The future of Zcash in the year 2020

@Morpheus I agree. [quote=“Morpheus, post:176, topic:32372”]
I really don’t think that the ‘community’ (or whatever it may be called) will be receptive to a continuation of distributions of funds to founders.
[/quote]

They founded the company. The associated fund has expired. It’s time to go big or go home!

Let ECC mine zcash and concurrently develop the business if they wants more z money out of thin air!

Don’t forget the users. Maybe they deserve an interest rate for saving their money in Zcash… Maybe that would inspire them to spend some zats around here…

+1. ECC needs funding, and so does the foundation.

Initial investors and founders however, do not. That time has run its course.

In fact, that is really the only truly contentious aspect of the allocations continued existence imo.

2 Likes

Why should ECC have funding on the backs of the miners when they could be mining themselves to align their incentives rightly? The ZFND could just as easily take over R&D and hire the founders

Mining is labor (and location) intensive for one, and incentives do align when your sole source of funding is the thing that you are trying to add value to. See: positive feedback loops.

1 Like

I still don’t understand why you want to give ECC more free money (without protecting the network and mining themselves) instead of the non-profit foundation who could just as easily perform that function with that same money…

Right, but what if the Foundation was the recipient of the new dev fund and then entered into contracts with ECC (and others) to continue research and development? I agree that “decentralization” of the dev fund recipients is of paramount importance with multiple developers/orgs so as not to be solely reliant on ECC. It’s then up to good governance to ensure the Foundation doesn’t become evil and allocates the funds strategically.

4 Likes

As mentioned earlier, both the ECC and the fund should make a proposal for further funding, and then discuss it with us. It turns out that Zooko and the rest of the founders will talk with the right people from the community and decide how it was with ASIC.

2 Likes

Makes someone again wonder why nobody thought about this earlier. The FR expires in 17 months and you need 16 months…

No doubt. Just ouf of curiousity, why wasn’t this mentioned allready in the beginning that the FR could be extended, changed, whatever in case 4 years FR are not enough to finish the product?

Nice wording. I’am not sure if there is currently anything decentralized at Zcash. The wording less centralized would fit much better, but seems riding the decentralized wave is choosen to make it more popular.

Means fully open source or how to understand this?

What? A sudden it needs decentralized decisions? The first really decentralized decision in Zcash history has to be the development fund decision? If this statement would be made by the foundation i would give it some benefit but from the ECC company that has no history in decentralized decision this sounds more than strange.

Isn’t this exactly what you are doing right now your own? Even unwilling to shift internally funds of the FR to secure development and/or building up some development reserve funds? From an estiminated $300,000,000 Founders Reward by 2020 not a single dollar shifting initiative?

Out of curiousity, what’s decentralized so far? I have a hard time to find anything decentralized at the moment… What i’am missing.

Having allready an example in the history with the asics discussion i agree with this. Someone can indeed expect it will be like this.

And just some side notes:

  • Seems Ycash initiative was right about the extended/changed Founders Reward.
  • I was absolutly right that the suggestion/proposal of shifting internal funds within the Founders Reward is absolutly tabu.
  • Zero initiative/contribution on the topic from the foundation, makes you wonder why we have them at all…
1 Like

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.

2 Likes

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.

2 Likes

I’d be surprised if they don’t, support contracts with exchanges is an obvious guess. Lets ask @zooko !

1 Like

We do not have any alternate revenue streams.

1 Like

@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.

9 Likes

“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.

2 Likes

I think the idea of a voluntary “user union,” so to speak, is a promising one!

3 Likes

How do we achieve that without KYC information ?

1 Like

“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:


That’s not my graph. That graph was created and published by the Electric Coin Company, in the same “Continued Funding and Transparency” blog post referenced above.

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.

6 Likes

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.

1 Like

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”

  • @ebfull on June 18, 2018 on #the-zcash-foundation chat channel

https://chat.zcashcommunity.com/channel/the-zcash-foundation?msg=GBJnCbGTFuShpDN42