I’ll tell you this : ECC leadership wasn’t to blame. However, it’s been documented in the forums that certains ECC employees are working against leadership and generally speaking act unfaithfully towards Zcash. The blame is the leadership didn’t have the balls to send a pink slip to these individuals.
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Heard and I can only imagine. To be clear, I do not believe replacing current leadership is the answer. Zcash would be significantly worse off without Zooko IMHO.
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Thank you Josh for the ideas, I believe the proposals in the post are highly valuable. The only thing that baffles me is that these ideas are only coming out now as a resigner. They would have had much more impact if discussed before, but that’s it.
I absolutely support you 1, 3, 4, 5 but I don’t agree on point 2. Zooko is a very valuable leader and each time he deliver a speech he’s been highly inspirational, not only ot my regarding but to many people I have spoken to. The same can’t be said for Jack, who a number of times infused negative vibes into the community and the zecholders, and sorry but I don’t recall anything inspirational from him.
To streamline operations I would instead close down ZF and merge its employees into ECC under the leadership of Zooko. This might sound as a strong take but hard decision are needed in hard times, and heard many people of this opinion.
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Thank you for the support and feedback. There is no better time to explore and make changes than now - ahead of the next bull market and any new dev fund. They do need to come quickly in order to give us enough time.
I appreciate that this part of the proposal, regarding both Zooko and Jack, is controversial and that these decisions are up to them and their respective board of directors. No disrespect to anyone. It’s just my opinion about what’s best for a fresh Zcash and its community moving forward.
As for Zooko, he is a special person and valuable leader indeed. And I hope, even though I’ve been publicly outspoken of late, that we will remain friends. However, having worked with him for years, and knowing the inner workings and decision making of ECC at the top, I’m confident that both ECC and the project would benefit from a substantive change. It may also benefit him personally and I suspect that he’d play a highly active role in the community regardless.
As a “resigner,” I’m able to speak freely. 
I appreciate where this is coming from, but I strongly disagree that this would be good for Zcash or the ZF.
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Keyword “special”. Zooko is not a person who I would trust taking a company public or for the long ride. He’s the initial guy with the story to sell. Le epic cypherpunk living in his car, working on a NSA sponsored project, etc etc. We need new blood.
Btw, I will repeat… but this word “fresh” resonnates.
I said in the past, the way forward is to get rid of the brand, the shitshow, the lame PR that Zcash is today.
Also get rid of this toxic Trademark, and get rid of Zf. The only way way to do this is unfrotuantely FORK Zcash.
We give the Zcash brand to Zf, and the ECC (or whatever is left of it) works with the community and we create new coins. And let’s see who’s winning. People would have 1:1 Zec/Newcoin.
As transparent addresses are coming back into question again, let me share a great sub-thread from years past:
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great thread. Right now the network generates 88 USD fees a day…
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Is that coming directly from all the transactions at the coffee shop that Zooko has onboarded? 
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Which is exactly why there are so many of us in the forum loudly advocating for Zcash protocol controllers to introduce a fee market, rather than keeping the essentially free minimum rate of today.
The only way to make The Zcash SAFE well funded on a long timeline is to introduce a fee market.
Sending in an variable $5-10 or even $50-100 a day into the development and grants funding treasury of the future is not enough to assure long term liquidity.
Re: Assumptions
Supposing Zcash reaches only 20% of the current Bitcoin fees paid level of today, and that Zcash SAFE absorbs ~5% of the the daily fee average, that would imply $5,000 collected per day.
Fees paid for usage is an explicit demonstration of value!
Without a fee market, Zcash users are never going to have the chance to show the value they perceive in using ZEC.
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Could not agree more. A lack of fee market obfuscates the value proposition. It’s leads to misdirected resources, and causes a lack of focus on the important markets and use cases. I also don’t think it’s right to give a monopoly to one entity to receive charity donations. Open the donations option, which is not a bad idea, to any and all charities.
Simplicity is key for money. And it’s very clear people will pay a transaction or gas fee. We just have to offer something they want. the velocity of transactions will skyrocket with the right products.
We have focused on the marginal and edge use cases and marketing an inferior and unworkable product (for day to day transactions) while core blockchain and core use cases have been neglected.
- stop most if not all marketing
- stop marginal and most edge use cases
- get back to the core blockchain and core use cases.
- develop a Sustainable Market Based Ecosytem.
We need a reset from leadership to put the ship back on course.
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Clawback Zcash media grant while we’re at it.
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100% agree (i.e., clawback the media grant) until we have achieved acceptable usability.
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A fee market is probably the way out.
Do you want privacy and security? Pay for it.
Zcash is not engineered to be used to pay coffees and pizzas. This was a pipe dream, we cannot have 100K z2z transactions a day. The blockchain is going to be swamped. We need high-end investors and capital movements. Median transaction >1K USD
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Hard to argue with that, even though I’m poor and would prefer ZEC for small payments, I recognize that projects like NANO are better suited such things. The problem is in the crypto world the best projects don’t win. The market is still dominated by an obsolete blockchain, simply because of branding and first mover advantage. I’ve seen people here say otherwise, but I think we either get more aggressive with marketing or we drop from the top 100 and fade away.
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marketing is a waste of money. zec is in survival mode. It’s mission and execution problem.
we need the privacy everywhere people to take over the mission. get out of the tax evasion and fringe use case worlds.
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The entire crypto world is marketing. People lived just fine without it until recently, most people still live fine without it, and most people always will. We are all in crypto because it was marketed to us, and BTC still dominates because of it. Monero has dominated the privacy coin space because of marketing, despite ZEC being a better product. Crypto has ONE use, magic internet money. Nothing else gives it value. If it can’t work as magic internet money then it is of no use to me, nor anyone else that I know.
Tax evasion? Fringe use? No idea what you’re talking about.
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what is your plan for Marketing?
“Download Zcash! its still not functioning properly, but its ok! we are all in this together!”.
also there are many interesting use cases for Crypto
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We cannot market a product that does not work as marketed.
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I’m so conflicted on this one. I’m with you and Pacu on a need for internal retrospective so things can be done better the next time, but I do not think a public or town-hall would be productive. Strong opinions and active work frustrations would probably stifle a positive useful outcome (at this time).
I also think the current roadmap needs to be addressed and pivots to other business strategies executed. The engineering delays are understood but still stand in the way of usability. Leadership needs to work on a strategy to weather the current situation. That should be the focus of every working hour, not another delay of game.
That being said, if the work culture is no longer keeping top talent or productively managing who they do have… that is a downward spiral. So some communication definitely needs to happen if only to show a strong path forward.
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