Pepper-Sync

[zancas]

Zingo Labs Requests Retroactive Funding for Pepper-Sync

We’re submitting a proposal requesting $1,975,000.00 in retroactive funding for our innovative implementation of sync, Pepper-Sync.

Pepper-Sync was developed on a shoe-string when the price was down to solve critical consumer useability issues. As of release, it had the first User-Facing spend before sync implementation. This is a critical performance criteria, since it is the best way for long-held (“buried”) funds to be made available for spend.

Pepper-sync has reignited competition among leading wallets to provide efficient sync, and provided potential for synergistic adoption of techniques for more performance gains.

Zingo Labs provided pepper-sync to end-users via four different applications:

• zexcavator
• zingo-mobile
• zingo-pc
• zingo-cli

We have interests in other projects that are also using pepper-sync.

We’re a good bet for the coin holders. Our commitment to innovation and value adds when the price is low is a two-fold argument in favor of providing us with around 10% of the projected lock-box funds.

First, we are able to produce efficiently.

Second, we are committed to ZEC irrespective of the price, we’re the real deal.

[outgoing.doze]

@aquietinvestor is forcing me to read all the proposals so I’ve got questions…

Compensation: $345,600 * ~6x (increase in value ZEC/USD) = $1,975,000.00

How does this work? The initial compensation request was in USD, why do you suddenly switch to ZEC, what’s the rationale? That’s going to be a nay till I understand this better.

[zancas]

@outgoing.doze

@aquietinvestor is forcing me to read all the proposals

Are you claiming that @aquietinvestor is the controller of your actions?

[outgoing.doze]

I’m claiming that I wish (as it pertains to Zcash governance).

Wanna answer about the 2M financing? Feeling like upgrading your Volvo or something?

[zancas]

@outgoing.doze

I’m claiming that I wish (as it pertains to Zcash governance).

I don’t understand this.

[outgoing.doze]

The voting delegation address book

I think there are two reasonable approaches to delegation. One is what you are describing, where someone publicly states how they plan to vote on the proposals. For example, “I intend to vote for A, B, and C and against X, Y, and Z. If that aligns with you, feel free to delegate to me at the following address.” This gives people a clear basis for deciding whether they want to delegate. The other is to delegate to someone you already trust, whether it is an individual, community group, or organ…

[zancas]

I don’t understand.

Are you claiming that @aquietinvestor is delegating voting power to you?

[outgoing.doze]

I’m claiming that I wish I could delegate my votes to Shielded Labs, but given delegating doesn’t enable me to verify how they actually vote, I would need them to publicly disclose how they vote.

Anyway it’s their choice not to do this for now and this has nothing with your project, so let’s move on.

[zancas]

Ok.

I am wondering about this:

@zancas

Are you claiming that @aquietinvestor is the controller of your actions?

[thowar2]

Hi I tried to use your applications to recover some Zcash and they were non-functional as well as poorly designed.

Thats not a $2m product its got the quality of a weekend hackathon product.

The concept sounds useful but since this is a retroactive grant we need to judge the finished product and it generally seems unfinished.

Will be voting no for this ask as its asking for far more than I value the results.

[zancas]

Context

@outgoing.doze

How does this work? The initial compensation request was in USD, why do you suddenly switch to ZEC, what’s the rationale?

When you pose the question:

How does this work?

I’m faced with an interesting problem. The answer to this question is:

I don’t know.

Even with your followup:

[paraphrased] Why did you switch from an ask denominated in USD to one priced in ZEC?

I feel unsettled. What’s this “switch” that you refer to? I don’t feel like I have answer at the tip of my tongue..

That’s interesting!

Shouldn’t I have a quick and forceful assertion prepared?

I am asking for economic agency. I should have an immediate and clear explanation of why I should be entrusted with it!

This motivated me to think it through again.

Revisiting the Ask

I reread the ask that I posted on github, including this clause:

“I understand all grants are valued in USD but will be disbursed in Shielded ZEC.
I acknowledge and accept that disbursement amounts may fluctuate based on the ZEC/USD exchange rate at the time of payment.”

And this (slightly edited) assertion:

zexcavator is known to have recovered buried funds, and if funded will be upgraded to handle sweeping up multi-sapling-spend-key funds, to discover and spend zecwallet-generated transactions.

After reviewing the above, I decided that the reason I was uncertain about your questions, was because they weren’t asking me about the fundamental issues related to this proposal.

The Question For Voters to Answer

I think the right question for a voter to ask is:

Given everything I understand about the value of this technology should I vote for this?

I think that breaks down into this simple question:

Does this enhance the value of Zcash to a degree that justifies the size of the requested amount?

I believe that the answer to this is unambiguously:

Yes!

That value is and can only be understood as a function of the value of Zcash. This is doubly true precisely because this work is specifically aimed at providing long-time privacy focused Zcash Users access to their own funds.

As the value of Zcash increases the value of pepper-sync increases, in part because pepper-sync is designed to fulfill Zcash’s contract!

Zcash claims that it provides Users control of their Own money, in critical practical ways, pepper-sync makes that claim valid.

Let’s fulfill our contract.

[zancas]

@thowar2

recover some Zcash

Did you open an issue? We’re interested in the different kinds of blockers that affect ZEC recovery.

[outgoing.doze]

I can’t tell if you’ve been using AI or you just naturally like that.

[thowar2]

I used other tools to solve my problem.

For this grant we need to evaluate your ask vs what you claimed to have shipped and make a value judgement based on that.

As a binary vote, mine is no but you may want to consider a different ask that is more in line with the value the token-holders have received.

On principle I’m fine with a grant for an unfinished product but the amount needs to reflect the status of the product (and an understanding of what it takes to be production ready).

[zancas]

@thowar2

I used other tools to solve my problem.

I’d be interested to hear which tools, and what privacy assurances they offered.

[chmod]

In this post you say “the cost is high because it’s worth it”, but in the grant application it’s basically “the cost is high because ZEC price increased”. Maybe I’m missing something but I still don’t understand how two full time devs went from costing $345,600 to $1,975,000

[zancas]

I think you’re exactly right. I think those two things are the same thing. Let me say it this way:

The cost is high because it’s worth it, because the price of ZEC increased.

Let me invite this thought experiment:

If the price of ZEC were 0 ZEC/USD.. what would be the value of pepper-sync?

I suspect we can all agree that it would be roughly 0.

Would you claim in that case, that the designers and implementors of pepper-sync ought to receive $345,600.00?

What if we had paid 50 people minimum wage to pound a patch of dirt with sticks until the funds ran out?

Would you then say that we should receive $345,600.00 (worth of ZEC) ?

I suspect that you would answer “No” to those questions. In doing so, you are accepting to alternative which is that “Yes” in fact the value of a thing that enhances ZEC is indeed proportional to the value of ZEC.

Here’s another example of the same argument being made by @joshs Bootstrap Org / Electric Coin Company - #38 by joshs .

[gottabeJay]

I am just disappointed.

[thowar2]

If you are asking for a grant for pepper-sync alone, my opinion is that your proposal lacks the information that would cause me to value it at more than $0.

I think its a fair argument to say the software helped increase the ZEC price and you should get upside, but this also puts the onus on you to show evidence to the community that your software did indeed cause value increase and is therefore worthy of the tax.

Zashi is easily a yes because the results are very visible.

With a bigger ask comes more accountability.

[zancas]

Ahh… I get it, you weren’t around when pepper-sync was first completed?

So you’re really not aware of its history?

Welcome back (assuming you were around before, which seems plausible)! I didn’t realize that you didn’t know about recent developments in sync.

How about a side-by-side benchmark of zashi (built with how much funding?) and YWallet (funded how?) against zingo running pepper-sync?

If one is faster than the other is that evidence of innovation?

Does the fact that Zashi had a relatively huge source of funding while we produced this on our own zime factor? It should, because that’s the evidence that we can produce value on a budget.

Zingo!

Obviously.. do your own research.

These benchmarks were created when pepper-sync first saw the light of day. That would be last summer, I see that you joined on Oct. 2 or so. Again welcome!

Note we include YWallet, which is faster in raw sync, but doesn’t (or at least didn’t detect and report funds as fast as Zingo).

Of course, detection of funds is particularly relevant in the case that they’re deeply buried.

To be clear, we did NOT have as much money as we listed in costs.. that’s simply how much our devs COULD have made if they were working on something other than ZEC last summer, instead of trying to build something they believed in.

Of course, we could say that the 1_000’s of our “taxed” ZEC we invested in ZEC tooling back then really wasn’t worth that much… but that’s what we were doing back then, investing in ZEC.

Also please do point us to your weekend hackathon sync engine.. we’d like to benchmark it.