Well, last year, due to the spam attack, zcash was barely usable. Any investment in marketing would have been fruitless.
Besides, the community spent ~1 million USD on the zec media videos, that’s not negligible.
I am not saying we shouldn’t spend on marketing but I don’t think there was a lack of marketing before or that this is the reason why zcash underperformed.
thing about marketing is it has to be great to move the needle.
most of crypto marketing is not great or quite bad and not effective.
it has to be really smart and find ways to do a lot with least amount of funds imo. cost effective. also who should the marketing target is another thing. id say start with gen z.
Not true. It’s never a bad time to invest in the community, no matter what the product/market is doing. Marketing doesn’t stop just because there are setbacks in the product. Building a community takes time. The spam attack wasn’t going to last forever. Now that it’s been dealt with, would’ve been great to have a bunch of groups all over the world, educated on Zcash, ready to go into the next bull market, educating the masses and fighting the fud. Instead, some of our most committed content-creators were made to feel like second-class citizens and newcomers that want to join are being turned away.
I’m not sure I understand your comment. The $1M spent on Zcash Media is a great example of what not to do with your marketing budget. A real company would never blow most of their marketing budget on a single video production company that disappears for two years to do its own thing without ever checking in with the client. No one should’ve expected user adoption or any kind of significant buzz from that.
If you hold ZEC, you have. Through ZEC’s price depreciation. ZEC is being sold to fund these activities. That affects the price of the ZEC you’re holding. You’re being taxed.
That requires marketing. 
That’s why we need a new governance system. We’re getting there, but we still got some echoes of the old system. Like ZCG. At this point any change will be better than the status quo, so I encourage everyone to consider running for the 3 ZCG seats up for reelection this month. The deadline is this Friday. Zcash needs it bad. It hurts to think about another year of this. ZEC is entering a bull run. Would be nice to see the growing ZCG budget be allocated by people who understand the value of the word “Community” in Zcash Community Grants.
Ok, I see your point. The ZM was probably not the right way to do marketing.
Haters will always find points of attack, it is important to be able to cut through the noise. For example, yesterday they laughed at transparent addresses, today they have to implement them themselves.
I would like to point out that ZEC is not available on the darknet either, which is a huge boon for the project. This is my absolutely sober position. I prefer the presence of ZEC on legal markets in partnerships such as Flexa.
I wonder if the lack of adoption, specifically in darknet markets and in general, might be caused by the previous trusted setup, along with some talk back then about making certain transactions transparent to law enforcement, etc. Additionally, nobody ever got rich off Zcash (except the founders), which is also important for building a community and motivating people to promote it for free.
The trusted setup is history now, but only for the past two years, and I’m not sure how many people are aware of this. Therefore, I would argue that Zcash is effectively only two years old as a real privacy coin. Also, communication has improved, no longer bending the knee to compromise privacy. A lot of developments are heading in the right direction, etc., so the only thing that matters now, in my opinion, is a significant price increase.
EDIT: Monero also had the first mover advantage + its not only about making people rich but about the opportunity cost for holding the asset
Just so its clear to me, how exactly do you know this? By def, wouldn’t dark markets not be talked about in such a public fashion?
Nobody does and that’s my point. I question folks who claim otherwise because it doesnt make sense to me. Unless you run a dark market and well, then you probably wouldn’t announce it!
i fully agree, its very sad to observe that most of the zcg members apart from maybe 1 person , dont believe or see the need for marketing
Every 6 months I slightly change my mind but currently I think that “governance” is the “product management” of crypto. Way too much time and pseudointellectual conversation. Builders want to build and not be bothered by this.
I feel like every X months we are in a governance discussion. It’s either the initial dev fund, and then a renewal proposal, and then the trademark, and then something else, etc.
My comment makes perfect sense. The discussion of the allocation only exists because the possibility of allocation was first created.
Right or wrong (not even time may tell), successful protocols did not have to keep discussing it. They either went all out with nothing (Bitcoin) or they “removed the band-aid” from the scratch on day 0 (Ethereum Foundation).
Now, they were both different times, and I’m not discussing about the past of what it could/should/would have been - no interest on that. But it does occur to me that these conversations have been the most common ones in the past 8 years of ZEC, and I’m not sure about the friction impact of them.
In a world with limited time and effort, are we happy with the proportion of those that we spend in this?
MARKETING is the most important thing.
Just look at the chart, Someone just sold 100K+ ZEC on Binance.
ZEC holders already lose all patients.
The recent slew of interview footage from ZM is a top notch resource.
While I value the ambassador style funding we have done, paying people for grassroots cheerleading can be looked at as astroturfing, and it’s not necessarily a good look.
Edit to add: to be clear, that’s not my perception! I’m just saying it could, from the outside, be perceived that way.
I completely agree that we can’t market a call to action to masses while there is nothing to offer an average user to use. Until then, you can focus on the image of the Zcash user, or the theoretical importance of privacy, but you can’t get your normie cousin onboarded.
Insofar as a lot of the target market find Monero talking points / propaganda first, sure.
I think it’s a major barrier to adoption that people who realise what’s needed and are tech savvy enough to do the extra work often get a barrage of misconceptions at the outset that prevent them from looking further.
The community, under your watch, overpaid for it. Period.
What’s even worse is that you, personally, have gone to great lengths, crossing boundaries of what is ethical, to defend your poor decisions.
