Wow, I didn’t see this coming! But if we have to flex an immune system response to something then I guess resisting privacy compromise is what im proud it should be on.
Mainly I’m worried about making it difficult to attract organized and stable contributors if the grants are fickle
We’ve got to be sure and understand our use of words 
Notice that I qualified with the word “engaged” - when I used that word, I meant people who are here in places like the forum or in discord, or other active Zcash ecosystem media hubs… especially so, in recent times - hubs where Dev Fund sentiment has been measured. (See underwhelming ZCAP participation, if you want some motivation to get more folks “engaged”)
When you use the word “community” it seems that you’re thinking much more broadly about people using the Zcash network, but who in large parts are not engaged in this forum, or weren’t engaged in coin voting, or the other sentiment gathering events.
I think we’re seeing roughly the same picture here, but we’ve not recognized the nuance in some terms used. Perhaps your 100,000-10 million estimate is correct, but unfortunately there is no evidence that they’re engaged or have been engaged in the past year+ of sentiment building around what to do regards to the Dev Fund in November.
Like we all know. Buying and Holding/ Using ZEC is one thing, caring about the abstract mission is another thing, and yet a third thing is to become engaged in the project processes(s)/ various active social media venues.
If I’m forced to guess the size of the Zcash “community” as you’ve written about, I certainly would error on the upper half of the set… perhaps 1,000,000 minimum… 20 million maximum!
In theory yes, but in practice, since the polls were communicated through the very same channels and by the same actors, the reached audience is the probably very similar.
The difference may be that on a coin weighted poll, 2 or 3 whales 
are worth more than a thousand Zcash cods 
, there are political incentives to actually engage with those big cetaceans to make a political statement or tilt the scale one side or the other. Being an activist around high-stakes zodlers brings more to the table on coin weighted polls than in “one head one vote” polls
Also forum polls are easier to vote on. I honestly couldn’t participate in the coin voting. I found out late and I couldn’t find the time.
If the reached audience was similar, it is expected that the easier method has more votes than the one that needed note management and a beta/newly released app version plus a novel workflow to work.
If it was otherwise that would contradict every Human Computer Interaction study there must be on system usability 
but hey! Zcashers, we are particularly curious people. So I won’t discard that option but I’ll just assume it’s less probable
Objections brought by @ambimorph align pretty well with the “don’t trust, verify” philosophy of the crypto community, so it’s possible that many others refrained to cast a vote as well.
PS: there’s a possible vote-o-matic case, a script like the ones I did for creating wallet datasets for integration tests can be used with real zec to create “individual voters” from a bigger stash of ZEC. Given the short notice I don’t think it was the case (This time at least)
Well, anyone can be engaged, you just need to write or express an opinion. It doesn’t mean it is a good one!
With nothing at stake, the bar is pretty low…
Fair point, but a lot of the Zcashers that I’ve heard from do a lot for Zcash! For starters, almost all of them buy and hold ZEC, which I believe is a critical contribution to the mission that should always be honored. Also, the ones in the cryptocurrency industry are often working to get Zcash supported in their products and services, and the ones outside the cryptocurrency are often working to get Zcash integrated into their economy. For example, someone messaged me a few days ago about how she requests that her clients pay her in Zcash, and teaches them how to set up and use Zcash wallets.
But yes, none or almost none of them are engaged in posting their opinions on this forum or voting in the governance polls.
But anyway, shouldn’t apply the same reasoning to both kinds of poll/petition? We could say it is risky to infer the opinions of the rest of the ZEC holders based on the opinions of those who petitioned with 2.7% of the total ZEC, but then we should also say that it is risky to infer the opinions of the rest of the Zcash community based on the opinions of the 0.3% (or whatever) of them who vote in governance polls. Or, on the other hand, we could say that the 150-300 people who vote in governance polls are more engaged, and so we should weight their opinions more than the other ones, but then we should also say that the coin-holders who petitioned with 400K ZEC are more engaged, and we should weight their opinions more than the holders of the other ZEC.
Thanks @pacu for letting me know about this discussion. I’m late by a few days! When thinking about Zcashers that are not on the forum much if at all, that’s ME. And yet, for the past year, every of the 366 days, I have thought about Zcash every day, for hours. Every single day! Building the ZavaX bridge and the red·bridge L1 has taken priority over staying current on the forum.
@joshs is 100% right that “The Zcash protocol itself must remain pristine,” and I agree with @daira that QEDIT’s version of ZSAs should be called a surveillance protocol. I first heard inklings of this design (ahem) “feature” at Zcon4, and I winced, but I saw the likelihood of the community removing the surveillance feature before integration and only releasing vanilla ZSAs, and I just crossed my fingers on that.
Zcash’s unique value proposition is that it provides privacy and selective disclosure features that are 100% under the control of the user. If government or anyone else wants to view transactions, they have to go through the user and request the viewing key; no sneak-and-peek is possible. If we were to allow Circle the feature-set they say that they need to release USDC (a centrally-controlled surveillance coin) as a ZSA, we break Zcash’s unique value proposition and mark my words, Zcash becomes worthless.
ZSAs imho are crucial for the success of Zcash. One use-case for the ZavaX bridge is for DeFi users to use Zcash as a private savings account, just as @zooko has described for years, but most DeFi users do not want to tie up their weath in ZEC, a coin that has a poor track record as a store-of-value. A coin tied to the price of BTC would be much more appealing to them, as would a yield-bearing asset. Both would be possible with vanilla ZSAs and the ZavaX bridge. Neither are stable coins.
I actually think it’s a shame the grant was terminated so quickly. A better course of action imo would have been to wait for QEDIT to release their ZIPs and then edit them to the community’s liking and offer QEDIT or another team a chance to finish the job. Perhaps this is still possible.
Finally, on the topic of money and $600K being a large grant, I can speak to that with some personal experience as the CEO of a company that has received a grant in the same order of magnitude ($210K). Software development, even when done on a shoestring, is expensive. (Without additional sources of funds, the ZavaX project would be dead in the water, and my having to devote considerable time to fundraising is why we are operating behind schedule.) A complex project such as ZSAs is going to take time and money, so from my perspective, $600K is fair for this amount of work.
I continue to be impressed by the dedication of the Zcash community and am honored to be building software with you. As the ECC CEO says, Onward!
The grant itself was already only for ZIPs and it was precisely the understood plan to collaborate with the community to ultimately get ZIPs that’s would satisfy Zcash privacy values.
The grant was cancelled because it subsequently appeared that the resulting ZIP would be fundamentally uneditable / collaboration not possible. And so we’re hoping that backing up will allow finding a design principle that can be agreed upon in advance of making a ZIP. If so, I believe we would reconsider a grant for that ZIP.
“Vanilla” ZSAs were funded under a separate grant, have already been implemented by QEDit, and are currently (I think?) in testing on a private testnet; the main blocker to their release is that we need to deprecate zcashd (and transition the network to use zebrad), which requires writing a replacement for the embedded zcashd wallet; that work is already in progress.
Oh that’s great to know
Yes better to cancel and re-spec then
100% with you here! It is hard (possibly ill-advised) to try and force people to engage in anything… governance voting, electoral voting, or even to get vaccines to protect against common viruses… “You may lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink.” I think ideally that individuals ought to reach a point of self-inspired engagement.
Personally speaking, I’ve got no confidence about having ~solutions to these questions, but in the very general sense I think that more engagement is always better - even if some engagees are measured to be lower than average in wit or wealth.
Beyond that, I think that the setup of processes is best determined by ecosystem consensus building activities, like what has been conducted for the Dev Fund decision. More representation is always better.
[Speaking for myself.]
On that subject, I’d like to discuss the other things Qedit have been working on, or would have been working on absent the grant cancellation:
None of these seem problematic in terms of user consent or violation of security expectations. Indeed I’ve suggested before that (1) is desirable. Of course (1) and (2) will still be subject to considerations about engineering complexity and possible unintended consequences, but I don’t see any obstacle to the grant proposal being renegotiated to cover them (and I will pay more attention to it this time!) I may have missed other things; @_jon can probably clarify.
I’ve heard some criticisms of Qedit during this discussion that I don’t think are fair. The Qedit team made an error in assessing how the commitment of the Zcash community to privacy and user consent would apply to their proposal. I don’t think they acted in bad faith or intentionally misrepresented what they were working on.
I do have some criticism of Qedit: I think that the outline design that was presented in Pablo’s talk at ZK Proof 6 should have been revealed earlier relative to the grant application process, because there was insufficient detail to assess the grant without it. I understand that this meant doing a bunch of work in advance of any of the grant being paid (which Qedit in practice had to do anyway), but given the potential negative effects on the Zcash protocol, I think that was necessary.
Full disclosure: I have discussed this with @_jon . The above is entirely my own view, though.
:pitchfork: getting this done with a high degree of quality should be where 70-90% of the resources go right now. It’s not a small job. I think many small, incremental improvements can come along for the ride so that once it’s done we will be in a much better place to consider and design bigger ideas for the more distant future.
I find the alignment between the (responding) coinholders, and the various community sentiment polls very reassuring.
What we don’t have evidence of is a significant fraction of the community diverging. This is the best possible scenario, as far as I can tell.
The “lean” ZEC-per-effort team at ZingoLabs has already (as a side-hustle) contributed to zcashd deprecation in several ways:
We need funding to:
These efforts will move the whole community towards a zcashd-less world. We’re proud to have already contributed in this domain, and believe the community will benefit from our continued contributions.
I know a lot of the Avalanche community is looking forward to this and getting ZEC exposure via the bridge and Avax defi
Thank you for detailing the nature of the problem. Speaking for myself, I was very excited about this Qedit proposal from the beginning, until you made me realize the threats it could pose to the core Zcash protocol. I’d be damn happy to have USDC, USDT, GUSD or any other common stablecoin in my Zcash wallet in a shielded ZSA wrapper and if I were a member of the community grants committee I’d be in favor of this grant even if I realized that this particular asset (not Zcash or any other ZSA, but a particular stablecoin) could be subject to internal issuer controls. I don’t see this as a problem if we’ve stepped half a step into centralized asset territory while leaving ZEC an untouched fortress. Otherwise, I disagree, as ZEC should not have even the hypothetical possibility of outside control. This is the foundation we rely on as a basic truth in our expectations for the future of Zcash.
In addition, for those who are familiar with the background (for example, I remember very well that the initial research on potential partnerships with stablecoins emitents was initiated by ECC itself in 2021), it may seem from the outside that this Qedit proposal is a logical continuation for the overall operation of Zcash based on the internal discussions of the main ecosystem participants. I didn’t expect this topic to be so raw, I saw a link to the proposal on Zooko’s twitter account and thought “oh finally this is being discussed again”. So congratulations to the community that the fragmentation of decentralization has reached its maximum point. It’s probably detrimental to the overall goals, but that’s the way it is.
I appreciate your enthusiasm for ECC’s commitment to participate in the grants process! 
As a long-time supporter for broader organizational involvement, I find this development encouraging. 
Given that the ZCG process is expected to continue in its current form into 2025, I agree it’s prudent to take proactive steps now to help provide feedback for grant proposals which will help ensure funds are allocated well. 
@joshs, please let me know what I can do to facilitate ECC’s involvement. I’m ready to help ECC gain the necessary access to the grants platform and ensure they’re properly notified of new grant submissions. 
Let’s discuss the specifics of how to make this collaboration as smooth and effective as possible.
This increased participation from ECC could be a significant step towards a more inclusive and effective decision-making process for fund allocation. 
I’m looking forward to seeing how this develops! 
the grants website needs upgrade. its close to unusable and hard to find right links most of the time. it could still be simple site but UX needs improvement.
edit: after a long time i used it and i had less problems than i remembered. but yeah this page is the one where you have to look for links inside the text, not that good. Zcash Foundation Submission Manager
The platform is called Submittable and it definitely could use some improvement. It was the best option when we researched replacements for the custom setup we had before but it’s never been ideal. If anyone has suggestions for other platforms to consider please share!