Petition: Dissolving the Trademark Agreement

Governance
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This is a petition for The Electric Coin Company and The Zcash Foundation to dissolve the trademark agreement. Under “19.12” of the trademark agreement The Electric Coin Company and The Zcash Foundation must take this serious in adhering to consensus of the Zcash Community.

Community members can show their support by liking this post or on X. The Electric Coin Company and Zcash Foundation MUST advise the community how they will “measure” community consensus for us to abide by to enforce this request.

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the problem is “community” is a very amorphous word. community should be anyone who uses zec on a recurring basis. so to define commmunity as including anyone outside of this definition is a huge problem. when we start to get the feedback from anyone outside this group, it can and will lead zec astray from its potential. zec is supposed to be money or a utility token. so build it for the people that will use it.or better yet, create an open platform where people don’t need to ask for permission to build on the blockchain or need the dev fund. most important, the people who say they are using zec today can’t support the project, it needs to be more inclusive and useable to average people. the working people. and working people need to interact with banks and the outside world and they need stability. zec can not exist in a vacuum.

follow the lead of metamask and ethereum if we can’t come to the same understanding on our own. ethereum has really mastered decentralization. it’s truly amazing! when i hear this community talk about decentralization it sounds like the government creating more bureaucracy. it’s not decentralized in the same way as etheruem. is it? maybe the tech we have just isn’t as dynamic or open.

to dissolve the trademark agreement to just hand over the reigns to a new driver following the same map doesn’t make sense.

zec holders are the community, they are the customers, they are the funders of the dev fund, they are the beneficiaries. no one else. But. we need more zec holders! that is where governance can make a change to be more inclusive with the outside world.

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Personally, I’d need to see some more Q+A’s and pros+cons before I could know my position one way or the other.

Like, what are the least contentious (where most everyone agrees this is a good function of the trademark agreement) to most contentious (most everyone does not agree this is a good function of the trademark agreement) aspects?

Would anyone like to take a stab at the above question? I really like finding common ground first before getting into stickier points.

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:roll_eyes:

Just have an opinion, guy. Anything at all, aside from waiting for someone else.

Me? Too much time is spent on this distraction vs. the real issue of adoption. Removing a trademark doesn’t mean shit if no one cares about the product/brand in the first place.

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One problem I see is everyone has all these ideas of how to control block rewards. No one is setting the vision for how the money is spent.

It becomes a death by a thousand cuts. Ad hoc polls. Seemingly random grants that don’t really advance the mission.

If the mission is truly “for everyday purchases, sending money to a friend…” the development is not accomplishing its objective.

When will developers realize the target customers won’t accept zcash (on a global or even broad scale) as stated in the mission? we are relying on very imprecise and not accurate random samples.

We seem to have accomplished privacy. but we painted zebra stripes on a turtle. if bitcoin is digital gold (which i believe it is on some level), then zcash is private digital gold. It’s very frustrating to see all these ideas for new organizations and no leadership and vision on how to apply the great privacy tech to the currencies we actually use everyday. Meanwhile ethereum is now taking a leadership role on digital currencies for day to day transactions while our developers fight over block rewards and trying to CONvince people that ZEC is money for day to day transactions when it goes up and down by 5-10% or more daily. Thats not money for day to day transactions. Sadly, i’m not hearing anyone proposing new organizations say anything that gets me excited.

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:100:. Product > politics.

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Also agree here strongly

As I’ve sung the same song for more than a year now, I’ll keep singing it. The Block Reward creates perverse incentives within the Zcash ecosystem, where an Us and Them bi-polar power struggle is inevitable (ongoing. and also, I’ll note counter-productive. Yielding value-less features, bureaucratic bloat, power-struggle no-action dilemmas, trivial debate, mission creep, et al).

Removing the Block Reward eliminates the Us vs Them ecosystem (an anti-cohesive community disposition) and aligns everyone’s interests behind Zcash (ZEC).

Removing the Block Reward is a powerful meme for the crypto industry. The current Block Reward meme has perpetual, negative impacts to the Zcash brand.

Do the CEO of ECC and the ED of ZF (and ZCG) believe that the Block Reward is critical? Of course they do, its where they and all of their subordinates get their paychecks from (I genuinely cannot blame them for taking this obviously self-interested position). Have any of their efforts in the past 5+ years resulted in prosperous ZEC stakeholders?! Heck no, we have the evidence. And I have additional news, these unfavorable outcomes are in large part because of the perverse incentives created by an indiscriminate Free Funding Model. There are many other crypto projects of similiar age and notoriety, without self-funding models, that have created significantly greater market penetration and adoption (Yes, some of this is merely chance, but in equal parts it involves building features that matter, memes, and community cohesion - all in order to drive price and adoption).

Spending ZEC block rewards on something as tangential and value-less (I’m happy to see evidence of the contrary) as Trademark defense, serves as Icing on the Cake for my arguments against continuing the block reward model. It is a case-study in how the block reward can perversely incentivize afterthoughts, like Trademarking, in a young and precarious crypto project like Zcash.

Lastly, to Zooko’s new mental framing theme, which I think is very helpful, these points are all about trade-offs. More funding, less cohesion, good/ bad memes, secure staffing, trivialities, bureaucracy, stakeholder success, etc et

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Feel free to comment on my vision for how the money could be spent.

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I will say it again here for visibility, but the Zcash brand is doomed and cursed. It’s over. You can’t recover from such a shitshow. By forking Zcash, the trademark will no longer be a problem.

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Ycash is a fork that didn’t extend the devfund & doesn’t have trademark issues - it’s trading at approx 0.04 USD.

What makes you so sure that forking ZEC again is a solution?

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highly disturbing budget.

We might as well just fork zec if this is a vision of the the future. 50%+ waste on admin and non development related spending. ~20m funding shortfall. the budget doesn’t even balance so a liquidity crisis is projected.

It’s really too bad the focus on the blockchain and digital money is marginalized.

is there someone who has expertise on the underlying tech and possibilities who can advise me on developing a plan?

can we put together a budget where we acknowledge and pull our heads out of the sand that zec is in survival mode?

  1. 80% of the budget goes to people who write code
  2. 0% goes to regulatory relations
  3. 10% goes to overhead
  4. 10% goes to admin and other “middle men”
  5. focus 100% on digital money. no messaging apps (they can fund themselves as L2s). limited marketing.

(this is where i need the help to asses if below is technologically possible or realistic)
5) explore turning zcash blockchain into a decentralized open access L1 blockchain where L2s pay gas. gas is used to fund L1 token stakers and burn the L1 token. Zcash the L1 becomes ethereum like and focused on digitial money. stablecoins and zsa become L2s. issue a new L1 token in order to enable zec to maintain its 21’m cap.
6) zec becomes an L2 on the zcash blockchain
7) zec the L2 controls its own budget based on the fees it wants to charge its customers. zec pays gas to the L1 blockchain. it can use its block rewards to subsidize the gas as we modify the existing block rewards framework and eventually eliminate block rewards over a 18-24 month timeframe.

This plan ideally would create a decentralized development model. New L2s could add considerable value to the zcash blockchain by focusing on digital money.

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Well, it is a solution to remove the current bureaucracy in charge. Because we don’t want a new coin with the old guys in charge.

But it is not a magical tool, we need developers, public figures, and community to follow. Ycash has no community, no devs, no exchanges support. Just like Zclassic and whatnot => :wastebasket:

All I’m saying is the brand “Zcash” is f****d and we need to get rid of it.

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I am against forks. i’m also against the government giving out PPP money to everyone; but if it’s given away and allowed why wouldn’t someone take it? now a fork is an uphill battle, and would require many millions in seed capital. but if the situation remains as status quo and consensus and community is dominated by grant recipients and hypothetical customers why should we expect things to change re the zec price?

so since forks are not only allowed; but seemingly encourage, i’d rather be in the group that wants to move it forward with a single minded focus on privacy based digital money for all. and drop all the baggage and corp overhead. There is a lot of dead weight and lack of focus. and that eventually will cause ecc/foundation to run out of money if they operate as they have in the past, which is marginalizing zec holders (the customers) while hoping people will accept a highly volitile token as money. proposals like the one presented to me are a fast track to a liquidity crisis. not that we already arnt in one.

sometime it feels like the gold bugs who didn’t kill themselves already have now moved over the crypto projects like this. it’s the same mentality. the sky is falling, the government is out to get everyone. they are right once every 30-50-100 years and wrong 99% of the time. privacy needs to work for everyone.

are you paying attention to what’s happening? everytime somone like a paypal, visa, circle, etheruem and many others move into digital money, the competition increases, our market opportunity shrinks, and the bar for a useable wallet gets higher as it relates to a currency for day to day transactions. another example is warren buffet buying into Nubank. it’s probably what banking will look like. they are growing rapidly in brazil and moving north.

dont underestimate these competitors, if people want privacy, they will add it and charge for it. they are masters at creating products for people. so ecc/foundation need to get refocused on real customers. and transactions are the best measure of successs.

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I’d appreciate it if the criticism was more constructive. Feel free to fork and modify the budget I proposed.

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telling you to focus on privacy based digital money, cut costs, eliminate waste; use the current zec price as a budgeting tool and show you don’t run out of money is not constructive? if that’s not constructive, i’m obviously living in a different world.

it’s a little flexible, i believe 100% of the funding should be focused and easy to see it’s going to develop the blockchain and private money assets. that means a large % to stablecoins and 80% total funding should go to developers.

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Here’s what I would do:

Step 1: Pick one or two markets to serve as a grounds for bootstrapping a Zcash economy. Personally, I would pick online sex workers because they’re in desperate need of privacy and censorship-resistance thanks to censorship from traditional payment processors and social media. In general, we should think about which markets need our privacy and censorship-resistance the most, because people who don’t need those things will be happy continuing to use their VISA cards for the time being. We’ll have UX problems for quite a while, so we need to target a market that can genuinely benefit (and profit) from the products we offer while tolerating our UX drawbacks until we can fix them. The online sex work industry is insanely valuable (OnlyFans on its own is worth more than 44x all of the ZEC in existence, and its annual free cash flow is more than the entire market cap of ZEC too, and I only expect those numbers to grow as our population ages and become more interested in and accepting of those services).

Step 2: Figure out our target market’s current concerns with the products we have. I’d expect these concerns to be mostly along the lines of performance/usability and the ability to cash in/out to their, or their customers’ preferred fiat currencies, as well as complaints about censorship by social media which Zcash has no plans to resolve because we’re currently a payments platform, not a content platform. But we need to know them, and ask them, because engineers (like myself) speculating about what prospective users want is a key cause of the bad situation we find ourselves in.

Step 3: Stop all expensive protocol development that doesn’t serve the goals of either (a) making sure the network remains secure or (b) addressing the concerns of our target market. We need to stop bleeding cash on projects that will do nothing to advance our adoption. Things like NU5 (while I have massive respect to the engineers who implemented it and it was something that even if Zcash were to fail, would be a huge contribution to humanity’s knowledge and abilities), did absolutely nothing to increase usability or adoption. All expensive protocol changes need to be aligned with a marketing strategy going forward.

Step 4: Invest heavily in products tailored to the specific market we’ve chosen. All spending and development efforts should be aligned toward a goal of getting our products established and accepted within our chosen target market. This is insanely high risk. We’d be betting our limited funding and resources on adoption within a specific market. BUT I perceive that to be lower risk than continuing with the status quo, where we invest heavily in technical changes without any specific target market and marketing efforts in mind, or where we let ideals of decentralization divide-and-conquer our funding to create a bunch of small sparks that all fizzle out.

We need to be bold. We need to make a strong, risky, bet and align everything towards it. We need to accept a high chance of failure. Because if we don’t, a divided community will be divided-and-conquered, and it just won’t work.

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i hate to beat a dead horse. but step 1 should be to a) show anyone you want a 1 month, 3 month, 1 year, 5 year chart of zec. both price and % change. b) also show then a chart of the USD. same time frames. calculate the standard deviation: then ask them what would you want to accept as payment? prove beyond a reasonable doubt people who largely live paycheck to paycheck are willing to lose 5-10% or more every time they accept zec.

the fees paid to visa are going to be a lot less than the expected losses on zec. then they have to sell zec and convert to fiat. so rational people are going to choose visa. privacy is not the most important thing. it’s not losing money. all you have to do is ask your mom, your grandma, your cleaning lady, your car wash provider, and even the guy sitting next to you developing….they need stability. is it that hard to see?

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You’re right IMO, I strongly suspect any of our target markets want stablecoins, not ZEC. This is a strong point in favor of asking our target markets what they want and giving them what they need!

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5 posts were merged into an existing topic: Moderation feedback

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The “target market” wants to invest in the next biggest thing (in this case – the privacy narrative). It’s not hard. They all want number to go up. Not even the barista at @zooko’s coffee shop cares about privacy.

This whole thread proved to be the same rehashed arguments from the usual suspects (myself included).

Plus 2 whole likes on @gguy’s original post. :partying_face:

A better discussion is going to revolve around replacing the current leadership.

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