We’re hosting a Community Call with Jay and Kurt later today at 20:00 UTC.
We’re going to host the call on Zoom. You can join using this link.
The recorded video from Zoom will then be posted on the ZF Youtube channel.
Original post:
We are planning to have a community call with the two candidates for the ZF board (Jay Verret and Kurt Opsahl) on November 9th. During the call, the candidates will introduce themselves, and answer questions submitted and upvoted by the community.
Please post the questions you would like answered in this thread. The questions with the most likes will be prioritized.
Edited to add: Please suggest multiple questions as separate posts, so that they can be liked/upvoted separately.
Do you support the perpetual renewal of block rewards for ZF, ECC, and community grants? Is this essentially a permanent zcash value/feature to you? If not, when should developer block subsidies stop?
Is ZEC more than 10% of your net worth? Is ZEC your largest crypto holding? Do you hold any other “privacy/selective disclosure” coins?
… and why?
Which area do you think ZF should focus on more: education, adoption, marketing, regulatory advocacy, community, development (core, wallets, ZSAs, programmability, etc) or anything else?
I don’t want to spoil it by answering early but this is a great question. I would divide up into 1) what incentive does my local merchant have to accept transparent ZEC and 2) what incentive to accept shielded ZEC.
Transparent ZEC, it’s similar to business model of Flexa/Spedn using Amp, saves a ton for the merchant on interchange fees and credit card fees.
Right now its a lot easier for the merchant to accept Zcash via Flexa, which is great for Zcash in the short term and I hope that collaboration continues to take off. How do we get the point, through wallet UX, through scalibility, where it makes sense for the merchant to accept Zcash directly rather than through that intermediary? That is very important because its the only way for the merchant to accept shielded ZEC (Flexa’s KYC is a bit loose right now but probably won’t always be) and we need shielded transaction usage to increase as much as we need assets to be shielded when at rest.
Along the way, we should learn as much as we can from Flexa, from Bitcoin Lightning, where they succeed and where they fail, and use those lessons in building the payment system component of Zcash (which is only a part of the tremendous promise of Zcash.)
I have already disclosed that I own a lot of ZEC. I am hesitant to disclose more than that in interest of financial privacy.
Not a miner or validator, but I am a staker. I assume you ask that question based on the POS move discussion. I have followed @zooko’s thoughts on staking and the move to POS, and one of his primary arguments is based on economies of scale.
I do not agree with Zooko’s position that there are no or minimal economies of scale in staking. I think he’s surely right on the mining/engineering end of things. But a lesson from the Ethereum switch to POS is that economies of scale in advertising/user education/“stakooor” onboard seem to persist. A couple of exchanges, and Lido (which is sorta centralized but sorta not) dominate staking in ETH. That is an economy of scale that persists.
Now, the slope of the economies of scale involved in POS is likely lower than that for POW, I believe that is likely. Which means the central arguments Zooko made at Zcon3 all remain valid.
But, it means we need to think carefully about any trends toward centralization that might remain in a move to POS for Zcash, and make sure we think of every way we can to address them and minimize any tendencies toward centralization of validation.
I hope this gets upvoted, this might be the most important question.
I can tell you how I am actively working to promote use of Zcash. I have a book proposal under review with MIT Press about crypto financial privacy, tentative title of “Hide Wealth With Crypto” 1/3 of the book is about Zcash. Overall my goal is to use my traditional credentials, lawyer and accountant, to get this book on the desk of every financial advisor in North America. As clients come to these financial professionals, I want to teach them how to guide their clients into shielding their assets from creditor risk using ZEC shielding, using ZSAs when we have them available, using Zcash shielded memos to memorialize legal trusts that control shielded assets and partition them from tax, tort or contractual creditors and do so in a privately stored way contemporaneous to the shielded assets.
That’s the North American & Western centric view for my idea to support Zcash adoption. But overall, this revolution in private money is about Africa/India/Asia. That is where we can have the most impact and where we can explode. Tradfi and the Fintech projects build on TradFi payment rails already suspect this.
I am in learning mode about how to support ZEC adoption in Africa and how to augment the work of the global ambassadors. BTC communities are absolutely thriving in Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa. Those three countries are among the top 10 globally for BTC usage. The natural progression for many Bitcoiners is to get burned on privacy and then navigate to Zcash. We need to have Zcash reps embedded and networking within the BTC communities that are already present in those three countries. We reach millenial generation users in cities, then adoption migrates to villages.
I am trying to learn all I can about the Chamas community finance groups in Kenya and efforts by Mpesa and other crypto groups to link up with Chamas communities. As far as I can tell, no ZK based privacy there. It’s a market with hundreds of millions of users who need privacy more than we do, need digital payments, I want to focus a lot of attention on a massive Africa Zcash project if given the opportunity to serve on the ZF.
Thanks for the reply, and double thanks for having skin in the game. Congrats on the column at cointelegraph. Im sure disclosure to public will/should be required. Curious if ZEC will be the only encrypted asset disclosed.
Do you like the current developer subsidy allocations under zip 1014? Should it even be called a subsidy? infrastructure? Should these be permanent? Is this unique financing mechanism more important than the shielding technology in zcash? When and how and who should determine when there should be changes?
I don’t know about permanent, continued decentralization is the goal. And I don’t know how to judge what a better allocation would be, I know a community vote was used to set the latest allocation which makes sense. But for now, it’s early days and I think we continue to need the Dev fund for the foreseeable future.
Increasing User Growth:
One of the difficulties increasing user growth is the lack of zcash service providers. One of the challenges in building zcash service providers is the lack of guidance in understanding the legal framework to operate. How can the Zcash Foundation assistance zcash service providers, virtual zcash providers enter the market place. This is a global market challenge, so lets narrow the focus to a very important market such as Germany. How can the foundation provide legal guidance to encourage virtual zcash service providers offer this world class technology?
Thanks for your response. I think that information is helpful to the community.
fwiw, i read 1014 as expiring, and absent some governancing, i dont think the implementation currently actually expires the payout. (apologies if someone corrects me and takes away from the import of this thread, but ultimately why i asked this question to you directly)
I believe ECC and ZF both have to agree on which chain can be called Zcash. ECC and ZF would both have to agree to continue the dev fund post 1014. If community didn’t agree with this but they continued it might cause irreparable damage to the Zcash name. I don’t think this would happen though.
Doxxed lawyers are pretty useless when it comes to guidance about crypto issues, particularly US and particularly SEC/AML/OFAC.
There are some top notch anon crypto lawyers in the LexPunkArmy (the same group that is fighting the CFTC on the Ookie Dao case). I work with them a bit and would be glad to ask them to share anon perspectives through this forum. It would help if you can provide more specifics in your question about exactly what clarity you need.
Looking forward to the call, looking forwarding to continuing to discuss issues on this thread and continuing the discussion we started a number of weeks ago on this thread that is linked to my name in Dodger’s post above.
I’m trying to talk with and learn from everyone I can in the Zcash community. I’ve lined up phone calls with folks who have been generous with their time from ZF and ECC and the broader community, I’ve engaged on both discord channels, on telegram, I’ve gotten a lot of great comments in shielded memos to my z-address (though how would you know? Privacy!). My z-address here if you want to sync your wallet (ugh) and send me a memo please do! zs1u7m0thayst4ckz03x7j42l8x5c4qgr4n7nef2wlgw2kfx06spdch2pm3gxs3u3v7prwnzqffazr
If you are member of the 80 plus community voting on this and we haven’t communicated, why not? Reach me in any of those ways and I’m hopeful for a chance to talk.
The idea is to commission a legal analysis as a template to be replicated in G20 markets.
Commission legal analysis for - virtual zcash wallet provider
State of Hessen, Germany
What You Should Know About Crypto Laws In Hessen, Germany In 2022
General Content Of Crypto Laws In Hessen, Germany
Legal Sale Of Virtual Zcash Wallets
Legal Sale of Zcash
Hessen Crypto Statutes, Regulations And Ordinances (or equivalents)
Penalties Under Federal Crypto Law
Possible Remedies For Those Accused Of Violating Hessen Laws
New Crypto Laws Coming Into Force In 2022-23
Illegal Crypto Market In Hessen
KYC Regulations of virtual zcash wallet providers
What licences are reguired to legally operate a virtual zcash wallet service