I find it suspicious that the topic of further funding was started now that Zcash price has started to recover. You knew that this is a controversial topic, yet you started it now, more than a year before halving, and when Zcash price finally started going up. Its like you want the price to go down, so you can find an excuse to complain how lack of funding is slowing the progress (yet like boxalex made a point $234 Million so far was paid out to you and founders).
Now I must say, I do not care that the piece of mining rewards is taken from ASIC miners. This is their problem, not mine. They don’t have a lot of choice with their hardware equipment anyway. They are trapped and will mine as long as their electricity price is lower that what they earn.
What I do care about is lack of interest of both Electric Coin Company and Zcash foundation in both price and marketing efforts. Price is what determines how much funding you have for further development. EEC is a for profit organisation, and should very much care about the price as well.
Marketing and promotion of adoption should very well take 60% of your budget, instead you reduce it.
Adoption wasn’t the problem when GPU miners were on network. They were promoting it for you. Now it’s your job. Just look at worlds biggest brands and see how much they spend on marketing (Coca Cola, Nike, Mc Donalds, Apple, Amazon etc.).
ZA[quote=“ChileBob, post:93, topic:32372”]
new tech not related to privacy should be licenced to other projects, not given to the world but become a new revenue stream.
[/quote]
There is not a question about where to get money, main question - if you can’t spend money efficient, sorry but no money for you.
I started this thread back in January, check the first post. It has nothing to do with the market price of Zcash.
The issue was that since launch we have known funding would end in 2020 but nobody was talking about it, so I started this thread to spur the conversation.
I’am pretty sure the guys/girls in charge can make a re-organisation of their “personal” rewards without a ZIP and NU4. All it takes is some re-organization, shifting of funds from personal rewards to tech/marketing/foundation/R&D/etc. funding.
But it seems these options are TABU, but milking the miner cow is preferred.
Some posts ago i made several suggestions/proposals. Someone from the foundation can ZIP, NIP and NUP them as a proposal (if someone cares there of course!).
Doing nothing isn’t the only option, obviously! Doing something should begin with self reducing funds and allocating them, enough the founders/employees/advisers/investors/whoever have an interest in continous funding.
What’s the foundations CLEAR stance on this by the way? At the end of the Founders Reward estimated nearly 300M have been issued which for sure is good (in my opinion) for a TOP 5 funded Project. At least i’am not aware of many that had more funds available.
Actually you know it since 2016 that funding will end 2020. And it’s not correct that nobody is talking about it. I mention it about in every 3rd post i make. Just nobody cares about it would fit better.
After we know it ends in 2020, even more interesting that nobody in charge, including the foundation, takes a clear stance, action, plans… Just nothing…
Just think about it: A company that got over 1/4 BILLION dollars runs out of funds in just 4 years with a half ready product. Damn, who the hell is agreeing to continue a Rewards Fund that obviously mainly was used for everything else but not to finish/market/adopt the prodcut itself???
Not hearing much from the foundation doesn’t build up much trust either in my opinion.
The transparency report, as well as the original funding blog posts before launch (1, 2), provides all this information - in particular it is clear that the company did not ever own the entire FR, and it is disingenuous to claim so. The dilution event described in the transparency document is a good example of how the FR allocations could be changed, and as described there it requires the FR recipients to agree; it is not something that ECC could unilaterally decide on.
[Note: I’m just an engineer, I wasn’t involved in any of the setup of this, and am going entirely off what has been publicly stated. I’ve also summarised this repeatedly in this forum and other places, so I think this will be the last time I do so personally.]
Over the past 2.5 years ECC has received around 12% of the FR for its operations, and the Zcash Foundation has received around 15% (technically less because investors received all their FR in the first year). That means (going on the numbers a few posts above) ECC has received on paper roughly $28M, assuming that:
it sold all ZEC it received,
as soon as it received it,
and that it was able to get the given price for all ZEC.
The transparency document indicates that ECC’s monthly expenditure for the second half of 2018 was around $700k. Let’s conservatively assume that over the 2.5 years since launch (so excluding all the expenditure pre-launch, when there was no FR being received) that the average monthly expenditure was more like $400k. That amounts to $12M spent on operating costs. The declared cash+ZEC on hand takes that to $18M. Then on top of that there are the one-time costs (multiple audits, investments, the Coinbase Earn campaign, etc.). The remaining gap narrows considerably if the conservative assumptions (both on expenditure and received funds) are relaxed.
I think it’s perfectly reasonable to discuss the original split of the FR, particularly from a “how could Zcash / future projects improve on the model” perspective given the data we now have on how the current FR has worked out. I’m really glad to see other projects (such as Beam) trying variants on the theme to find a sustainable way to develop widely-beneficial open-source projects. I think we all benefit from using the published data we have available to inform these discussions.
Seventeen investors put in a total of $2 million dollars into the Zcash Electric Coin Company in exchange for equity in the company.
A total of $3M had to be raised to effectively get Zcash Company started. Back then nobody had ever heard of zkSNARKs and didn’t know if Zcash would be successful. According to stories I have heard from Matthew Green and Eran Tromer, they got rejected by many potential investors and had to pledge a good portion of the rewards/company just to raise the $3M.
Remember, there was no such thing as ICOs raising 10M off a whitepaper and nothing but promises. This was 20+ separate investors that it took just to scrape together the $3M.
Since the Founders’ Reward is 2.1 million coins (10% of the total long-run monetary base of 21 million coins), and since the Founders’ Reward will be split among the owners of the Zcash Company in proportion to their ownership, this means the new round of investors paid $2M for an eventual distribution of 131,250 Zcash coins. Therefore, they effectively paid $15.24 per coin.
In hindsight, paying $15 per coin was a good investment, but everything is easy in hindsight. Zcash could have flopped and the coins could have been worth pennies. That’s the risk VCs take.
As @str4d pointed out above, a blanket statement like “they have had $240M to develop Zcash!” is highly inaccurate.
Slowly but surely i understand how various people have claims that there are some missleading statements. I consider this one to be one of these.
HOW can you distribute something you don’t own? The simple answer is: You can’t. The company owns the entire FR and than distributes it due the various stake holders, investors, CEO, employees, whomever.
From the Zcash paper:
21 million Zcash currency units (ZEC, or ⓩ) will be mined over time. 10% of that reward will be distributed to the stakeholders in the Zcash Company — founders, investors, employees, and advisors. We call this the “Founders’ Reward”.
Or on a pure formal approach. Every person that gets his share from the Founders Reward will post in his tax decleration “received from Zcash/ECC company”, right? After someone receives something from the company it was owned by the company. It’s really simple.
Agree, of course it needs the persons in question to agree with it. But IF you NEVER ask them, you never will find out if they agree or not. There are 2 interesting aspects within that question actually.
1.) Is Zooko, you, some others willing to reduce their own share you get from the FR?
2.) IF the FR receivers refuse to reduce their share of the FR it’s signalling that they as well have not much interest to continue with Zcash’s future…
And this exactly is the problem. 88% went for something else and ONLY 12% for the operations!!! I’am going as far as calling this a “doomed to fail design of the Founders Reward distribution”. After you noticed your own allready and as stated in the “transparency financial report” the funds are not enough. Try to re-organize it, and as said, this should be the first step and not a TABU.
NO. This is in my opinion again missleading. The company received about $280M, distributed and paid shares to the various receivers of the founders report and $28M are left than for operations. This should be the correct formulation.
The fact that only ~28M out of ~280M are left AFTER the distribution doesn’t mean the founders reward so far isn’t ~$280M.
it’s an estiminate calculation to find out how big the founders reward in US$ was so far at the time the founders reward has been received by the company.
For such calculation the points you mentioned don’t matter much as the only purpose of the FR calculation was to give it some US$ value at the time the FR was received and that one is pretty close while taking average prices per month.
The process of what happened AFTER the FR was received doesn’t matter much, it’s again an internal decision. Means for such calculation it does not matter if you sold 1 ZEC worth $200 for just $50 as the point is that you received funds having the value of $200. Everything after that point is out of reach for us.
Why worked out? It still works and will work for another 1.5 years. Just discuss internally how more funds from the current founders reward can be shifted forth and back to ensure more funding for operations/development/R&D/marketing/whatever, than just cutting all these off.
I personally totally miss ANY incentive to make any changes to the FR distribution.
And again, the Founders Reward so far is in the range of $280M and as said bevor it’s an internal problem/design how what when to whom is/was distributed.
I really admit and think that the Zcash Engineers are maybe the best of ALL projects. Really technically you guys/girls rock, but for months i’am now bearish due the lack of financial/economical skills/forseight/whatever on the financial matter and the flawed Founders Reward design that obviously won’t change for the next 1.5 years.
And just in case you get my bearish/critical posts wrong, i’am posting my opinions because i still think there is a chance to correct some things, enough there is a will…
Actually it’s not a highly inaccurate statement that they had ~$240M to develop Zcash as these are just the funds the Founders Reward has generated so far.
Even the fund raising at start of $3M is a good start, no matter these real investors got back more. That’s ok that they got 131,250 ZEC out of 2,100,000 ZEC which makes 6.25% of the whole FR.
That’s the price for a kick start and Zcash was able from zero to begin absolutly professional and welll funded.
Why not making another “transparency report” on how 2,100,000 ZEC Founders Reward have been distributed exactly, not just vague statements.
I still wonder why there is no comment from the Foundation after this thread has been brought back to life??? Do they have no thoughts, not interested or another reason that such important discussion/decision isn’t of importance for them?
cut funding in 1/2 for another 2 years for ECC (i don’t care if miners are taxed! rather ECC have the funds over some miner) dissolve the zcash foundation, and utilize saved funds on marketing.
the anti-marketing campaign ECC/foundation has been waging is beyond goofy. not sure how building brand awareness would be considered a bad thing. building brand awareness is not price manipulation.
[1] These numbers are subject to change if, for example, more investors or ZECC employees decide to donate to the Zcash Foundation, or if the company grants more equity to employees, or employees leave the company.
Just saw this now. There seems to be even the possibility to change the numbers and receivers from the Founders Reward. Just shuffle a bit with the current Founder Reward numbers, cut here and there something and allocate more to development so funding is secured/ensured until the product is finished.
I don’t think they are anti-marketing, it just they know that Zcash can’t be marketed for the average user (yet).
If there were ads on the evening TV saying “Drop Gold, buy Zcash” or whatever, and “Zcash will protect your privacy” there would have to be a big (small) print disclaimer like you see on the pharmaceutical ads:
privacy only works on full nodes which take days to sync, may not be accepted by all exchanges, see site for details.
Only after it’s super easy for a newbie to download an app on thier smartphone and begin using Zcash properly, should ECC begin a big awareness/marketing push.
Interesting to see how this will work out with cut funds for Marketing…
My personally never thought about TV ads, but more something that brings Zcash nearer to the average joe user. There are 1001 options on how to market and brand something successfully.
Probably because there is only so much time left before it will be too late to make any changes. Doing nothing will be a choice.