackets). This is a moderation advice to everyone but particularly to @jmsjsph: please do not selectively quote people in a way that changes their intended meaning.]
Thank you. Will meditate on it 
whilst ZF ran an anti-marketing campaign; entities where running a sustained multiyear black PR campaign against zcash. took a shill team almost a year to push back on the FUD on twitter alone
problem is, damage has been done. we really need resources put into marketing/outreach. nobody outside the industry has ever heard of zcash, and an unacceptable amount still think the FUD they’ve read about is true. imo, marketing/outreach cannot be ignored.
I’m ready to trust our corporate overlords to crypto back the USD and trickle down zeconomics to us. Grassroots may not be necessary, may actually thwart plan. They have their own partners, even in the media! They will roll out carpet when they’re ready. ZCAP knows
I’m replying here because this seems like a good venue to lobby for MGRC directions.
First off, congrats to the MGRC members! I claim post-hoc that you were definitely unambiguously and in all other ways my favorite five.
Not just that, but you got elected without me undertaking the onerous burden of voting! But srzly I am thrilled by the outcome (though I can’t really imagine a scenario where I wouldn’t be given the strength of the contenders).
My purpose here is to seize the moment to advocate for the MGRC’s attention to be directed toward the issue of diversity.
By many metrics, there’s plenty of diversity in the MGRC… but by some there’s a clear deficit.
Obviously, this has been pointed out before. More than reiterating this point, I am hopeful that this post will serve as a catalyst.
Is there some decisive action the MGRC can take sooner-than-later to:
(0) stimulate diversive inclusion (linguistic, geographical, gender)?
(1) broadly influence the perception that Zcash has an inclusive bent?
I don’t have a tip-of-the-brain idea in this moment, other than to attempt to kick the conversation into a particular direction. Did a thread get created for this discussion already?
Does @Vish have any ideas? @ml_sudo ?
Congrats to the Council!
How so? Arguably all hand-picked ECC/ZF (like majority CAP, assuming HJ announcement date is not a coincidence) Added 2 more redundancies:
[Moderation edit by @daira: the image above is manipulated to add the “James Joseph 4 MGRC” text.]
Even though I put out a couple of brainstorms in the diversity thread about how the voting process could evolve in the future to allow voters to choose whole teams instead of individuals, I did not mean to suggest that I think there’s anything wrong with the current team.
Based on what I know about the people, I expect this will be a fantastic team! I’m overjoyed that we found such excellent people to drive MGRC. And I think that they — more so than any improvements to ZCAP or the voting process — will probably be the best drivers of improvements to Zcash’s reach and diversity for now.
(As evidenced by Holmes proactively starting that thread.)
I continue to be concerned about the one-year timeline and process for changing the composition of the MGRC, as I previously mentioned.
My prediction is that a year from now — assuming that the MGRC folks are as good, skilled, and dedicated as they appear to be so far — that a year from now they’ll be, like about halfway into executing on their first major project or projects (i.e. recruiting and supporting one or more major improvements to the Zcash project/ecosystem/technology/community).
I also think they’ll be like about halfway through the process of learning how to work together effectively, bring out the best in each other, and address the inevitable problems that will crop up.
So I’m concerned that having an election in which all five seats are up for grabs a year from now could be very distracting and disruptive, both to the MGRC itself as a body and to the major grant recipients.
Just think of the campaigning! How long has campaigning been going on for this round? Three or four months?
Now, you could say “oh that won’t be a problem because the ZCAP will choose to keep them if they are doing well”. I agree that ZCAP has shown extraordinarily good judgment for such a large voting body, so far, multiple times. But if that’s the right decision then there are some major advantages to signaling it in advance!
If you tell people “all five of of the MGRC might lose their seats September 15, 2021”, then even if on September 16, 2021, you say “ok, we’re keeping all five (or four out of five, or whatever)”, we’ve already paid the costs of the distraction and uncertainty.
In fact, this could potentially already be a problem if tomorrow the MGRC is having a conversation with some stellar team who says “here’s our plan to deliver this fantastic benefit to the Zcash community. It’ll take two years to deliver phase one. But we’re not sure we can commit to that because we’re not sure who will be sitting across the table from us a year from now and whether they’ll support this”.
This is a standard best practice of governance in Boards of Directors of for-profit corporations and non-profits: you stagger the replacement of individuals on the board so that you’re changing out only a few at a time, for continuity. Having a vote to replace the whole board would only occur if there were some extraordinary crisis, like the stakeholders believe that the Board is engaging in some kind of misconduct, or they believe that the entire organization is going to be destroyed before the normal governance process can take effect.
I’d also like to point out that this is another diversity goal that voters might have. As a voter, you might say “I want three continuing members, one fresh member, and the fifth one could be either way.”
@jmsjsph, approval voting, compared to plurality voting, mainly advantages candidates who are widely acceptable non-insiders. In plurality voting when you’re considering a noninsider, you worry about “wasting” your vote on someone not anointed by a dominant party; you know that your fellow voters will have the same worry even if they have the same preferences. I’m glad this election avoided that problem, and I hope we’ll continue to.
I’m not so convinced. Besides, the results of this election are self-evident. I’m more convinced that this election was elaborate theatre to entrench the powers that be. Statistically speaking, that is
That quote is saying that for that problem, plurality voting normally is equal to approval voting at its worst.
