See, as a ZEC stakeholder I see things differently than you, and many others in here.
Do you think it is respectful that @joshs is organizing a poll that puts him in a position to decide what happens once it is finished? Do you think it is normal that he can double-vote on a matter where he is completely bias?
So first, I am not being disrespectful and second I believe ECC and ZF have been for a long time, and remain, disrespectful to ZEC stakeholders.
Either way, multiple ways to make this stop:
Kick me out and embrace the censorship @daira (ECC) would love to see happen, and then enjoy losing any remaining credibility this community in here still has.
Accept that the current situation is messed up and fix it. It’s not even difficult, you can just create a ZIP detailing how a poll will be interpreted.
I’m upset. I have time, money and motivation. Good luck.
Because things are not working and i dont think he is being disrespectful.
This guy is a shareholder for better or worse and he should have some say.
People say price doesnt matter then why is Josh and others crying about funding due to zec price being so low?
Now we are going back to the dev fund everyone hated and voted against.
Makes no sense.
The problem with zec is the devs are trying to make it this perfect piece of software and no one cares. It will be a dead project if price action continues this way.
Just reading through this thread and it really hits how big the perception gap is between Monero and Zcash.
Zcash has arguably the best privacy tech out there — but outside of this forum, almost no one knows.
Meanwhile Monero has this strong narrative, meme culture, and presence across platforms.
Maybe it’s time Zcash embraced some of that energy — not by changing its tech or values, but by actually showing up where people already are.
I’m thinking: what if we had a small “Influencer Integration Fund” — not to fund deep-dive videos or reviews, but to support short native sponsor segments in videos people already watch?
Like VPNs do.
“This video is sponsored by Zcash — the VPN for your money. Private, instant, no signup.”
That kind of message just clicks.
No massive budget needed — just a few thoughtful integrations in the privacy / crypto / finance space could do more for awareness than 10 years of whitepapers.
If Zcash can finally communicate what it actually is, in language real people use, I think it would finally start getting the recognition it deserves.
Would love to hear if this has been attempted before — or if it’d be worth starting a small working group to draft something for ZCG?
Love this idea and thought process. After the Zcash Media drama, I’ve been struck by the gap between the thoughtful, complicated, high concept marketing/educational material the Zcash community has put out and the much more basic ideas conveyed in marketing for other much more adopted projects. It sings to those of already invested in Zcash and willing to spend a bunch of time and energy thinking about how cool it is, but doesn’t draw in or say much to people who don’t know about it and don’t care yet.
Like with so many of the shortcomings of Zcash, I think a large part of the issue is that as community we’ve been working the issue from too much of an abstract/philosophical level (“why is privacy important?”, “look at this mind-blowing math”), rather than sending out more easily digestible messages addressing the question “how is this useful to me right now?”.
IMO the marketing work ECC has been doing more recently is a step in the right direction. “Privacy is normal” is a good campaign and easy to understand, but it still doesn’t answer the question of “how does this help me right now?”.
Once again, just empty talk.
It’s easy to sit around and dream about philosophical ideas. People talk, then move on.
But what about the users who already understand and actually want to use private transactions?
The real potential Zcash users.
That’s where it gets harder. Because when it comes down to actually using it — Zcash is, first and foremost, practically inconvenient.
Maybe we should start by addressing those issues first?
things take time. too freaking long for some things imo. i dont know all the details of everything so hard to say exactly why.
but Maya is finally getting close to launch. in next week(s) if no more delays.
BTCPayServer Plugin was kind of forgotten and not focused at all for long time, and close to 0 demand from community or projects to implement ZEC payments with it for long time. the demand has started to show up from all parties in last months.
good thing - these projects are progressing with no current blockers atm.
and imo we should have more talks and dream about what is needed to get to more people to use Zcash. but only talk doesnt change the world - true.
using Zcash should feels easy and great. right now there are still some usability problems, but for many use cases its already good enough.
(and then actually we need to execute on those plans and measure if those plans worked in any way)
ZCG is willing to fund the best ideas and executioners! who have experience and results to show that they have effectively done sth similar before.
(1 issue I can see with partnerships with influencers etc is they would prefer to not put in a public grant with the amount of money they want for it, and ZCG only funds public grants)
Absolutely love this idea. Instead of wasting more money on the dev fund which led us to this we should use that money on advertisement. Partnership with influencers would be an amazing start.
Social engineering, demoralization warfare, alice in wonderland tactic. Nothing new under the sun.
In times of raging information wars, discernment is more important than ever.
The takeaway here is that monero has issues being a true privacy coin but no one cares. Adoption is light years away from zec. Price action followed.
Zec leadership keeps trying to improve on the tech but misses the point that no one is using it. Making it a little bit faster or super uber private wont make the project survive.
No one cares. We need to pivot into the things people do for mass adoption and more importantly so the project survives.
There really isn’t any kind of Zcash user community. There are a few people who buy/sell it, some miners—but there’s no one actually using Zcash as a means of payment. For that kind of community to emerge, you’d first need to make sure things like Tor work reliably, Zcash gets integrated into popular payment aggregators, decentralized exchanges, and so on— if Zcash is supposed to be a privacy-focused cryptocurrency. Only then might a real user community start to form.
Agreed. There is no community. 99% of posts here are some techie post about some zip being released to make some obscure thing work that no one cares about.
Leadership does this every year. No matter how much discussion there is from a few of us to change course because this is obviously not working.
I was talking about priorities. Zcash prioritizes theory, while Monero prioritizes practice. Monero works perfectly well without FCMP++. Meanwhile, Zcash doesn’t feel so great. It just keeps generating endless ZIPs, various internal addresses, and pools. Now there will be a whole bunch of ZSAs. Who will understand and use them? Tether probably hasn’t even heard of Zcash. Or maybe medical organizations (like the example in the promo video about ZSA), which are so heavily regulated by law that they won’t take any extra steps, will line up for ZSA? Meanwhile, for 5 years ECC haven’t managed to implement v3 Tor addresses, they hardly integrate anywhere, and because of this, almost no one uses zec in real.
I do not know why you have this assumption that nobody uses ZEC. Maybe you are not using ZEC, but I for example do. I use it for payments, I use it to write private messages, I use it to hide wealth and I recently used it for coin holder voting. Also you say Zcash does not feel great. Why? Did you try Zashi and Ywallet? For me it works very well.
FCMP++ is being marketed (on X) as the Zcash killer tech that brings Monero´s privacy on the same level as Zcash. Regarding that I just asked, when was it announced and when will it be deployed? Just to make a comparison of dev work/speed between two privacy projects. I saw your argument about Zcash efforts being delayed, e.g. the Maya announcement in Jan 2024 vs. April 2025 as of today. Valid argument. So Monero is better in that regard? Honestly curious. I am not that well informed about Monero. From time to time I check what they are working on here: https://ccs.getmonero.org/
It’s actually very simple. You open the explorer and look at the number of transactions in a block and the amounts of those transactions. Then you open CoinMarketCap and check the trading volumes (not counting, of course, scam Yobit, which for some reason pushes Zcash, which, in my opinion, only drives people away). And then you compare it with Monero for example
Then we are probably interpreting the figures differently. Obviously the Zcash community is still small and we have a lot of room for improvement. But I would not say that nobody uses it.
Yes, I have already noticed that especially the new accounts here like to use the stylistic device of “exaggeration” extensively to convey an opinion. To each his own.
