Sarah Jamie Lewis announces her candidacy for the Major Grants Review Committee

[sarahjamielewis]

I sadly couldn’t make the call this week (sorting out housing in the aftermath of flooding earlier this summer), however I’ve compiled some answers to questions in the other thread that I hope you will find useful:

@amiller

Q: Tell me a science fiction story involving Zcash in 90 seconds

zxviews1qd8atlcqqcqqpqqj5kz4d42syywcgnfsc8fkzdsvg9a8zzeqgtgukmv3vtp5w34t37m90k7uwwlp47yn9fjn0qtxxsva4phvzc06lejayq8rpqpprq0a246l4vyjqyukudh37e09lnj5p46x2uje5mpfmade8w8mye8ujghn5llq39zgv9ec2936v05vzvvj325g8zscel73akagflpgsrq204c9aflf2hmh2uejav4uw5ml7677mcwquy7dcr4jljuj23s4pptr5jgm5n88a

@ChileBob

Question : Describe the type of people you work best with, if you were on MGRC what qualities should the other candidates have?

I work best with people who require minimal supervision, can hold their own and who have strong, considered principles to guide their work.

@amiller

Question: Our focus of discussion recently has been on the MGRC itself… shortly after this I imagine we’ll start to shift or focus to the potential grant recipients. Looking ahead to potential grant recipients, do y’all have any ideas what would make for a great grant recipient? A small development outfit? Large established team? Hire a cryptocurrency dev team away from their existing token? Any specific dream teams you’d like to hire?

I hope the MGRC will seek out as many small dev teams has possible, both to increase the surface area of grants covered and also the increase the decentralization in the ecosystem. There is a balance to be struck between resilience and redundancy; between competition and superfluity.

@jmsjsph

• what is the smallest grant you can fund to make the biggest impact?
• for those holding less than 70% zcash, what incentivizes you to review grants on behalf of the zcash community?
• by what quantitative measure would you define MGRC a success? a failure?
• how do you explain the sudden drop off in shielded transactions?
• Recently Hudson suggested layer 2 privacy as an alternative to Zcash to shield sexcare workers. ML is crypto-agnostic. Ethereum or Zcash or better and why?
• has your company ever received money from ECC, ZF or any of its investors?

• It’s amazing the kind of art you can produce for under $5000. Explanatory and educational videos. Posters etc. Definitely something I think the MGRC should consider
• Incentive wise, I really think Zcash has the best team in the domain. I’ve said it before and I will say it again.
• Quantitative measures are difficult. I’ve outlined some security policies I’d put it place in this thread, but I think the true measure will be in usage statistics, or more concretely the number of shielded transactions.
• Lack of demand.
• Layer 2 privacy is a minefield, I’m very skeptical - so much can go wrong, and your anonymity set is rarely great. I would still argue Bitcoin as being the most practically private cryptocurrency simply because of it’s scale, widespread use (in comparison) and the relative accessibility it has in decentralized and local marketplaces. My hope is that Zcash arises as a practical challenger to that title.
• As noted in my first post Open Privacy (of which I am the Executive Director) received a donation from ZF.

@_eric

Have you used Zcash to buy anything? And from your perspective, what infrastructure could have made the user experience *easier?

Nope. When I was a freelancer I used to buy groceries with Bitcoin. At Open Privacy we used the Zcash donation to fund a Staff Designer position (but not directly paid in Zcash). The wallets are becoming much more usable but there is still a relative lack of direct demand.

@covfefe

Question: What attracts you to Zcash?

Question: In 6 months time, what would success look like for MGRC members? What would failure look like?

• Answered above, but in short, the people and the technology.
• Success - multiple successful grants, public security audits, a process for recognizing great zapps (I really like parts of @jmsjsph proposal around trust badges and the “shielded security seal”), but most importantly as mentioned about I would like to see an increase in shielded use. Failure - a lack of shielded uptick, no new Zapps, and overall lack of movement in the ecosystem.