See, I’m not going to make that easy mistake and pretend that I know best.
That’s what ECC and ZF have failed at. They thought because they are the best at cryptography, they can’t be that bad at managing money and planning for the future of Zcash.
Exhibit A of the disconnect between their plans and the reality they have achieved.
I am however confident that resources will be better allocated by people with skin in the game, so that our chances of success are increased. This certainly includes being adopted by more vendors.
That’s quite a loaded question you got there.
Let’s start with clarifying your assumption about my goal: I want for it to be what Bitcoin was meant to be, how Satoshi envisioned it: private, scalable.
How? Like the above, I don’t have the pretension of having all the answers. I am looking forward to getting ZEC holders back into the governance equation so we can all figure out how to achieve our common objectives.
ZEC holders do not just deserve the right to vote on the dev fund: they deserve the right to control it. I have no interest in pursuing fragile governance mechanisms. Sybil resistance or nothing as far as I am concerned.
I don’t feel like waiting for Monero to implement the equivalent of Orchard.
What’s going to be the point of using Zcash then?
We can’t just be bleeding edge, we must be competitive and attractive.
Beside, your argument is broken. It’s not just criminals using Monero. I, a sizeable ZEC stakeholder, use Monero to pay for all the privacy services I use that for some reason are not accepting Zcash (not a single one of them does). I do it because I believe in financial privacy and I will support whoever pushes things in the right direction.
So go for it and have fun at Monero. They are successful. You are not.
Either it works and it is (a privacy enhancing technology) or it doesn’t work and it isn’t. Monero gives a false sense of privacy, so it is the opposite of that.
I don’t. Actually I am quite happy Monero exists, competition is quite important. It can highlight some of our weaknesses.
For us to get more adoption, we really need to catch up on a few things; and that has a cost. We do have a dev fund, which is an amazing feature, but with our current token price, it isn’t worth that much at this point.
There’s a pie composed of people in need for privacy tokens. It’s slowly growing, which is good. However if most of that pie is composed of Monero users, then it’s both bad for those users and bad for us. Bad for those users because they don’t get the privacy they believe they are getting. And bad for us because our token is not priced correctly and it affects our ability to fund what we need to succeed.
The work of @hanh is absolutely awesome, as I have said repeatedly. Voting is a stepping stone to something very important, critical actually: control. Why control? Because only with control, we get Sybil resistance. It’s a cold fact. There’s no shortcut.
There has to be someone in control and currently it is unelected legal entities that can really do whatever they want ultimately. That is absolutely not ok. That is not what resilience and anti-fragility looks like. This is not a path leading to success.
We are not going to get control overnight for the simple reason that we have to figure out the technicalities of how to implement this properly. But if enough ZEC stakeholders express a wish of having 100% of the dev fund managed by them, we’ll have made clear progress.
I just don’t think of myself that much. Feel free to put labels on me though, I’m always curious to observe how people perceive what I do and say.
It helps me to work with you, if I have an understanding of who you are.
It’s not that I need identifying information that you don’t want to share, it’s that the more coherent the facet of you that’s supporting this forum is, the more accurately we can engage each other.
If I know “where you’re coming from” I am less likely to bump into you. It’s like we’re trying to create a unique artistic expression together.. like a dance. If we can find a rhythm we can explore interactions that otherwise wouldn’t be possible.
I believe that’s a reason why it’s quite important to think of yourself, so that you can more skillfully share with others.
That having been said, I do feel like our conversations are helping me (and probably other readers!) to appreciate your ideas and energies. I think this is good for us all.
I will think a bit more about your post, as I think you’ve made some interesting points that I would like to ponder.
That’s precious feedback for me, thank you. It’s certainly challenging to feel at war with the same people I want to collaborate with. We’ve got to fix the system that puts us against each others.
Yes, it was a major mistake. But to redirect the blame to “mercenaries” who eventually left because of the difficulty of grant funding is misdirected. As the “core devs” themselves state, they would also have to leave if they didn’t get funding. (Or else, why would we even need the dev fund?) I guess one can’t be a mercenary if one gets paid for long enough. Or if one’s “heart is in the right place”. Honestly, all the talk about “patriots” vs. “mercenaries” is a rhetorical psyop to shield the “good people” from any criticism that they can’t deliver.
I am no fan of many grantees, especially Nighthawk, but blame should be assigned in proportion to how much funding has been given. (How many TENS OF MILLIONS have been given to both ECC and ZF? And yet there is still a bias towards defending them as cypherpunk geniuses doing the Lord’s work on maths that no one else can understand. It’s like Stockholm syndrome or something. Sure, it’s impressive, but what’s even more impressive - and important - is making something that a lot of people use.) Almost two years after this comment (which I guess I can’t link to), and the mindset still has barely budged. Zcash is still hardly anywhere to be found regarding merchant adoption, and the most righteous blame belongs at the feet of the ECC and ZF leadership. We need to stop getting excited about far-away deep tech developments and focus on the basics before we overthink ourselves into oblivion.
You’ve (ECC & ZF) abused the trust of the stakeholders. I very specifically explained you how and you have just ignored it. ECC and ZF are doing great many things, but I think quite a few people would like you to get out of the governance of the dev fund where you do not belong.
As a monero user, I find this whole discussion very sad, not sad as in “you’re pathetic” because I don’t think you are. More sad like watching once great states of greece fall in short order to the Romans, unstoppable as the tides. It is very sad to see the great fall.
I don’t have a dog in the fight. I use monero because it suits my needs, but if some other currency was better, I’d switch. I have no loyalty.
I think perhaps a few of you should take the same attitude, or are afraid do because of the money you have tied up in zcash.
But, if you refuse to join the romans, all the better. I want to live in whichever empire wins, because that will be the best. Here’s my recommended battle plan:
#1 be aware of the law of diminishing returns:
No body cares if you speed up the transaction time from 1 second to .1 second, but they care a whole lot if you speed it up from 100 seconds to 10 seconds. Nobody cares if the anonymity set goes from 10 to 100, but everybody cares if the anonymity set goes from 2 to 10. Nobody cares if bitcoin’s hash rate goes from .5 petahash to 1 petahash, but everyone cares if monero’s or zcash’s hash rate goes from 2 gigahash to 4 gigahash. You can’t compete with and beat monero over things that aren’t pain points in monero. You have to solve the things that are pain points.
#2 Don’t complain that you can’t buy things in Zcash! Just start offering:
There are only 2 reason a person buys a crypto currency. Speculation (like bitcoin) or to buy something they want (like monero). If you want people to use a crypto, offer them something they want to use that crypto for! I’m reading a lot of complaints about how the money’s been spent developing zcash and it sounds to me like you don’t really need to develop Zcash more. That money would have been much better spent buying businesses. Millions of dollars?! you ought to have spent that money on a Zcash first business. That would have brought in more users. Set up a smart contract, sell shares in a smart contract based company. Focus on high volume goods and services. It seems in my experience that’s probably a VPN first. Go crowd fund a Zcash only bare metal server VPN service in Switzerland. If that works out, do it again with a different business venture.
I think a few people agree with this here. Obviously it’s not quite black or white, but we do have some very expensive non-sense in the pipeline, that’s for sure.
Because you write, repeat, and accuse so incessently I stopped reading your posts. They are low signal and not worth my time. If you point me to something actionable that I haven’t responded to, please provide a link.
What’s different here? Feel free to keep doing that. You’ve put yourself at the center of the governance, I’m going to be relentless at getting you out of there.
Why on earth would you treat Josh, the greatest cheerleader of Zcash short of Zooko, so disrespectfully? Why so angry? We honor your POV though we HONOR civility too here.
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