I’m really interesting in participating but I’m curious if anyone knows what actual legal protection DAOs afford us? Is privacy really a benefit if it’s required? Or is anonymity a fundamental requirement of DAOs I’m only just realising .
I imagine an individual transfering large sums of ZEC is bound by their local laws. So a 2 party multisig wallet/contract suddenly protects me from legal prosecution? Of course not… Maybe a 3 party… 4… 100?
Are we just assuming all parties are using Zcash and tor to remain anonymous to lower the risk of prosecution?
DAOs are in their infancy. There are many different ways of operating that range from total anon → total doxxed. I am approaching this from the perspective of first seeing what useful thing a Zcash DAO could do and then working backwards to figure out structure, governance, mechanics, etc.
What do you think a Zcash DAO could do to bring value to Zcash?
I think by far the most important thing a DAO can give the Zcash ecosystem is protection/backup/have leverage against some of the centralisation risks of having private companies control the chain. That would mean the DAO would need to build a community of users that can run independent of the current ecosystem.
My initial thoughts were to advocate we start really simple and branch out from there.
Example:
Create a discord
Create a multisig Zcash address
Create a GitHub page (website GitHub hosts) to attract and advertises who we are and defines what we do and goals
Create a GitHub repo that accepts requests/proposal (as pull request)
Use the pull request review feature to give feedback
Do we eventually move to a eth smart contract? Maybe. But maybe that’s also something we do after we’ve invested some time proving there’s an interest in a new community to begin with.
@zooko, do you worry that by allowing/making the Zcash chain fund a DAO that doesn’t comply with KYC legal identity disclosure laws/responsibility would make defending/advocating for Zcash to gov and other entities harder?
Sorry not KYC. Disclosure of legal identity. Do the disclosure of legal identity responsibilities also pass through to individuals too?
Note: I actually don’t know where the disclosure of legal identity responsibility come from so I’m wondering what the difference between what responsibility ECC and ZF have and why it’d be different to a DAO. I had assumed it was one of those money laundering prevention type things which is why I asked.
Good question. Based on my interactions with policy-makers and regulators around Zcash over the years, I don’t think there’s substantial risk of that causing any problem.
[edited to add:]
And also based on the many and various DAOs that are active, many of which have users/participants in USA.
So are we all keen to try Gitcoin? I think for me the biggest barrier to entry is getting new users to understand the platform, including myself. How do we use the platform for Zcash without too much noise? Do I have to search “Zcash” every time I go on there? Is there a way to create a dashboard that’s Zcash specific?
If that is the route we go I suggest when we get further along the DAO officially initiate their life by asking for seed funding on the platform.
As someone who was not able to run a sticker store of Zcash stickers while staying pseudonymous due to the many legal fences built around the protocol I am very keen to see where this conversation will go.
Okay. So we need to advertise right? Asking the question to the largest audience possible. Twitter, forum, discord…
Next steps? Not an official statement but do we want to say something like the following and share it around?
Pseudonymous Grants
The current ZOMG grant process requires identity disclosure. We have been made aware that there may be some grant applicants not willing to disclose their identity. To provide avenues for people to receive small grants a group of Zcash user are working towards providing new avenues to receive grants. These will be funded by the Zcash community and voted on on by the its members.
If you have any grant proposals you would like funded please get in touch.
In support of such efforts, I provide evidence that this has been an real issue all along:
I understand that legally constituted entities are subject to various rules. If I don’t get what I want here, I am not the type to be a jerk about it! Rather, I will politely disappear. Most likely, even as I continue quietly to use Zcash for my own privacy, I will drift away from the community towards places where I can do gainful work on cypherpunk terms.
How many others are likewise? How many potential contributions and contributors have the Zcash community lost this way?
I recognize that this is a difficult problem. I applaud efforts to solve it.
If I have any further opinions to offer on this subject, I will probably not offer them under this pseudonym—save for a note of practical importance: Discord is bad for free software projects, it is extremely hostile to Tor users, and it autobans anyone (with any IP address) who takes measures to prevent privacy-invasive fingerprinting (“telemetry”). I recommend that it be avoided for any discussions intended to attract strongly pseudonymous persons. I myself cannot engage in Discord discussions, since they instantly ban all of my accounts before I can even try to use them.
I agree that gitcoin “tries to do too much”, HOWEVER:
I think we could take the idea of “bounties” from gitcoin. I know that there’s kind of a list of “wanted” projects for Zcash (or at least there used to be a page about it somewhere), but it’d be cool if you had on grants.zfnd.org crowdsourced ideas, and a “Claim Grant” or something that can be advertised on job boards to devs to attract more developer talent.
Also, the foundation or whoever (maybe the community grants team but they deserve more money if they implement this) should try to start capturing emails more like gitcoin is doing.
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