Hello!
My name is Vlad and I am probably best known for hosting the Bitcoin Takeover podcast – for which I interviewed Josh Swihart alongside Kris Nuttycombe (S15 E62), Zooko (S16 E29), and more recently Sean Bowe (S16 E51).
By virtue of this post, I hereby announce my application to the Zcash community grants. My considerations are quite simple:
– I issued a Twitter challenge to which the community at large responded positively: https://x.com/thevladcostea/status/1990512411238158426?s=46&t=gsfNwtDtLBe-E5UXg0sh5A
– as a true Bitcoin maximalist™, I want to push the offspring of the Zerocash paper to the absolute limits and turn it into a serious contender to BTC as both a store of value and a medium of exchange. Hopefully, this effort will also push Bitcoin to adapt to the latest industry standards for privacy.
– Zcash is part of my “Freedom Gainzz” fund and I would like to further promote the narrative that investing in privacy really doesn’t make you poor because you can outperform bitcoin.
– I really enjoy trolling the Monero community and the grant would be a perfect opportunity to fuel their “you’re getting paid by Zcash” accusations. While this may sound silly, I think that drawing more attention to Zcash is a net positive.
While my application might sound unserious and rather memetic in nature, I do want to add that I genuinely care about Zcash and it’s the Bitcoin we were promised a decade ago. So let me state my intentions and philosophy too.
I want Zcash to succeed because it’s exactly what the world needs in the age of automated surveillance, CBDCs, and mandatory KYC/digital ID.
I do believe that my work provides a significant boost to the Zcash marketing and culture – and with or without the grant, it will continue to do so.
But I also think that the competitive advantage of Zcash is the development culture: it’s avant-garde, it’s cypherpunk, and it strikes the perfect balance between legality and the freedom to use your money however you want, without surveillance.
If accepted for the ZCG, I will further emphasize the importance of hiring good devs who build stuff that improves the Zcash privacy and scalability, but also increases ZEC adoption. While marketing and awareness are important, I believe that the value of Zcash as a project comes from persistence over time and innovation.
So with or without the grant, I want to make the point that Zcash should focus on innovations like Tachyon and shielded assets that anyone can use with the same user friendliness of Zashi, on home nodes and miners that anyone can configure from a stunning UX, and on more smooth integrations such as NEAR in order to increase adoption.
Furthermore, I want to suggest that in order to become truly unstoppable, Zcash needs more than nodes, miners & adoption. And while I love the contributions of genius developers such as Sean Bowe, the community should focus on finding and training more of these brilliant devs. Yes, even Bitcoin still relies on the expertise of Pieter Wuille, the opinions of Greg Maxwell, and the wisdom of Adam Back.
But since Zcash has a budget for hiring developers, it can be so much better than Bitcoin in terms of shipping innovations for both ZEC holders and the entire crypto industry. Training a new generation of Sean Bowes is an endeavor that is worth exploring.
In a nutshell, this is what I stand for and how I believe the 8% of the Zcash should be used.
Whether or not you like my ideas and want to support my candidacy, it’s up to you. But I do hope that I can use my disappointment and disillusionment in Bitcoin development to fuel something productive, that helps maintain a positive development culture.
In the end, it’s the zebras that adapt to their environment and innovate that win the savanna battles.
Onwards! 