I understand this idea very well, because I discuss it with my friends all the time. They say: “We don’t care what your mission is. Where’s the payoff in all this? I already supported the project by buying ZEC and I’m ready to sell it right now because it turned out to be a bad investment.”
So we need to look for a balance, because history knows a lot of examples of bankruptcies of successful enterprises that for some reason ignored the interests of the big stayers: Kodak, Blackberry, AVON, there were many of them and they all believed in the mission.
Because if we say that the interests of investors and the interests of developers have different vectors, we are doomed to failure from the very beginning. It is obvious. If people stop buying ZEC, then the mission has failed.
Right now, ZCAP is largely made up of developers. That’s not a balance.
If we move to coin voting, investors will most likely vote against funds. And that’s not a balance either.
We’ll have to combine approaches to find balance.
The bitter truth to consider until we can pay with cryptocurrencies in every store in this world is that 99.9% of people in this space don’t believe in any mission, they believe in the US dollar.
This is clearly realized when people with 10 years of supporting bitcoin convert it into ETFs.
Who has actual legitimacy over the spending of the dev fund, outside of Zcash stakeholders?
Quite a few people in that so called “community” groomed by the Zcash Foundation, on this forum moderated by the same, are confusing the governance of the protocol with the governance of the dev fund. The protocol governance has been following the Bitcoin governance, and all has been fine on that end. The dev fund however, has been hijacked.
No. Stakeholders control. You don’t dictate us who else shall control how we spend our inflation.
If any future mechanism for managing the dev fund doesn’t give ZEC holders the ultimate voice—whether through a veto or final authority over how lockbox funds are disbursed to the grants managers—I will personally choose to exit and liquidate all of my ZEC holdings. I will also encourage other ZEC holders who agree with this stance to make their voices heard and commit to liquidating their ZEC if inflation is controlled by a small group or single organization rather than by ZEC holders themselves.
I believe in Zcash, but I also believe that ZEC holders, who bear the cost of inflation, should have the ultimate say in how it’s managed.
IMO it only makes sense that coin holders decide where the funds from the lockbox get assigned to. No other organisation should have a say, yet I believe we might implement a fixed period where maybe ECC etc. have a veto just to be sure that the system does not get gamed in the beginning.
It would be great if anyone could demonstrate and document the ability to conduct some basic decision making having zec holders using I assume coin holder voting. It would be great to debate the level of participation vs outstanding coins issued, address information, ip info, wallets used, result outcomes based on 2%, 5% 10% participation results and what this data would add to the effectiveness of using this method in making decisions. Please correct me, where are some data sets?
And all project approvals should be decided by coin holders through voting. Only those holding the coins truly care about ZEC’s price.
Transparent coins or shielded coins—the decision lies with the voters. What you’re saying is another form of centralized thinking. Everyone has the right to vote, whether they prefer transparent or shielded coins. That’s their freedom.
Zcash serves everyone, allowing them to choose transparency or shielded. Voting is their right, they can vote with t, z, or u, or abstain. Respecting everyone’s choices is what makes a project truly successful. Zcash, with its optional privacy, gives people the right to choose—a fundamental right for everyone.
There shouldn’t be a divide. You should understand that Zcash itself is optional privacy, so it needs to be fair to everyone. I get what you’re worried about, you’re concerned that people might end up only using transparent coins for voting. But your logic has some issues. People who truly care about privacy will always use shielded coins to vote. Those who don’t care, like those just looking to profit on CEX, won’t change no matter how much you try to convince them. But their goal is the same: to boost ZEC’s price and popularity. Once the traffic picks up and more people get involved, the base grows, and ironically, more people will start caring about real privacy.
A simple way to look at this proposal is to compare it with the prior model.
Prior Dev Fund:
8% ZCG
7% ECC
5% ZF
All guaranteed. Funds sent directly to the orgs. Orgs use it at their discretion, however they like.
This proposal:
8% ZCG
12% Coin holder discretion
Anyone can apply for funds. Could be paid up front. Could be paid by deliverable. Could be retroactive. Depends on the grant proposal.
It’s up to the coin holders to decide whether to approve or deny any grant application submitted to them. Could be nothing is funded.
It’s up to ZCG to decide whether to approve or deny any grant application submitted to them. Same as today.
No one is guaranteed to receive anything. Just because something is funded, doesn’t mean that it will be implemented in the protocol. That must go through governance checks and balances.
As far as I am concerned, this is the only reason why I created an account on this forum. At this point I don’t care about the percentage distribution. I am here for structural change. The dev fund is to be controlled by tokens holders, at the protocol level.
Yes, even with 6,10,100 different institutions they would still be centralised.
If you look at it closely, neither the ZF nor the ECC is necessary to move the project forward. It only needs developers and where they come from and in which company they are based is irrelevant for the decentralisation of the project. The only thing those responsible for zcash have done is to distribute one and the same vision to various institutions that simply consume additional money. This has nothing to do with decentralisation But you’re right, it’s time to stop all funding, whether for the ECC or ZF, and let them finance themselves, then we’ll be a big step closer to decentralisation. It needs a community that decides where the money goes. There is no need for a ZF or ECC. What zcash needs are developers who offer their services and are then paid by the community - it doesn’t matter where they come from.
Anyway, i don’t understand what your vision or that of the makers of zcash has to do with the community’s money? why do they all have to be paid from the community’s money?
in addition after almost 8 years there is not even any added value for the money they cost for the community, and because this is slowly becoming noticeable, they are now trying to shift this responsibility, for which they were generously paid, onto the community, so that the community does what they could not, save the project and drive it forward.
I’ll tell them something. If you had such a great and grandiose project then you wouldn’t have to fight for the communkty’s money, then there would be people who are convinced of your vision and would finance it without undermining zcash. But they don’t seem to exist.
Very simple: ZF and ECC are supposed to pool all available reserves and use them to cover their costs until everything is used up. There seems to be enough money at ZF. In the meantime, they should looking for new sources of liquidity.
If they don’t find them, that’s a statement. If you don’t find any sources of liquidity, you can submit suggestions to improve Zcash, no matter under what name, and the community will then decide whether these things will be approved.
No, but we’re stagnating, is that better? This proposal is a distraction, fundamentally things would remain the same.
The words of @HHIROSHIMA are a bit strong but there’s some truth to what he says. I know your dedication to the project and how your values are aligned with it @daira. As a ZEC holder, I’d gladly vote to finance your work as well as the one of the people you consider key to the project.
Looking forward to this. Could be nothing is funded indeed. I don’t have any higher priority than doing everything in my power to stop the illegitimate control and spending of the dev fund from ZF & ECC.
Miners don’t care about anything than profit. But when Zcash switches to PoS, ZEC holders will decide what code is running on their nodes. The balance of power will change drastically and odds are pretty good that the dev fund will be freed from that point forward. How much more time do we waste?
each dev chooses a project/part of Zcash they contribute to. and then there will be proposal by the devs who work on it and how much they need to complete that part by what time.
each dev can work on multiple projects also if they can and need to.
but if orgs can do sth similar and be more lean - but still do this sort of project based funding - it would be big improvement.
edit: might be not that great idea i guess…
why teams can work better:
Built-in collaboration/support systems
Shared accountability (less pressure on individuals)
If you look at it objectively, they took the bitcoin code that they didn’t even write themselves and integrated ZKP into it and created a wallet after almost 8 years and certainly swallowed up more than $100,000,000 that was not financed by wealthy individuals but by a small, trusting community.
If you know my dedication to the project, I hope you’ll respect my considered and strongly held position that funding only myself and another core developer is by far not enough. In fact the three current core devs at ECC (myself, @str4d, @nuttycom), one contractor (@sellout), and the team at ZF are collectively also not enough. We are stretched far too thin and there is too much work to do, to the extent that it is risking burnout and the loss of irreplaceable knowledge and experience. We critically need (and will get) at least one more core developer, and we also need a dedicated head of security at ECC, at a minimum. I am also very happy with the current management structure at ECC and with the excellent contributions of the Zashi wallet team based in the Czech Republic, the Qedit team, the Zingo Labs team, and others.
Frankly I think that the proposals of some of the armchair commenters would cause immense disruption and breakage to a model that is for the most part working well and producing extremely high-quality and needed work.
Nobody is saying that they should not be funded any more or that they should not have more developers. It’s just that things cannot continue as they have been.
I’m sorry to be blunt, but that is disingenuous. Several people have clearly been saying in this thread, with varying levels of directness, that the developers I’ve just mentioned should not be funded.
Anything protocol related would have my full support. That includes security, decentralization, or really anything that is actually fundamental to the project initial vision.
I feel confident the same can be said of most ZEC holders, but we’ll have to take our chances. And if we don’t like what we see, like @joshs said, there’s always the fork. So let’s all get courageous and do the right thing here.
