https://cointelegraph.com/news/crypto-firms-need-public-offering-address-wall-street-bitgo-ceo
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Precisely. What is this person expecting exactly in return for getting funded?
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i kept thinking about this idea for few days
and i am 100% sure that stopping the funding is not the best idea
especially with the positions of Zcash in the industry right now.
rationalize the idea by comparing to a great project Litecoin
this is a citation of Charlie Lee:
“Because Litecoin was launched fairly, as you all know, we didn’t print money for ourselves. So because of that the Litecoin Foundation is very lean. Most projects that come to us we have to turn down because we don’t have the funding. I want to change that.” - Charlie Lee
Litecoin is way behind of its potential because of this
with Zcash and its cryptography, it will be hard to find devs, especially when they could go to Mina, Starknet, Aleo or other ZK projects and get paid for their skills very well
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Yes, not privacy matters but money.
Looking at the most recent transparency report, the $3.75mil debt that ECC is also chewing into available funding… the more I look at everything, I can’t help but think that if ECC is looking for more funding from the community, then we should get a much more detailed breakdown of where the funds are going. Maybe we treat it like a grant rather than a dev fund extension.
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ECC is not currently receiving any dev funding. The proposals I put forth are grant-based.
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I have the perception that many community folks think that dev fund allocs where “fatty, sluggish and inefficient” and that grants will be “lean, frugal and super efficient” and I think this expectation is false and I would not like to see them disappointed.
In my experience the amount of administrative overhead that it takes to properly report and submit milestone progress for long running projects is high. It won’t mean that company A that used to be structured like a mature startup when being a dev fund recipient, it will now be “just devs, making code, hacking, day and night” because of grants being how they are.
How do you feel about this impression of mine @joshs? Do you think that transitioning to a grant-based revenue stream would impact ECC’s structure? What do folks should expect from that transition if that’s the case?
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The dev fund allowed the same issues to persist for years while we kept coming back to the same “why aren’t we getting adoption” question. Grants at least does not offer a continual source of funding and puts more objective performance criteria in place. They can both be efficient or sluggish… judging from the variety of posts over the few years, ECC was sluggish and bloated (and may still be given conditions).
Yes that’s what I mean with my post. I’m not sure that most of the people have that expectation.
ECC suffers the opposite. It’s always doing an enormous amount of things that other companies do with 5 to 10x the headcount. ECC was always spread thin due to the large scope it needs to cover and the budget constraints. The fact that ECCers are not complaining out loud about the long hours that have been going on for years doesn’t mean that it’s not happening. 
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It might. It depends on the structure of the grants. Let me try to explain.
In a grants model, we essentially become work-for-hire, or services, business. I built high-end and complex custom software for decades - as a dev, architect, project manager, practice head, and the CEO/business owner. I’m not trying to boast, but I am an expert here.
Running a software services business is different than running a product-based startup. Generally, you are building to someone else’s vision and either scrutinized by hour (time and materials) or deliverable (fixed price or not-to-exceed).
It has its own unique set of challenges, including:
- Managing a cash flow negative business vs. a more predictable annuity stream
- Dealing with ebbs and flows of customer demand
- Scope management
- The overhead associated with writing proposals, selling new business, accounting for time, and reporting
- Inexact estimates - often off by orders of magnitude at the outset
- Unforeseen issues that are outside the control of the project manager or org
Fixed cost proposals (as opposed to time and materials) are generally beefed up to account for such things, which can increase the cost to the customer. It’s a question of who is bearing which risk (cost, schedule, scope).
I think most people think about grants as being a discrete deliverable for a set amount of money. They can be, and it makes sense in many cases. But not all cases.
Another type of services business is a managed services business where someone hires you to support you. For example, I launched an offshore development center along with a NOC (network operations center) out of India back in 2003. The software business built software. The NOC managed and supported large global Microsoft and SAP implementations (along with our counterpart in the US). We signed long term contracts, with performance guarantees, and were paid fixed monthly fees. This allowed us to invest and plan for the long term, which was also beneficial to our clients.
Likewise, orgs can be funded do their work under a broad mandate for a period of time (I believe this is who LAE is funded by ZCG for audit work today), without mandating specific deliverables too granularly. If the org doesn’t do a good job stewarding the resources for that period of time, they are not funded for the next period of time.
This also allows us to account for all the things that need to get done, but are not predictable. For example, what happens if there is an emergency security issue? This isn’t uncommon. Today, ECC is contacted and we have a process in place to deal with such cases. It’s not predicable and the actions we take are based on severity, complexity, impact to other projects, etc.
There is a lot of things that I don’t have time to get into today such as the possibility of general stewardship and reporting requirements, trust assumptions (is the developer an honest actor or compromised or even DPRK), dependencies that we have on others and many others in the ecosystem have on us, etc.
If the community moves to a grants-based model as it has voiced it prefers, and is willing to fund our work, we’ll need to determine the best path forward, but suggest that the easiest and least expensive path is one where the community agrees to continue to fund our work at some level, for some period of time, that can either be renewed or terminated.
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Now there is a hot question! It all comes back to social consensus, who do we trust? How fragile is this trust and what assumptions should we verify?
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Not to mention that the ECC engineers don’t often get the credit they deserve: bringing zk to life for the first time, making it performant for the first time, eliminating trusted setup… solving problems that everyone has been trying to solve and now everyone else is using. The hard core and experts in the space know, but I need to do a better job communicating what we contribute to those that don’t.
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i also think ECC devs dont get the credit they deserve.
while even many do give credit, the overall crypto market doesnt always reward the core tech builders when the tech hasnt yet gotten massive enough userbase.
while some of our community understands zk is super hard - most of us probably cant grasp exactly how much it differs from the normal public blockchain work.
and we probably tend to compare it to the public chains that are less hard to build.
the market better one day bring the credit where its due. but for that to be more likely so many things have to go right - and as i understand - our devs should not be bothered by anything else than being able to work on delivering Zcashd deprecation and then NU7.
i wish there was a documentary about ZK devs and how they work.
since its hard to understand for many what ZK tech/code does or is it would maybe make people understand the magnitude of it.
// Netflix - this is your chance
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Exactly. That’s why I find it hillarious when people get impatient and give all kind of advices. You know Zero Knowledge isn’t exactly like dogwhifhat 
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Kind of boasting though. But I don’t doubt your skills.
Now, any expertise in fascism? Because as far as I can tell your country is heading right into it. Do you know how many days it took Hitler to dismantle German democracy?
Why am I asking? At this point I’m not sure how long your king will like ECC & ZF, and I don’t like that risk one bit. And we don’t need that risk. We need to govern in a way that does not rely on government approved entities.
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I agree. [10 char]
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Bankruptcy declaration ! but you are not the only one here and it explains a lot here.
I also wish there were proof of work and evidence of every day of the supposedly best of the best developers who supposedly put so much effort and have been working on zcash for 8 years.
In fact, I believe that word for word. But I don’t think there are many of your kind.