I am Tom Howard and I am running for ZCG on a platform of ZEC maximalism and tax efficiency.
About Me:
Multi-functional background starting in computer science leading to Entrepreneurship and a history of building and investing (as a VC) in the general crypto ecosystem since ~2017.
As a builder, founded Mosendo DeFi smart wallet, contributed to Maker, UMA and Synthetix. Founded PowerTrade crypto options exchange (backed by Framework, Nascent, CMS).
As a seed investor have overseen ~300 investments across various L1s and within BTC, ETH, and SOL ecosystems.
Active in the Network State ecosystem as an event organizer and writer.
Currently Head of Strategy at CoinList where I occasionally work with political groups to promote pro-crypto and pro-privacy policies in US government.
My work at CoinList generally does not cross with anything Zcash related.
Via my investments and CoinList I likely have economic exposure to other privacy tools or L1s. As far as I know they do not meet the standards for store of value asset as I define for Zcash below.
I have no formal role or economic interest with any Zcash related organizations.
Have personally been onboarding various âcrypto nativesâ to Zashi and have actively pitched ZEC to crypto funds and institutional investors since the beginning of this year.
My vision:
Zcash is the self sovereign store of value Satoshi envisioned but never completed. Full privacy of money is required to have true separation of money and state. ZEC is the natural successor to BTC as money.
Fork based consensus is required to ensure sovereign money is never corrupted by a formal governance. Therefore I lean against things like proof of stake or formal voting on consensus changes.
Exogenous assets typically break fork based consensus, therefore I lean against things like Turing complete scripting, ZSAs, oracles, or other mechanisms that can be used to subvert ZEC as money. Though c-node has recently convinced me of scenarios where they may be compatible.
My priorities:
We need to scale ASAP. Support tachyon. Support consensus work that maintains sovereign security and improves scale. Support all the surrounding infra.
We need to fix infrastructure decay. The Zcash ecosystem is full of bitrot. Projects that were built on old versions of Zcash no longer work. There is no functional full featured open source wallet. There is no full featured explorer. RPC nodes are centralized and may not be private.
We need the Zcash tax (aka dev reward) to be effectively serving token holders through stronger means of error correction and strong accountability on grantees. This means a priority on token holder voting for dev rewards so that inefficiency can be swiftly corrected.
Quantum compute is coming faster than we expected and the Zcash system naturally lends itself to quantum resistant cryptography where Bitcoin does not.
We need to focus on results for Zcash, not tech for the sake of tech. Nailing the core private money system, improving general ecosystem user experience, and focus on user growth must come first. An R&D budget is important as a fraction of spend but should not be the primary use of dev rewards. R&D needs to be accountable to scoped experiments and defined results.
Why I want to serve on ZCG:
I strongly believe that Zcash is our best chance at self sovereign money.
I also believe that inflation/tax is theft, unless everyone paying the tax benefits.
I do not believe that committees, non-profits, or foundations are a good way to spend a tax or a treasury as they lack accountability in various ways.
My goal is to eventually deprecate ZCG to be replaced with onchain token holder votes and delegates.
I am aware that the ecosystem has undergone various interpersonal dramas and bear market doldrums. I am new here since about a year, I donât care about the past, I am direct, I donât hold grudges, and I think I am will suited to judge grants based on overall merit for Zcash.
I understand my platform may be controversial and I only ask for voters that agree with my platform. I am not interested in representing a different platform. I have made best effort to provide the principles with which I am reasoning from and may change my conclusions when presented with better evidence.
As I understand it âtaxâ is coercive extraction of wealth. That is, involuntary, are you saying that âcoercionâ is moral, under some conditions, âe.g. everyone paying [..] benefitsâ?
Yes - but I also recognize that these definitions are subjective.
For instance Zcash would not function without the inflation tax paid to miners. We can debate what is the optimal tax to pay for miners, but I believe there would be near 100% consensus that paying miners is necessary.
Paying developers for improvements to the network via inflation tax is a controversial stance in crypto. But it is one that I believe, in general, is worthwhile for the good of all Zcash. And I think most ZEC holders believe this as well, in principle, otherwise they would not be owning it.
The tricky part comes down to the very subjective question of which work is worth paying a tax for? What is actually of benefit to all of Zcash vs a benefit to a few? The allocation of this tax is not so clear cut as the mining reward, and I hope to bring rigor, standards, and clear thinking to deciphering these questions.
(as we now have a short history in retroactive grant conversations, I would like to note that I think a proposal such as pepper-sync would have benefited from pre-approval with clearly defined outcomes and payouts for a grant)
I disagree with this use of the word âtaxâ because it seems to me, to be inconsistent with the definition that existed, e.g. before blockchains.
Without defining what a âtaxâ is (since Iâm offering you that privilege) Iâd argue that if a process is not coercive, then it doesnât match the definition of âtaxâ.
If, on the other hand, it is coercive, then itâs immoral.
Also.. BTW, it hurt my feelings when you said that you thought pepper-sync seemed like the result of a weekend hackathon.
Tax: While it is true that the ZEC dev reward is not a true tax, because I opted into the ZEC system, I will still refer to it as a tax because myself and the majority of token holders have almost 0 say on how it is spent. The mechanisms for vetoing funds in the dev fund are extremely weak and the spend feels coercive to most token holders who see spending on many things that do not produce results. I will continue referring to it as a tax until we fix this.
Feelings: I generally do not accept that your feelings are my responsibility. You have a choice in the matter in what you do about your feelings that I have zero control over. I aim to speak for either truth and accuracy or my opinion (my truth) in an unfiltered way. I will not be censoring myself to spare people their feelings when representing the spending of other peopleâs money.
Hackathon project: yes my first comment on your thread I referred to your product as having the quality of a weekend hackathon project:
My comment was directed at, as I hope I made clear later, the end user Zingo Wallets.
When I read the proposal I was not able to decipher what pepper-sync was, and appeared to me as a request for the development of the Zingo wallets.
Later you realized I did not have any context on pepper-sync and improved your proposal for pepper-sync itself in the thread. I donât have enough information to fully judge the quality of pepper-sync.
I stand by my comment on the quality of the wallets as a product as at the level of a weekend hackathon project. Namely the UX and UI of zingo-pc which I have had the most experience with.
How do you know how much âsayâ the the âmajority of token holdersâ have?
Donât all tokens have the same voting capabilities?
Are you suggesting that some tokens have more?
Isnât respecting the will of the token holders the whole point of coin-weighted voting?
Yes I am suggesting that we currently do not have equally weight token holder voting.
The mechanism for elections is not accessible to both smaller token holders and less technically savvy token holders as the voting mechanism itself is very difficult and technical to participate in.
The elections do not have a means of error correction, if a representative is elected and then immediately colludes with grantees, token holders do not have a mechanism to remove them until their term expires.
The foundation based administration also presents a weakness where certain scenarios may put them at odds with token holders. As far as I can tell the vote of token holders do not always need to be followed. Bringing this fully on-chain removes any chance for conflict.
I would propose, roughly, a token weighted delegation system, where token holders can quickly remove their delegation to a candidate they disagree with. This provides a clear means of error correction and ensures all delegates have some amount of skin in the game.
you mean that your authentic understanding of other people is such that clear expression of that understanding causes harm?
Is it your position that itâs necessary to hurt people to provide the best âgovernmentâ?
No - my understanding is that other people cause themselves harm in the choice of their reaction to clear expression from others. Not everyone does this, but it is their choice to do this, though they may not realize it.
My position is not that itâs necessary to hurt feelings to effectively govern, but that decisions should not be weighted by whether or not feelings will be hurt. It also is more harmful to people seeking grants to coddle their feelings.
Spending other peopleâs money because a grantee may feel bad about rejection is wasteful.
Granteeâs that do not get clear feedback end up working on things that are wasteful and their own time and resources are wasted.
I would like to ensure that both the funds of token holders are respected, and the time of prospective grantees are respected.
I believe this is a problematic way of viewing human relations. People arenât machines who can just choose not to be hurt. I agree with you 100% that feelings shouldnât dictate how grants are distributed, but I believe there is a difference between unfiltered and professional communication. I donât necessarily consider calling zingo-pc âa weekend hackathon projectâ to be the worst phrase Iâve seen in internet debates, but at some point we have to acknowledge that there are nicer ways to communicate while still getting the point across (especially after the recipient pointed it out).
You can actually choose how you react to your feelings and it is highly problematic that people do not even know this is possible.
Regardless, in the case of zingo-pc, I find the UX offensive to the user, embarrassing to Zcash and damaging to the ecosystem, so it is prudent to convey the direness of the situation with more violent communication methods. (not to single out Zingo, this is true of every Zcash wallet besides Zashi)
I am here to win for Zcash and too often âbeing niceâ is a way to lose.
Thanks for running for ZCG. It appears you have overseen 300 investments which require strong evaluation skills. One of the obligations of a seating ZCG member is to evaluate project developers milestones in order to complete payment. As you should be aware ZCG pays the Financial Privacy Foundation for services.
FPF SHALL conduct periodic reviews of the organizational structure, performance, and effectiveness of the ZCG program and committee, taking into consideration the input and recommendations of the ZCG Committee. As part of these periodic reviews, FPF MUST commit to exploring the possibility of transitioning ZCG into an independent organization if it is economically viable and it aligns with the interests of the Zcash ecosystem and prevailing community sentiment.
How do you evaluate FPFâs periodic reviews of the organizational structure, performance, and effectiveness which ZCG pays FPF to conduct and where do Zcash Community Members find this information?
Should the Zcash Community Grants be an independent Zcash Entity?
Good question, and a bit more context on my experience here:
I was a founding member of MetaCartel DAO, a fork of MolochDAO which introduced the ârage-quitâ mechanism
I was a foundering member of VentureDAO, the first for-profit MolochDAO that popularized the concept of a âlegal wrapperâ for DAOs, bringing on chain definitions into our articles of incorporation.
I was an early participant to various Ethereum governance DAOs including Compound, Aave, UMA, Synthetix, Maker.
Iâve been involved in setting up various foundation structures in crypto.
I have been a long time active participate in various cryptolaw groups that discuss how to best blend crypto and âwet lawâ
Have been closely following MetaDAOâs new futarchy based investment system on Solana
This is relevant because I have seen 100s of failure modes in the DAO and Foundation ideaspace, which makes me very opinionated about the various incentives structures one should definitely avoid when allocating community funds.
I view the FPF and ZCG as a âgood enoughâ transitionary phase from the previous model which did not have built in accountability.
However I am fundamentally skeptical of foundation models for managing public goods as the structures are mostly brittle and not adaptive to the ecosystem needs, and the incentives tend to lean towards value extraction over time. This is a pattern we have seen with almost every major crypto foundation so far.
The very language embedded in the FPF âmust commit to exploringâ implicitly means they are not committed transitioning to something else, so with no external stimulus the organizational incentive is to preserve the status quo.
In my view, our goal should be to move over to token holder voting, enforced on chain. Roughly, I think we should replace ZCG with delegated token holder voting, that has cryptographic guarantees rather than legal ones and quick error corrections when a delegate does not represent tokenholders appropriately. This also needs to be balanced with what is feasible and most secure.
I view my role on ZCG as pushing that initiative forward aggressively so as to minimize the potential for non-productive value capture and create a more meritocratic and results driven distribution of the developer block subsidy.
Regarding transparency, we should have dashboards that give real time view into funds, fund movements, org structure, grants, proposals, votes, and anything else token holders find relevant (we also need better block explorers for the chain itself!) We should probably move away from this forum based method of organizing as the ecosystem grows and overloads this medium.
We are in new territory, and the ZCG treasury is growing. ZCG needs experienced, strong-willed, first-principles-driven capital allocators. Full support.
Hi @joshs, principles, experience and trust are not enough in the verification of transactions or capital allocation. The ability to publicly verify transactions, have proof of reserves, or third party audits are required.
We are in new territory, this is the first year of the Dev Fund where a Zcash Entity, located in tax haven territory controls 30 million USD on behave of the Zcash Community. The controls to audit, have proof of reserves or view transaction history, what type of wallet and addresses hold these funds, and the transactions history of these funds is under the control of two individuals and two unelected board members.
Can you share where any Zcash Community Member can view in minute meetings, public discussions, public view keys, or third party verifiable audits of the funds being allocated on behave of the Zcash Community consensus written inside zip 1015?
What controls are in place for the protection of Zcash Community Funds?
As a fund manager I have experience with corporate financial controls and audits. It should be straightforward to make this available if it is not already.
On the one hand you claim that causing harm is unnecessary, but on the other hand you seem to be incapable of conveying your meaning without emotionally charged language that is specifically intended to place the speaker in a dominant position.
Do you see a contradiction here?
I disagree.
Generally speaking insults are used to elevate the status of the speaker over others.
Itâs a rhetorical and political device that I believe destroys value in a meritocracy. It does so by making open-inquiry, the lifeblood of innovation, unavailable as psychological-safety and emotional-safety are necessary for the deep investigation of new ideas.. new technologies.
Notice I am not suggesting that important observations about the flaws in a design or technology should be in any way muted.
The opposite in fact.
Meaningful understanding of problems and flaws is critical to effective innovation. Insults, and domination language simply get in the way of investigating those flaws, and make the process of innovation more difficult, or stop it outright.
On the one hand you claim that causing harm is unnecessary, but on the other hand you seem to be incapable of conveying your meaning without emotionally charged language that is specifically intended to place the speaker in a dominant position.
Do you see a contradiction here?
I disagree.
Generally speaking insults are used to elevate the status of the speaker over others.
Itâs a rhetorical and political device that I believe destroys value in a meritocracy. It does so by making open-inquiry, the lifeblood of innovation, unavailable as psychological-safety and emotional-safety are necessary for the deep investigation of new ideas.. new technologies.
Notice I am not suggesting that important observations about the flaws in a design or technology should be in any way muted.
The opposite in fact.
Meaningful understanding of problems and flaws is critical to effective innovation. Insults, and domination language simply get in the way of investigating those flaws, and make the process of innovation more difficult, or stop it outright.
Would you care to argue against the substance of this position? Perhaps one of us will persuade the other, and weâll both win.
