This is an interesting thread. As just a general community member I think this matter should be closed, hidden, and handled in a professional setting. I don’t feel this is the proper forum for this sort of thing.
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yeah well nobody at ZCashCo or the Foundation takes my calls, I mean that in a literal sense of voice calls, urgent matter or no, over the last year and a half, so here we are
Bingo
I am only alive right now because of no-strings-attached donations over the last 18 months from privacy activists in the broader cryptocurrency community, mostly European anarchists who became accidental ethereum millionaires, and zcash forked coin supporters, who supported my work for the broader ecosystem without any deadlines or conditions, because SOMEBODY had to keep everybody running on other platforms than Intel Linux…“doing god’s work” was a phrase used more than once.
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Because I am NOT in it for the money…I didn’t work on blockchains until zero knowledge proofs were ready to go because without strong privacy tech, as my Canadian friend Ian Welsh says, “blockchains are totalitarian technology”
Remember, EYE was the one who bugged Satoshi to setup the first bitcoin mailing list/repo, but had babies under age two to support, and lost touch/missed the boat back in the day, and also never liked the public ledger aspect…I mean in Boulder, CO in '94 i was one of those freaks razor blading out pages of the PGP source to OCR and do legal re-importations/verifications of the source back in the US.
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Ah. I can see why you would be frustrated. The zcash company benefits directly from your increasing the accessibility of the network.
But if there was no contractual agreement between you and the company to deliver specific things for specific prices, what obligation do they have?
Did you endeavor to create the Winzec software while speculating that the nominal donation amount from making transactions would support your efforts? Did you acknowledge and accept the risk that it wouldn’t?
Even as an individual developer one gets to make business decisions for themselves. Is this just frustration and regret that your efforts did not pay off? Or did the zcash company fail to meet their commitments to you and your business? If it were the latter, would you not pursue legal action rather than attempt a hostile chain fork?
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Or its the former and yes, they and I both made those choices
and now they and I are both free to make new, different choices, the big ones I can think of being listed in this thread
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I agree. They too accepted some risk by letting an uncontracted third party deliver a major distribution channel.
That’s interesting too because most any IP company would never let their product be altered and delivered by a third party with no recourse for quality, control, etc.
It’s almost as if the zcash network, zcash coin, wallet, etc are not really their product, but just a means to display their product. Hmm =)
from a miner point of view the only thing this thread is going to make me do is stop using winzec for my wallet. I always pay the wallet fee when sending zec, but i’m not going to donate to the cause and then find out it wasnt enough and lose a months worth of mining. ZEC should pay you to be the official windows wallet, i’m sure the $$ is there. They will lose a lot of nodes (which they dont seem too concerned about given the whole ASIC debacle)
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Key negotiation and communications tactic/rule: As soon as you have to point to the technical and legal requirements of the argument, you already lost the fight.
Everything you said is technically correct, but the point here isn’t the technicality. The point is that, yes, Zcash could walk away, but in doing so they will need to accept the consequences of doing so. In my opinion it’s not in ZEC’s best interest to do so.
In full disclaimer…if it wasn’t for @anon47418038’s work on the zcash4win wallet and the ease of use on a widows platform, I would be in another currency and likely would not have adopted ZEC, especially with all the down-time and shenanigans the exchanges have pulled regarding ZEC wallets.
I am sure I’m not the only one.
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Always back up your private keys. You can import them into the official wallet even if your other one became a pumpkin
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yup, and zcashco is welcome to handle the costs of the support burden of that for thousands of users still on non-auto deprecating mac/win clients
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What they would lose is desktop users being able to send shielded transactions, the supposed raison d’etre of the freaking coin
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THAT is why there have been hundreds of thousands of downloads and up to half the network’s full nodes being Windows users…my top downloads have always been from China, where p2p, OTC trading of zcash is the only legal way to use it (hello capital controls!) to make a fiat trade
Dear radix42: thank you so much for all you’ve contributed so far! And for posting this openly so the rest of the community can learn what’s going on with you. I’m sure this issue, as well as a lot of others, will be a big topic for the Zcash Company’s internal strategy process, as well as the community’s deliberations around Zcon0.
Zooko
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I suggest that no matter WHAT HAPPENS, you immediately hire some sort of Developer Relations person with a world class track record, as if such an individual had existed and picked up the phone at any of a number of times this last year, we would not be here right now
I am a disabled, queer, single parent, been doing that last bit solo the last 5 years and have had NO in person contact with anyone in crypto aside from two lunches (one with you) and Boulder Blockchain meetups, so yeah, social isolation has been A Thing…and coming out in Jan didn’t do my social media donation flow generation any favors either…actually shocked that I only lost 1% of my followers over THAT one, but that’s prolly because my feed was already a very ecclectic, queer and disability friendly “crossing the streams” with $crypto for a long time by that point
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It is a shame that it has gotten to this level. I raised this issue a while ago on the Foundation Chat as it seemed clear that this would come to a head when there are hard deadlines (Overwinter, Sapling) and such a large % of the network relies on this software and it is closed-source, supported only by a single developer and by donation.
My suggested solution at the time was to “throw some money at the issue” which isn’t necessarily elegant but was meant as a stop-gap measure and I echo @shawn in wishing @anon47418038 had made a grant proposal for ongoing support but hey ho.
I don’t think this is true. As per the proposal here Zcashd v1.0.15 and below into safe mode a few days before Overwinter activates · Issue #3328 · zcash/zcash · GitHub safe mode will be activated for older nodes so aren’t they just going to stop working as disablesafemode wasn’t in the config file by default? This is going to be a terrible user-experience but funds will be safe i.e. they are not transacting on the legacy chain and will be forced to upgrade before they can use their wallet (albeit they will have to work out what the problem is first).
There 100% needs to be an option for current WinZec users to upgrade to prior to Sapling albeit funding this directly just seems like kicking the can down the road. Hypothetically let’s say there was some funding would you be open to open-sourcing the project such that this cycle doesn’t keep repeating (if I understand Zcash4Win was released in that manner?)
This or as per @secparam strategy of a Foundation-supported wallet likely the only realistic long-term solutions.
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I too wish @anon47418038 had made a Grant Proposal, but since that’s not an option, I welcome a proposal from them on a contract relationship with the Foundation to continue funding WinZEC with concrete deliverables, per my tweet:
Looking forward to your email @anon47418038.
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Btw, where is there a convenient place to see the full nodes and what version/software they’re using?
there USED TO BE, but nobody was willing to pay @lustro for the level of effort it took to maintain it and keep the data current and backed up
seeing any parallels here?
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Here: Zchain Network - Zcash Network Visualization (you can choose the relevant date range)
As per the second comment Zcashd v1.0.15 and below into safe mode a few days before Overwinter activates · Issue #3328 · zcash/zcash · GitHub from bitcartel you can see the breakdown as per 12th June.