This is fantastic! Thanks @nathan-at-least .
This is great thread btw.
+100 Start simple, leverage existing tools to achieve goals.
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Here’s a poll: https://twitter.com/deepcandles/status/1436745224181534720
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This. Less fluff and more soul 
How much do contributors really care? Knowledge gap continues to accelerate (wider) and its imho one of the biggest issues facing privacy in general.
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Ok that’s great, you would be the prime type of profile such z-ZOMG (private ZOMG as opposed to t-ZOMG) would want to help.
Would you mind creating a separate post detailing what contribution you could offer and what funding you would need? Maybe put [z-ZOMG] in title so we know what it’s about.
Looking forward to the details and making it happen.
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I would be happy to. I am swamped with Monero work for the next 24-48 hours, but I can write up a post after that.
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‘Psuedo’ anoymous means that while you aren’t externally identified you are still identifiable to an internal admin of some sorts and we have that. You want ‘fully’ anonymous grants and thats tricky. You may as well forget about the ZFND, they can’t help, this would have to be an independent thing. There’s a lot of details to work out (the dev fund discussions carried on for the better part of a year) and if you’re serious then you’ll take some time to work through those but, to me anyways, it’s seems like theres already a full plate for eveyone right now so don’t think nobody cares.
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Are you familiar with Tor?
It is indeed the stated intent.
You may be right, but I am still willing to give the idea some of my resources. 
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Yes I am familiar with ToR, do you know the definition of ‘psuedo’?
pseudonymous
/sjuːˈdɒnɪməs/
adjective
- writing or written under a false name.
“the monarch was not spared by the pseudonymous critic Junius”
Ah its my fault for misinterpreting pseudonym for psuedo-anonymity sry, interesting though.
The pseudo in pseudonym implies the false name, not the false idea, interesting.
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This topic is so exciting, it’s great we get to talk about DAOs here.
Here’s my dump of current thoughts:
It’s hard to point to where the magic is in a DAO. Regardless of how it’s implemented, fundamentally a DAO is just a multisig controlled by real people, so it shouldn’t be expected to “automatically” do something better than an ordinary corporate entity like ZF or Bootstrap, unless its stakeholders make good choices. However, the following are potential benefits of DAOs, so that focusing on these might help steer towards a good outcome:
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It could make use of anon talent that’s unavailable to the existing orgs. This is the pseudonymous angle others in this thread have picked up on, basically it could operate based on pseudonymous folks that can’t directly participate in ZF or Bootstrap. I have a good feeling about this thread because there are some legit anons posting on here :o
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Flexible weighting for governance control. Zcash Foundation board is a simple structure, majority vote among 6 members. DAO can make decisions directly through the majority of a more complicated assignment of stakeholders. Gitcoin’s governance token, GTC, is like this. Introducing GTC – Gitcoin’s Governance Token
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It could have for-profit incentives built-in. The non-profit structure of ZF is part of why ZOMG is limited to grants rather than, say, venture investment in a for-profit startup dev team. A DAO could potentially take on such opportunities. Incentives would especially be important for building a DAO that proves itself to be self-sustaining even without receiving Dev Fund.
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The meme potential. Maybe a funding DAO will be interesting enough that it creates its own hype and engagement, boosting Zcash’s reputation for innovation.
It seems like to aim at these potential benefits, it would still be difficult to make a high quality DAO without also doing lots of the other work that ZF and Bootstrap have to do. Among the many impressive things about ZOMG-001, they did a great job of promoting transparency and publishing frequent detailed minutes, and writing up a vision statement. It’s hard to imagine a smart contract directly enforcing this. Basically there’s a culture layer you have to provide that’s out of reach of the smart contract code.
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I love those points and perspective, thank you @amiller!
Indeed, if we decide to leverage Ethereum, although we would probably start with a very basic smart contract, we could make it evolve progressively. I still have to better understand how we could leverage Gitcoin’s governance, directly or indirectly.
IMHO, this is genius. In particular, remember how in the early days of the Ethereum foundation, for any 1 Eth people would donate, 1 Unicorn token was received? That token has never been leveraged but it could totally be at any point. Likewise, we could make it so for every 1 RenZEC donated, 1 z-ZOMG could be given in exchange. It would then be up to the community to decide later on if holders could have some advantages.
Yeah, totally. I think that’s really where we need to start. We need to know who’s up for it and how much resources they are willing to dedicate (whichever they are) to this. I’ve said that I could give 5h per week and DAI$500 per month, we’ll likely need more people if this is to go anywhere.
Call to action: [z-ZOMG] Contributors needed
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I think the creation of some things like Zcash and Bitcoin came from an understanding that theres something important riding on it, like an urgency that deserves a mission so the idea of an amount of work done pro bono to get it rolling makes more sense than doing so in the current state of Zcash granting affairs. The ZFNDs urgency in retaining its status is understood. Problems with their reporting could mess up the whole dev fund scenario let alone the possible legal ramifications for them personally and they’re also paid so there’s that as well. Bootstrap is only on receiving end but same goes for them. The ECC invented Zcash, the first practical implementation of a zero knowledge proof ever and they can tell why it was urgent (I already feel like I might step on some toes, sry) and ZOMG, minus the legal repercussions, was urgent (I think) because of the contention between the ECC and ZFND during the ™ discussions and the overall desire for more decentralization. This has to be urgent and I really think the energy to do it and realize that urgency is here but directed elsewheres.
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Very well said.
Absolutely what I believe too! Also the forum is probably read by a very small number of Zcash holders. I mean I started reading it a few weeks ago even though I own ZEC since its big bang.
I firmly believe the “z-ZOMG” idea is here to stay and is an important piece of the Zcash success, but we might need to be a bit patient and keep pushing it until we get some more eyeballs on it.
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Am I one of those anons? 
Recently I’ve been working on Monero since its “statistical attack surface” is kind of huge and desperately needs the attention of a qualified statistician. I thank you @amiller for your work in Moser et al. (2018) “An Empirical Analysis of Traceability in the Monero Blockchain” since it’s serving as a basis for a lot of my work. The “countermeasure” of using the gamma distribution with the fitted parameters for mixin selection was a good first draft, but in my view it never should have been used in production code.
I’m not sure if the authors, including @amiller , expected the Monero Project to adopt the countermeasure wholesale. I’m working on developing a fix, which will occupy much of my time for the next several months. After that, I could potentially work on some Zcash issues, or just some “basic research” in the technical sense of the term.
@amiller you may know @mitchellpkt a.k.a. isthmus — he has reviewed some of my non-public work on Monero, so you can get third-party verification of the quality of my work through him. And I’ve just gotten started.
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Couple of weird brainstorm ideas for z-ZOMG.
- t-zomg, like zf is working based on elections. But an alternative is to randomly assign people. More like jury duty than congress. Sortition - Wikipedia
- I’ve been fascinated with the idea of the unwittingly powerful. Usually as a thought experiment of where power comes from when people talk about Vitalik being the centralized leader of Ethereum. Folks seem to follow what he says, but thats really the choice of the followers rather than due to Vitalik, no?
Put these together… basically the proposal could be to make a DAO that pools funds and picks a random forum member or twitter account or zcap invitee and funds projects they like. They don’t necessarily even have to know they’ve been picked
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Interesting idea. That is not too far from this proposal:
mbio.asm.org/content/7/2/e00422-16.abstract
More:
See also, for ideas on alternative voting systems:
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Did anything ever come of this thread? I’m bumping it now because I’m interested in contributing labor to a ZDAO. I am happy to comply with KYC and put in work towards this cause.
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DM @Rucknium & @stickyplot, get the conversation going.
Start small & iterate. It will get big one day.
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