Worth a listen if you have time: https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/77
The challenges, and some new ideas for funding Blockchain Development.
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I think its important to remember that we are in uncharted territory in this space. There is no blueprint on how these technologies are to be developed so plans are subject to change. This is the nature of the beast. We have the under funding issue, PoW algo debate, a fork and the list goes on. I appreciate the ECC for their transparency in letting us know whats going on. Hindsight is 20/20 and we need to figure out what to do moving forward because we have a talented team and the technology is worth it.
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It seems like many users have an issue with how the funds are spent more than the fact that there is a fund at all.
If the fund was extended, what would be the key points that users would like to see focused on? Those points should be written into any ZIP proposal.
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Just a quick reminder that NOT everybody is a native English speaker. While this episode mostly perfectly serves all US/UK and perfect English speakers others like me have problems when it comes to English audio listening, be it due dialects, fast speaking, technical wording, whatever.
This said, the link you gave might be a good episode, contain value information, but ONLY for these that are native English speakers … Nobody really thought so far to make articles upon such audio episodes, just for ALL not Native English speakers so they can at least look up words or google translate???
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boxalex got flagged. Oof
Absolutly! IF you see that the distribution is towards everything else but not max-ed on development/R&D/Adoption/Marketing than people ask them why to finance/sponsor just the wealth of individualts/companies???
As you mention “users” have an issue it seems the foundation is absolutly ok with it.
I will make an estiminate these days when i have a bit more time on how much in US$ the Founders Reward so far is and how much it will be in total end of 2020. A vague estiminate without proper calculation let me believe it will be in the range of $200,000,000, i even think at least.
Why extending the founders reward, just make a re-organization and re-distribution of the current Founders Reward. Shift some funds from individuals/profit into strategic reserves and development.
I can’t see any attempt of ECC towards self-improvement but just asking that miners again give a share of there anyway unprofitable and risky mining operations. Seriously?
Here some free ideas how you could raise some funds:
- 0.9%, meanwhile, or 2,033 ZEC per month, is going towards Zooko alone
- Zooko can voluntary cut his share from 0.9% to 0.1% for example. (that’s as much as the 34 others get). Pretty sure he is compensated enough by Tezos and the other projects he works on.
- 3.4% of the total supply is going towards 34 employees
- That’s 0.1% per employee or ~226 ZEC per month. At todays price of ~US$70 means US$ 13,560 for each employee per month. Cut that at around 50%.
14.2% is allocated to 44 employees, advisors, and founders
- Not sure if these 44 people include the advisors and founders or not. At 44 people this makes 0.323% or 730 ZEC or $51,100 per month per person (in case they are 44!). Just take from here 10% as a strategical reserve for the period after the Founders reward expires. Should be good for a longer time if you allocate them for the next 18 months.
- 3% is going to the Zcash Foundation (6,563 ZEC per month)
- 2.8% is going to the Zcash Company (6,125 ZEC per month)
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With the above savings these % for the Foundation/Zcash Company would increase and if put into a strategical reserve be good for at least another 2 year (hopefully).
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Make some extra bucks from Bitmain and Innosilicon. Something like an Asic-Tax as these 2 exclusively sell their hardware. Nothing more easy than getting funds from them for staying on asics. This should have be done allready when we had the asic discussion. But still not too late if they want to sell there hardware for equihash Zcash.
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Make a hybrid consensus adjustment. Either Asic-POS if Bitmain/Innosilicon agree to “fund” development or GPU-POS if they refuse. Foundation and Company can stake their holdings than and have funds from staking rewards for development. Still something. Would have as well a nice side effect that the foundation/ECC have an incentive to really long hold their funds/holdings.
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Change the whole issuance and inflation rate, this would lead to a less price loss, thus making the remaining Founders Reward worth more in US$. Mostly too late for this with the slow NU approval process.
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Instead of cutting PR/Marketing spend some more. Again every single dollar price increase reflects as well on the founders reward and funds available. Someone can anyway only wonder how this one seems on the last priority list while it should be highest priority even for ECC/Foundation themself. Higher price => More US$ funds for development.
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Sell a stake of Zcash to someone willing to invest. As you guys/girls seem to have good connections to JP Morgan, maybe they are interested.
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Cut some costs with outsourcing. Seems 99% of the team, if not 100% are all US or western based with huge wages/saleries. Pretty sure some work can be outsourced for way less cash…
Just some ideas/proposals. If everything has been tried and later some funds are needed than it would be the moment to ask for an extension of the founders reward or something to replace it. But it doesn’t seem there is much initiative so far from ECC to cut the own ZEC/Cash flooding …
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Damn, these are all good suggestions, can you run my house budget @boxalex ? 
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For what it is worth, we talked about this at the time we were envisioning the concept of Zcash. (I remember one particularly formative conversation between Andrew Miller and I about it.) We talked about how Zcash would always need funding if it were successful — the only projects that stop needing new development are dead projects — but that we didn’t want to ensconce any one entity with an indefinite privileged position, because that would be an invitation to that one entity to become complacent or corrupt. So, we decided to make the initial funding be limited to four years and leave it up to the community that would hopefully exist by then to decide what to do next.
I’m glad you all are here now and the community exists. 
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It’s a shame that no one in the community who has invested in Zcash is in profit (largely due to the ridiculous inflation curve), because now it will be very hard for anyone to convince the community to fund ongoing development.
It seems like not only did the majority of investors underestimate the effect of the inflation curve, but so did the Zcash team.
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The Bitcoin distribution model has worked fine for Bitcoin, plus the first Zcash halving is next year.
Simply because speculators didn’t calculate the possible effects of the supply curve is a poor basis to make a decision on the funding of future development efforts.
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You didn’t get the idea. It’s not about speculators in this case. It’s about that currently due the high inflation the founders reward is worth less in US$ than it would with a way lower inflation/issuance …
Fine, great if everybody is happy with the high inflation/issuance. As it worked fine for Bitcoin why not copy their funding model as well because it worked as well more than fine for them, obviously! At least i’am not aware that they need even a founders reward…
Edit:
I would go even as far as concluding that ECC didn’t calculate the possible effects of the supply curve for their own reward/funding neither the impact of lower ZEC prices…
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Create an infrastructure for a coin with a dev fee and this will be a way out with financing.
Initially, zcash had the concept of “electronic cash” and development for 4 years and then it is unknown and I think that the community had to decide, now the concept has changed “company gives you a product” that needs to be maintained for uptime, but asks for it to expand development fees over 4 year period.
The proposal may be as follows:
- Wallets (workers) with dev fee
- payment in the browser (extensions) with a dev fee
- The company enters into a contract or organizes the exchange service zcash for currency for everyone (yes, this is an exchange or exchange), from which it receives a percentage.
- Deductions are extended (remuneration of the founders) for another 4 year period, but the percentage of deductions should be less, for example 0.1-0.3%.
The point is that if you provide a product then it should be convenient to use this product, in particular, the idea of cash on the Internet, give the conditions necessary to start, and the improvement of the conditions of use (adoption) will be on a third party who wants to work with zcash.
There is also a simple solution: to cancel the POW and make the distribution of the entire remaining amount of coins that has not yet been mined between the founders of the ECC and the foundation.
Google Translate-
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Is it possible to have sort of a clear and concise info-graphic of the timeline of the founders reward accrual and its value at like $50 a ZEC (to play it conservatively), along with the development due dates on the same time line to see whats needed and/or whats missing? Just some visible numbers and conservative expectations would be a great start to find a solution.
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Community needs to keep following things in mind before they decide to support monetary changes
- Parity is expected to build/launch their zcash client in 2020 (around the time FR rewards are expired). Parity client most likely won’t have dev fund like their Ethereum client
- Miners, users and investors dislike monetary changes after initial launch because they fear coin scarcity/supply can be changed in the future as well.
- Exploring other options for funding developers:
- Enable miners to offer their share of mining rewards to devs. So, it is up-to miners.
- Introduce dev transaction fee (split mining fee into two), and/or give miners the power to disable it.
- meta idea: To avoid ZEC price fluctuations, dev fund (optional/mandatory) can be fixed USD value per month using ZECUSD price coded in zcash client. Additional knobs can be added if ZECUSD crashes so that miners still get majority of block reward and transaction fees.
- Explore ZIP based funding (in other words milestone based) with unlocking majority of funds when ZIP implementations are deployed. Authors, implementors and everyone involved should get rewards per ZIP. Rewards could be proportional to value and impact of those ZIPs. Example: “fully shielded”, “succinct blockchain” etc., All of this can be enabled by users and miners who run zcash. Makes perfect alignment b/n users, miners and dev.
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Calculating the Founders Reward in US$ value:
Founders Reward is 43,200 ZEC for 30 days.
The monthly ZEC prices are average prices for the given month in US$.
2016 November, average $60 = $2,592,000
2016 December, average $50 = $2,160,000
2017 January, average $43 = $1,857,600
2017 February, average $30 = $1,296,000
2017 March, average $53 = $2,289,600
2017 April, average $72 = $3,110,400
2017 May, average $139 = $6,004,800
2017 June, average $320 = $13,824,000
2017 July, average $218 = $9,417,600
2017 August, average $234 = $10,108,800
2017 September, average $220 = $9,504,000
2017 October, average $236 = $10,195,200
2017 November, average $290 = $12,528,000
2017 December, average $450 = $19,440,000
2018 January, average $561 = $24,235,200
2018 February, average $416 = $17,971,200
2018 March, average $275 = $11,880,000
2018 April, average $236 = $10,195,200
2018 May, average $286 = $12,355,200
2018 June, average $190 = $8,208,000
2018 July, average $185 = $7,992,000
2018 August, average $156 = $6,739,200
2018 September, average $127 = $5,486,400
2018 October, average $119 = $5,140,800
2018 November, average $101 = $4,363,200
2018 December, average $61 = $2,635,200
2019 January, average $55 = $2,376,000
2019 February, average $51 = $2,203,200
2019 March, average $54 = $2,332,800
2019 April, average $65 = $2,808,000
2019 May, average $64 = $2,764,800
Total for past months: $234,014,400
If we take for the remaining FR todays price of ~$70 additonally $3,024,000 per month are added. Means again that an estiminated $51,408,000 until the end of the Founders Reward are issued.
This makes an estiminated Total Founder Reward of $285,422,400 or 285M or over 1/4 Billion US Dollars.
I yesterday guessed it might be over 200M, but didn’t really think it was that much at all. Now the question should be should/could someone await that with $285M funds a product should be flawless finished and top notch?
Just as a sidenote after thinking about that huge number. A year ago radix who developed and maintained the only windows wallet than back had to beg for some ZEC from the community …
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As mentioned earlier, neither the founders, nor the foundation, nor the company need to do anything, they get the money anyway, this is not fair. If the price of the coin will be reduced, then 43200zec will not be enough for 30 days, to cover basic expenses and even more so after being cut by 2 times in October 2020, what to do then, increase the share of the founders to 50% or more? then it’s easier to immediately make a premaine for the rest of the amount and close the question, spend money for 1 month or 2 and start from scratch.Can someone from the responsible persons comment on the lack of desire to increase the price of a coin? Why there is no powerful marketing and promotion of your product to the masses?
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Totally agree with it 
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Parity is only developing the client to the point of it syncing with mainnet, and it will be the Zcash Foundation’s client to develop and maintain once that work is complete (source). The ZF does benefit from block reward funding.
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I would like to know where all this money went?
The company holds $5M worth of USD and ZEC. What about the other $229M? Is it all distributed among founders, employees and seed investors?
I did not see million dollar marketing efforts. Okay, an expensive coinbase campaign during the coinbase scandal. How impressive!
You spent hundreds of millions in two years? Wow! What a great misalignment of funds. This is multiple times the funding that Ethereum received and look what they did with it. ZCash is afaik in the top ten of the most funded projects in crypto.
Where are the results? I do not see adaption and use of ZCash anywhere. Basically nobody uses z-addresses. Users and the crypto community in general are way more enthusiastic and confident about monero. The market is showing this as well.
Instead of getting more potential users on board, they got scared off by hearing from the CEO of ECC that “making Zcash too traceable for criminals … but still completely private & fungible” would be totally doable and a great idea.
So how many millions exactly went into R&D? Why you did not plan ahead with so much capital and secure funding of R&D for a way longer timeframe? With so much financial power you would be able to do so for sure.
What justifies such high salaries and compensations for a startup that is not even succeeding?
I (as an investor an long-term supporter) am just speechless and this so called “Transparency Report” was just the final straw. Good luck!
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That amount assumes that the ECC hasn’t been researching, developing and improving the protocol since the start (they have).
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