How about telling the community exactly why you changed your mind about ZSA’s, almost perfectly aligned with the Oct pump and then sudden ECC drama? Surely its alllll a coincidence?
More likely, this has been planned, and the dragged out zcashd dep supports this. If I was QEDIT, I would be so upset rn. What about the ZEC holders who helped finance ZSA’s as well?
I can only express myself, my dissapointment, and hope ZSA’s dont die tonight. For the record, I dont have all the info, so maybe those WHO DO, should say something.
How do I, and anyone in the community, know you wont change your MIND again, right before Tachyon is set to launch?
Just another fact for those who weren’t here two years ago.
This scheme was presented on January 1 2024. It was enthusiastically received. A month later, ECC met with the developers who influenced this scheme. Then there was ZCON, and everyone agreed that it looked cool.
I clearly see ZSA in it, I see Crosslink in it. Today, these are all things that will ruin Zcash in the opinion of the majority of voters, including the author of the scheme. I humbly accept this position. But for me, this is proof that everything in Zcash can go a different way if people appear who like encrypted Bitcoin and nothing more. Tomorrow, a hypothetical Michael Saylor will buy a controlling stake in Zcash and he won’t like Tachyon, you’ll see.
The former ECC / now ZODL team has always been free to speak without restriction. They are free to disagree. Also core principle.
I worked with Circle. They were only interested if they could blacklist and freeze funds.
Jason and I both met with Tether, no interest.
Penumbra, Namada - no traction with shielded stables. GENIUS and Mica increases difficulty.
I’m tight with Aleo - it’s their focus. Requires compliance. More than what is enabled with straight ZSAs.
ZEC + swaps have pmf without protocol complexity. We have a very small window to get ZEC in the hands of billions. Nation states are actively moving against privacy + self custody + defi. Fiat will be debased. I don’t think this is widely appreciated.
We need to focus on UX, distribution and scale. We mustn’t fuck around. Everything else is wasted time. I am shooting straight.
I don’t necessarily agree with the majority of coinholders, but it’s certainly a breath of fresh air. Finally. Finally, it’s no longer about what random people think what should be done with our tokens. It’s been ridiculous for all these years and there’s shame to be had for quite a few in here that never understood the time money waste they have created for this project and its shareholders.
The crazy part is watching committees who don’t own Zcash (ZCAP, ZCF etc) think they should be involved in roadmaps or funding initiatives.
ZSAs were important when conceived, ruled as unimportant by the market (Pnumbra, Namada) - anyone paying attention knows the landscape has shifted. These orgs with nothing at risk aren’t paying attention and aren’t incentive aligned
I am always amazed when opponents of ZSA cite other projects that lack even a basic scarcity model, let alone the more sophisticated elements of tokenomics that are present in Zcash. It’s as if their devaluation by the market is not a consequence of their poor tokenomics model, but rather that their functionality is the root cause of their market failure. This is the hypothesis that additional functionality destroys your advantages. Guys, you’ll have to compete with great banking products to replace the world’s money. Just take a close look at what perfect modern banking apps offer. The 2024 scheme was similar to this. But you just want Bitcoin, which cannot be tracked. Which did not become an innovative product and did not prove its long-term sustainability, never becoming an alternative to gold. I’m just crying and laughing.
As with everything, people will either over or understate the results of this poll given their own personal bias.
What is reality: 1.2 million ZEC ($324m) voted against this upgrade and 14.8 million ZEC ($4 billion) didn’t voice their opinion.
Where I think arguments are broken in both-sides:
Past votes and ideas should not dictate the future. People should be open and encouraged to change their ideas in light of new information. Using ZSA’s history (or past funding) is a sunk cost fallacy to argue to continuing down this path.
Stating that ZSA should be deployed in testnet when clearly campaigning against it will create a self-fulfilling of their failure. No company will invest resources developing and feedback’ing into a design that has no viable path to production.
The burden of proof of bringing viable ideas or interested parties has not been met. Their use-cases are still not clear. This is not necessarily a problem, but be honest with it being a moonshot.
Comparing ZSA’s possible adoption paths with technologies that are super infant and inherently different is disingenuous. Zcash has nothing to do with chains that I can’t even name from the top of my head.
ZSA’s are an innovation to the protocol, and this comes with costs. See the Shielded Adoption for what happens when innovation is delivered without tooling and ecosystem, it lags years.
Experts have weighted that ZSA changes to the circuit are minimal. The repetitive talking point of “overcomplicating” the design is too broad, generic and dangerous for any future discussion.
There seems to be a strong desire for private sound money with Turing Complete capabilities. Recognise that ZSA’s are closer to CounterParty (UTXO, Non-SC) than Ethereum (AccB, SC).
Zcash doesn’t have “PMF” even within crypto (#24), let alone in the broader world. Repeating this because of a momentum appreciation is shortsighted. Even if assuming so, it took years for ZEC to “achieve” that - expecting every feature (ZSA) to come with that is unrealistic and, if retroactively applied, would have avoided planting important seeds that are now flowering.
What I think this broader signals: There’s clearly two different camps interpreting what Zcash “is supposed to become” and how to get there. We all seem to agree on private sovereign individual ideas, but will that be enough to avoid further disruption? The suggested paths seems to be getting wider by the day. A fracture so early could be fatal.
My Thoughts On The Poll
I think this shows a bit how much of a popularity contest these polls are and how the questions comes without enough context or the trade-offs (would be impossible to do them justice either way).
Why wouldn’t someone support Taychon: the matter now is “do you support scaling Zcash a gazillion % for all planets in the universe?” Clearly yes! But “Do you agree that we should focus on <lowering transaction costs|increasing throughput> at the expense of forcing rearchitecting every existing tooling of the ecosystem and deprioritising everything else?” might bring different results. [Apologies if this is not doing Taychon justice, it’s an example and hyperbole]
Crosslink/Issuance/Token economics adjustments are way too broad to be discussed as they stand in my opinion. Those have the highest hurdles to overcome. Interpreting anything (for both sides) from a generic poll is silly.
As I’ve repeated many times I’m not either an advocate or detractor of ZSAs. As any other Zcasher I’ve been right some times and wrong others. What I’m sure of is that everything I said or did was deeply rooted on wanting the best for Zcash.
Polls aside this is what it has to prevail. I don’t think that anyone that has been around for this long since ZSAs started as a possible feature wants to damage Zcash, dilute its mission, sabotage it, etc. Neither those who don’t want ZSAs.
It’s a difficult moment. Passions arise, because we are Zcashers. We have to be careful with our words, avoid reductionist arguments and respect others.
Cherry-picking facts to build conspiracy theories or mockery of the kind of “AHA! Now these random caucus voter people now what it’s like!!” won’t take use anywhere but to our own extinction as a community and as live exponents of cypherpunk culture.
There’s people that do not believe that ZSA are a good fit for Zcash and feel vindicated. But there’s other people who have been patiently waiting for ZSAs to become a reality and now feel that it will never happen and feel defeated.
Both are valid feelings but they are just that. Life is both short and long and the train passes many times for those who persevere. No one owns the absolute truth. Whatever is today might not be tomorrow.
If the feature you fancy the most is not selected for NU7, take it as an opportunity to make a better case for it the next one. If your posture was somehow ratified by this polling exercise remember that there will be others and that they might not find you in the same side. So be kind, no matter, always.
I’m really curious how the other 92.75% of coins would be voted and am with @joshs that improved coin holder voting should be implemented asap, right from the Zodl wallet. This coinholder vote had all the participation of a local school board election (in contrast to the other community votes above).
Re ZSAs, as most of you know, I like them, and I’d love to experiment with them in testnet.
There’s been a noticeable shift in the conversation since the price of ZEC went up, and a lot of drama too. Not the best look imo. Still, I’m glad to be here building with y’all! Exciting things are ahead…onward!
I appreciate this perspective. We all should recognize that Zcash is truly pioneering on governance. We’ve had some shocks lately – let’s turn the page and build together. We’re not at the point where we can fight amongst ourselves and take on the world simultaneously. If you feel like your passion project just hit a wall, I don’t think it’s necessarily the end but it’s probably a healthy place to take a breath, let the dust settle and then strengthen your proposal and approach.
We need to improve our overall governance process and the coinholder voting process specifically. There is a tension between decentralization and functionality. A little messiness is desirable to prevent capture but too much creates gridlock. We want a high bar for changes but also don’t want a situation where an individual, regardless of how invested they are, has veto power over the protocol. Improving the practicality and perceived safety of coinholder voting will go a long way towards increasing the legitimacy of the process. One of the issues with ZCAP (I say this as a participant) is that there is no cost to participate in community voting. Everything was approved. Perhaps there is an argument to be made that all 11 proposals stand on their own merits, however I think this feels more like a rubber stamp. This could just be the nature of ZCAP and the other community group signals – they might be more useful signals when deciding between options versus weighing independent proposals. If ZCAP is essentially a “Yes unless convinced No”, then coinholder voting, however flawed at the moment, feels like an important check and balance.
People care more as the project becomes more valuable. Now is the time to work on improvements to the governance process; it is only going to get more difficult over time if we continue executing well. If you have ideas of how to improve the process, please share them.
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