The Zcash dev fund should be devoted to one thing: making Zcash more usable.
Running nodes more easily
Transacting more easily
Building more easily
Contributing to consensus
Hobby mining/staking
Exchanging
People pretend like Zcash works fine and there is something wrong with the governance or the decentralization or the marketing. The fact is that Zcash does not work very well. The spam attacks have been effective. Truthfully, there is almost nothing to market.
If I had someone’s ear, I couldn’t tell them to use Zcash, much less invest in it. Zcash doesn’t work without substantial investment of time. There have been many people who bought into the idea of “a swiss bank account in your pocket” but found their funds stranded - at least temporarily. Wallet problems and node problems have been a frustrating ordeal and no one should deny it.
Who could casually recommend Zcash, much less spend substantial funds marketing it?
If Zcash worked smoothly and was slick, it would be easy to market.
it works like bitcoin but better and no one can see your transactions
… yeah, dude, it’s true, with bitcoin everyone in the world can see your balance and all of your transactions
That would be easy to sell, if there was a simple wallet that hid all of the complexity and looked good and “just worked”
The product is not good enough to start thinking about product-market fit. Learn by using, doing, experimenting and building clean code and putting into production, not by “research”
Everyone at ECC and ZF should be doing shielded transactions every day and iterating on what is painful.