if Zcash Foundation and Electric Coin Company aren’t faithful to hold ZEC over other cryptos then this whole ecosystem looks like a joke cause Zcash has been falling like a rock far out of the Top 200 now (btw i did see that Electric Coin is planning to sell down Starkware… cheers to that)
we need Zcash diehards from the top down who are ready to go to extreme lengths like Elon Musk did for Tesla
part of being a Zcash diehard is about buying & Zodling
believing in the mission at all costs
How Jack and Josh sleep a few nights on the floor??? jk jk
I personally couldn’t care less what they do. I see them as a business that are out to achieve their objectives. They need to be strategic about it, and sometimes it means sacrificing tomorrow for today to ensure next weeks survival.
But I’ll meet you guys half way, I wouldn’t mind if they got their share and sold it for USD. But holding BTC or ETH or any other crypto just seems like a punch below the belt.
They have to hedge their costs (agree USD is the low risk hedge). The USD (or any) hedge is needed because zec won’t work as a fiat like currency. My point has always been the need to hedge costs would hoppefuly wake them up to the fact the best way for a person to hedge who doesn’t already own zec and who wants to buy goods and services for day to day spending is to just never own zec. why would anyone take the risk to convert into zec, then take on the risk to buy coffee and zec goes down and they don’t have enough money, then even if they do, the vendor sells zec to convert back into fiat to buy inventory etc… It’s too risky. it’s it’s a sell zec vision. Zec is designed for holding as a primary use case.
The problem as I see it is the ECC/ZCG have a zec is fiat vision. It’s not connecting with customers and I
don’t think it ever will. Good technology; just in the wrong hands as long as they continue down this development path that just never results in gaining any traction. Once the vision changes, we have a chance. The first sign things are changing is deprecation of zcashd and qedit getting funded for stablecoins and an ethereum like gas system. once this is done, there is a foundation for a more inclusive and viable ecosystem. The price should start to factor in growth and value.
I see ZEC as a hedge against fiat. If ZEC is not used as a medium of exchange to buy goods and services sometime in the distant future, then we might as well pack up and call it night (that goes for all crypto as well). We’re in the game of money, we should strive to be money FIRST, then we can add all the colourful and sugary stuff on top after.
ZEC has the potential to be the greatest form of money in history, second only to gold and silver. Nothing will beat gold and silver if anyone’s wondering. Gold and silver is money prescribed and ordained by god and has weight in the literal sense. ZEC can be a solid second, she only has to jump 218 spots on CoinGecko
in my opinion that’s the vision that makes it go down. zec is an asset. if you want it to be a fiat, a 21m cap won’t work. it’s not flexible enough to account for population growth, technological advances, and many others. so i think it’s a matter of time before these guys change the 21m cap if they intend for it to be money. and even then which country are they going to take over to force them use it? it only kinda works like you say if people don’t have a local fiat alternative. and even then i don’t think it really works at scale. el salvador is a test case, interesting to see how it plays out. wish you were right, it would be much simpler for all.
i am committed to seeing the zcash dev fund abandoned. when i ran for MGRC round 1, i used the platform to argue that it should never have been renewed. now that we are here, i strongly encourage the community to do everything to see no block reward go to any committee that relies on any social power.
maintaining a dev fund maintains a toxic culture that zcash needs desperately to move on from. everyone associated with the foundation and ECC should gracefully bow out of the community or develop for zcash independently to their hearts content.
lets move on and learn to love an open playing field zcash rather than maintaining a hierarchy of interests we continually have to to address.
i’m coming around to this conclusion as well. At first it sounded like a good idea to seed development.
but now these orgs are starting to want to control the community and act in their own self interests. don’t all governments claim they are doing what’s best for their constituents? and their idea of decentralization is more orgs that effectively centralize development with the respective org acting as gatekeeper to determine what’s best for us with our money. it’s dangerous.
they become their own fiefdoms, case in point the 20m ecc war chest that could be used to help fund development for other orgs in the time of need. And the dev fund is becoming a real tax permanent tax that i don’t think they intend to remove. We need a gas system that rewards developers directly. the developers set their own fees and collect the rewards directly without intermediaries. we need to remove the tax and spend goverment like structure.
i think POS for zcash died when zooko wilcox and nathan wilcox left the project.
and, if that doesnt break your heart, i dont think current plans to have ZSAs or deprecating Zcashd are making it into the halving, but are being held back to see if the Dev Fund gets renewed.
I dont know anyone other than by their online or public personas, Josh. I have read your proposal. i simply want the dev fund abandoned. I know i am best a quiet investor but someone else already goes by that name (despite his active involvement hehe)
anyway, If i have accused your organization of a falsity, the proof is in the pudding. I look forward to changes before the halving, but really doubt it will happen. to say more, as first day zcash noticer, pre ethereum blockhead, i remain naivelyimmature/too untechnical or simply philosophically opposed to non-voluntarist funding mechanisms that were incidentally concentrated my academic interest in zcash governance. but, as i anticipated through heuristics/political science magic tricks, i was able to deduce early that this entirely is failed model. VB now says zcash should consider his favorite style of pyramid building with retroactive grants. this is a middle ground that still attributes the “work for your bags” mentality, rather than take from the community coffers and we’ll see ya next time that is the mode of operation for zcash teams.
what i learned mostly over the years was watching the poltiical preferences of the fundees stick and incorporate their beliefs into the very cadence of production of products. this disaudes new entrants. people might cry about lazy overcompensated devs or whatever, but the greater error here is the common areas become the stomping grounds of people who think they own the project, (just because they built it).
i think that a fork or the end of the project inevitable. if interest in privacy picks up, maybe we’ll get a real one, not a little copy paste project. we’ll see if someone hermit crab developers take up the old ZEC shell , acquiring coins because they dont have to answer to the power structure anymore, and build, (IP issues aside,sigh) while old-zeccers move on with their neoliberal exchange-listing-and-funding-first project.
i dont have any much more to say. and dont accuse anyone of malfeasance or whatver.
The dev fund largely deals with “how the money is spent”. Its the “source of funding” that is the problem. An allocation of block rewards isn’t directly connected with success as measured in blockchain usage. It is based on largely selling hopes and dreams as its currently done. So if you get the price to go up, you get more money. But the money is spent on things that are not resulting in blockchain use. The orgs are appear to be funding political ambitions as opposed to economic. We need funding connected to transactions and blockchain use. Similar to how Ethereum charges, when a user transacts or interacts with the blockchain, they pay gas. There is a direct connection between users and blockchain interactions and funding directly to the ecosystem partners responsible for the respective interaction. As another example, if we thought of every L2 on the Ethereum blockchain as an “org” they also have a lot of orgs. But they are a market based structure. Every L2 on ethereurm isnt forced to beg for money from a centralized org. And by creating a market based system, Etheruem doesnt have to maintain everything in the L2 ecosystem, the L2 ecosystem partners maintain themseleves based on the usage which creates a gas fee to the ecosystem. The Zcash model is crushing, and not supportable (I or we cant be the first people to have mentioned this to you). So the structure itself is the problem, this is why you have so many people trying to create orgs based on politics and not real world use cases. In contrast, Ethereum is focused on real world use cases, funding is raised from third parties, and developers build on the Etheruem blockchain to get gas with no middlemen.
By the way, I respect and agree with the spirit and much of what you have to say here, which is in part why I agreed to come back to ECC. Another perspective is that much of what you say is also true of Bitcoin, which I maintain has been compromised and mired in agendas antithetical to its intended purpose.
I’m not a defeatist, and I deeply believe in this project, but I agree that we need substantive change. Thank you for speaking up with conviction.
