Are you pro BTC? If yes, Why? If not, Why?
Yes. As mentioned above I used to pay for my groceries with BTC. BTC was first, groundbreaking and it is everywhere. There is no Zcash without BTC - both economically and materialistically. That could change in the future, but there is a long road ahead and the reality of the system needs to be recognized.
What is the largest account size you’ve handled in USD? How many end users did it impact?
I run a non-profit with a yearly budget of ~$200,000 USD. We produce software, research and run workshops for communities. Last year our research contributed to Switzerland cancelling the use of e-voting in major elections for the first time in over a decade.
MGRC will control 8640 ZEC per month or 25920 per quarter, how will this be roughly spent? (provide napkin calculation).
Given an average ZEC price of $50, I would expect 8640 to fund 4-8 medium projects a month. I’d like to see a split between larger blue-sky projects (network privacy, contracts etc.) and smaller focused improvements (security reviews, developing policies, the introduction of the “shielded security seal” etc.)
MGRC announcement attracts 100s of applicants from all over the world with all random ideas, all matching your goals, how would you evaluate them?
We need a standardized application process and rubric for evaluating applications - and follow up processes for those applicants whose ideas are going to stretch and break that standardization. Such a large attraction is also going to require a rethink in the limitations of the interpretation of 1014 as set out by the Zcash Foundation - it will be impossible to effectively evaluate 100s of applications on just 5 hours a month of overhead.
KPIs aren’t entirely possible on a privacy preserving payments protocol project’s level, it’s all z2z, how will you evaluate funded team’s impact?
Total number of shielded transactions and Total number of Zapps. Ecosystem development, number of issues being filed by newcomers, number of fresh pull requests, the buzz on the forums and chat channels. There are lots of side channels to test the effectiveness.
DeFi fever made ETH run 2x compared to every cryptocurrency this year, thoughts?
Fever is a good word. It’s hot, painful and short-term.
What locals, regions, languages, ethnicities, educational backgrounds of people have you worked with? What are your preferences of assembling teams that deliver?
I’ve remotely worked for a large portion of my career, working with teams around the world. I’ve done science outreach in schools, I’ve given lectures and talks in many countries and my current work requires me to keep up with other organizations around the world tackling privacy and security concerns. As noted above, I work best with people who require minimal supervision, can hold their own and who have strong, considered principles to guide their work.
We live in a remote world now, how do you evaluate applicants for grants?
See above. Standardized rubrics and effective side channels.
Projects in Zcash are going to go through a huge change beyond the handful, driven teams funded via Zcash Foundation, thoughts?
We need that change. As exciting as some of the projects that came out of the first wave of funding are, they suffered when it came to quality. Major vulnerabilities undermine the mission and could have been prevented. Security standards and quality seals are not a silver bullet but they leverage the unique tension between the current organizational grounding of Zcash and the projected decentralized future.
Zcash is a protocol at its core, ZEC price is volatile. How will you handle a single digit ZEC? ($9 x 8640/month = $77,760) How will you handle a 5 digit ZEC? ($21,000 x 8640/month = $181.44MM) Thoughts…
This is something I have a lot of experience with at my job at Open Privacy. We receive donations in ZEC as well as BTC and XMR. We have to plan and commit to months of expenses based on our current price knowledge and forecasts. It is something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and prototyping tooling something I’ve learned is that there is no right answer. The future is fundamentally unpredictable.
Unlike with my role at Open Privacy, the MGRC is in a position to break the correlation that ZEC has with BTC and begin to chart out a possible future for Zcash. Which is essential before we can speculate about what those kinds of prices really mean.