This makes the most sense to me - funding should flow through the Foundation.
There should always be a time limit on funding streams to ensure the recipients cant become complacent or corrupt.
Think this discussion needs to be led by the Foundation, perhaps as if they are applying for the job.
Hi, just a quick reply. I think this is a pretty dangerous move. It makes the ECC the centralising force, both in terms of the Proof of Work/technology and network .they then become the absolute arbiters of the coin, network and trademark.
The idea is that since the FR is ending we /might/ need to find an alternative method for funding research.
Does the ECC have alternate revenue streams apart from the FR? We don’t know, they don’t publish that info afaik.
I’d be surprised if they don’t, support contracts with exchanges is an obvious guess. Lets ask @zooko !
We do not have any alternate revenue streams.
@boxalex is right, you should tax Bitmain and Innosilicon for allowing ASICS on zcash network. What is the use of them if you aren’t charging them money.
Thanks for tagging me @sonya; yes, I think any proposal that has the Foundation receiving all funds (even if there are contracts in place for development) could jeopardize broader decentralization, and as you suggested I wouldn’t want the Foundation to be a single gatekeeper.
And thanks to @zooko for his post above and giving the community his perspective. The Foundation would only support proposals that:
a) don’t rely on the Foundation being a single gatekeeper of funds
b) don’t change the upper bound of ZEC supply
and c) have some kind of opt in mechanism for choosing to disburse funds (from miners and/or users)
We could suggest a proposal within these guidelines, but like @zooko I would prefer to see proposals from others in the community first.
“zcash community federation” comes to mind. maybe a community federation could be formed. all members of ZCF could be elected, and act as a kind of counterweight to ZF, almost like ECC/ZF today.
I think the idea of a voluntary “user union,” so to speak, is a promising one!
How do we achieve that without KYC information ?
“90% of the Zcash monetary base goes to the miners . . .”
Let me repeat that.
“90% of the Zcash monetary base goes to the miners . . .”
Those aren’t my words. Those are the official words of the Electric Coin Company (né Zcash Company), published on September 23, 2016 (a little over a month before the launch of Zcash), in a blog post entitled, “Continued Funding and Transparency.”
Just to remove any latent ambiguity, perhaps a graph would be helpful:
I must have read that blog post 15 times the day that it was published, because I was trying do decide whether to invest in Zcash, and one of the most important criterion for me was whether the proposed allocation plan–including the Founders Reward–was fair.
That blog post convinced me that the allocation plan was indeed fair. And in my mind, one very important aspect that made it fair was that 90% of the Zcash monetary base would be allocated via the free-market mining process (whether it be via Proof of Work, Proof of Stake, or some hybrid of the two).
Regarding any proposal to deviate from this, it matters little to me whether the proposal is being offered up by the ECC, the Zcash Foundation, some cabal of crypto hedge funds, “thought leaders” on Twitter, the “regulars” on this forum, or the community of rank-and-file Zcash users. What matters to me is whether a stake-weighted simple majority of ZEC holders supports the proposal to deviate.
On this thread, we need not delve into debating the fairness of stake-weighted voting. Hypothetically speaking, if a stake-weighted majority is against a given proposal to deviate from the current allocation, how in the world could anyone claim that the “community” is for the proposal?
To be clear, even though I am against any proposal that deviates from allocating 90% of the Zcash monetary base via the mining process, I would accept as legitimate a deviation so long as a simple (stake-weighted) majority of ZEC holders supported the proposed deviation. Absent a mechanism to hold such a poll, I will not be convinced that that “community” supports a deviation.
To the holders, I don’t think it matters much who dumps, ECC, Zcash foundation or ASIC miners. Some say its better to continue to fund the developers as their transparency report states they will run out of funds soon at this pace. I find it troublesome that large portion of their share is spent without any plan it seems and they will continue spending money as they have so far.
And so I don’t think it’s the holders the ones that have to decide, its the ASIC miners. As they really
dont have a lot of other options to mine on this algo they will have to bow down and accept it. If it was still GPU mineable coin, I don’t think that would be the case. I personally say approve it, but some reorganization has to be made with plans of spending those funds.
I see at the bottom of my screen that @ebfull is winding up a response. Let me try to anticipate it:
“. . . I have never believed a stake-based vote is a (particularly) useful measure for governance”
https://chat.zcashcommunity.com/channel/the-zcash-foundation?msg=GBJnCbGTFuShpDN42
These thoughts and opinions are my own. I am not speaking on behalf of ECC.
Dear Zcash community,
What we are trying to do is hard. The cryptography, engineering, regulatory engagement, comms and adoption. This isn’t just another cryptocurrency. This is the complexity of building a cryptocurrency with sophisticated cryptography and a focus on fundamental human rights.
Tonight I will be on a call at 11pm to work through a concern in a foreign country who is uncomfortable granting their citizens privacy. Like the country we’re meeting about tonight, many states are just fine with the surveillance that other cryptocurrencies allow for. This is the world we live in and the future that is headed our way unless we act. States are pushing surveillance in the name of protection. It’s a grand bargain between those in power and the people that they govern. And it’s a dangerous agreement and difficult to undo. The irony is that states are better off when their citizens are protected from the prying eyes of bad actors and foreign states. But today, this is lost on most.
Zcash is a threat to those pushing for broad surveillance powers, but not because of what it does today. The market cap is too small, z2z usage is minimal and the UX is too limiting. But Zcash is a threat because of what it may provide in the future.
As a team member who is fighting this battle every day, some of this funding conversation feels healthy, and some of it is incredibly discouraging. But I do understand it. The Zcash community has the right to keep this team accountable and to determine how, or if, we should keep our jobs. You have the right to decide how much should be paid to developers and how much should be paid to miners. But know that we are inventing and engineering and fighting and busting our asses every single day.
I work for ECC because I believe in your rights, I believe what we are doing is for a good and noble cause, and I believe that, for now, this group of people is uniquely equipped (more than anyone in the world) to help further that cause.
I believe that we at ECC have a vision for a world where people are safe and free and have the opportunity to strive for better things. I believe that most Zcashers share that common vision. I hope you share that vision. And, we also have a vision for how to get there. It is not yet realized. We still have much to do.
So you may decide if you want us to stay, or not, or the mechanics of how all that will work. But we are here and committed and fighting for you every day. And I, for one, am grateful to have the opportunity to spend my days in this effort. And I thank my coworkers and this community for that opportunity today, and hopefully tomorrow. You, us, we still have much to do.
Josh
THANK YOU for this necessary reminder and for the work you guys are putting in! IT IS NOT EASY!
Good luck tonight!!!
I don’t mind the idea of a development fee going solely to the zcash foundation or at least I don’t think it violates the idea of decentralization if we considered it a larger Foundation staff (which I think I read about aiming towards somewhere once) who’s decisions (according to the internal values and bylaws) to disperse funds could be checked immediately versus multiple institutions with potentially varying ideologies; is there a significant difference? Which is more easily enforceable?
Also what does this mean for the protocol having to be changed with the development fee addresses in assuming it would be passed directly to a varying recipient? Or is this an incorrect assumption?
Stake weight voting → no
The idea that large holders intrinsically know better or care more than someone less financially inclined is false (and from what I can tell these people care more about markets and profits then development anyways)
I think the governance panel vote method wasn’t too bad, obviously some kinks to iron out but I think the method was sound (I did participate in the last one and I guess if it’s a problem then I would abstain from the next, I don’t care, that’s not why I’m posting this) @acityinohio did submit a zip mentioning a method of non formal, (non-weighted?) stake voting which I’ve been thinking about but is not the same
I’am sorry if, i guess mostly my posts, are discouraging for you, but so it is for me and some other community members. Seeing that a FR of an estiminated $300,000,000 isn’t enough to have even nearly a finished product.
To know how much should be paid to developers we first have to know how much a developer gets at all first. I made an estiminate on the Zcash Distribution but it’s still not clear who gets’ how much. From my calculation it must be at least $13,560 at a ZEC price of $70 and could be even more than $51,100 per month. (See below).
Sounds good, but let’s be honest, fair and straight. You forgot to add that you are paid more than generously for this, which is ok by the way. Let’s not forget that ECC is a For-Profit Company and so are their employees, founders, you guys/girls don’t do it for free like it was a poor open source community project. But ok, after you are doing this for a good and noble cause where is the problem to cut a given percentage of everybodies payout from the Founders Reward now and until it expires to shift more towards current and future development? Why is this a tabu?
As long as there is no straight answer i have my problems with believing you guys/girls do everything for the success of Zcash.
That’s exactly we are all here and had NO problems so far with the Founders Reward of ZEC 2.1M.
And to be straight again, just a vision to reach a target isn’t enough. It needs as well planning well ahead, discipline and a lot more things to make visions reality. You got with the end of the FR an estiminated $300,000,000 to make this vision reality.
Obviously this wasn’t enough and/or correctly disitributed. Now, after you have a “new” vision for how to get there, how much more funds are needed to get there? As a multi-company owner myself i know that when you ask for financing (a dev reward is exactly this) you have to know how much needs to be financed!!!
Ok, that’s a set of questions towards you and the ECC. Now let’s take a look on the other side of the coin. Getting block rewards from miners (again) to keep it fair.
Miners, no matter if gpu/asic/cpu/fpga, invest a lot into hardware, maintance, electricity and whatever not and this for a very small margin or even for a loss just in hope it may payout someday. In most regions they mine even at a loss allready. While a developer or employee of Zcash/ECC get’s his ZEC paycheck with garantee it’s a different story with miners and the block rewards they get. You really think it’s fair to “milk” these further? I mean they allready got milked by Bitmain/Innosilicon, than the current 20% FR, than the Mining Pool fees, and daily with the electricity bill they get.
I’am no fan of POW mining today anyway, but here i don’t think it’s fair to milk miners even further.
Just as a contrast i think it would be even more fair to increase the max. supply and make an airdrop for funds (extreme example!) as this would hit and make every current/future ZEC holder pay for the dev development and not just 1 group of the ZEC community.
And last but not least. Anybody even thought about the impact of this? I mean let’s not forget that one large Zcash supporting group, the gpu miners, felt betrayed after they got forced out by asic miners. Did anybody really care about them? Obviously not. Now an extended or new dev reward will hit hit the next miners, again a broken promise.
And this step gives Ycash all the legitimination it needs…Actually i admit i regret to have attacked Ycash that hard as it seems the intention of them was just about right, that the monetary promise will be broken.
I am strictly against this.
Total:
Aside from the larger debate, I think “stop with this non sense” is unwarranted for. It was an estimate of total FR value assuming all ZEC sold when received, which at least at a high level is a relevant number.
