With All Due Respect; Noam Chom's Zcash Tokenomics Proposal

General
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Hello All,

Based on the current lack of a simplicity/ tokenomics based proposal, and based on my personal experience as an original anti-block subsidy advocate who later became convinced that another 4-year direct subsidy would have been best; I’m here to propose that all forms of block subsidy are ended later this year.

I did my very best to raise the patently obvious risks that 1 year of additional direct subsidy wouldn’t be sufficient to let this community debate, design, and implement some variation of the grand system that Josh has proposed for distributions out of the Lockbox. But I was the minority, and I wasn’t able to convince the ecosystem to support my proposal, which was more reasonable/ allocated a more appropriate timeframe for things to get done.

Rather, we sipped a bit more of the hopes/ dreams tonic - and convinced ourselves that magic might happen in less than 1-year. Unfortunately, magic didn’t happen and now we’re in another slow forming mess (eerily similar this or this or this to call attention to a few).

I strongly believe that we owe it to Zcash, and we owe it to ourselves, to end it.

Let the builders/ visionaries who are willing to die on this hill stick around, and perhaps let the salary careerists have a bit of a soul searching moment and move on to a greener pasture/ more capitalized/ more reliable salary timeline provider.

In short, I propose:

  1. Block subsidies are ended, either to ZCG, Lockbox, or any other entity
  2. The Lockbox (et al roadmap concepts) remains as-is
  3. Encouragement that a solution for Lockbox distribution remains
  4. Existing organizations are encouraged to stay the course, while also seeking other means of funding
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ICYMI, a few things happened this last year:

The shielded pool has gone parabolic

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With Zashi and it’s amazing UX being a thing:

Supported by our first shielded-supporting hardware wallet with Keystone.

We’ll have our first shielded web wallet on Brave, thanks to ECC’s collaboration with them and Filecon.

We have our first working DEX with NEAR, and weeks away from another with Maya.

We are close to deprecating zcashd with zebrad (ZF) and zallet (ECC w/ Zingo) with an unprecedented level of cross-team collaboration (ECC, ZF, Zingo, Pacu and others). The amount of work to accomplish this shouldn’t be underestimated.

Twitter engagement is increasing:

Projects like Qedit, Least Authority, Zingo!, RedDev, Zcash Brazil, ChainSafe, ZecHub and others are receiving funding and provide significant value to the ecosystem.

Let’s not forget that it’s because ECC killed the trademark and pushed for the change in the funding and governance model that we have the option to pursue an indirect funding model now, giving the community more control. These were massive changes in governance.

This is just off the top of my head, apologies for other contributions and contributors that I missed.

This last year, we entered a new era. This is a new Zcash.

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So now that ZF and ECC have failed to get us anywhere close to what @joshs envisioned in 2022, he moves the goalposts and the new metric of relevance is the size of the shielded pool?

Sure, it’s good, but how much does it matter for us at this point? Has anyone defined what level of privacy we get at different pool sizes or we just celebrate bigger better mindset because why not?

I’ll be voting for full control of the dev fund by token holders, but if this doesn’t work, I’m with @noamchom and agree the block subsidies should be ended.

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To be fair, Josh was not the CEO until a year ago.

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That is why I have not criticized his results, but his moving of the goalposts he has expressed himself not that long ago. It was fair.

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There is a lot of great stuff happening, my proposal isn’t intended to create feelings of negativity, and I can assume that it inevitably could hurt feelings (by suggesting the end of all forms of Zcash block subsidy).

The majority of human energy that goes into Zcash on a yearly basis is not paid. I believe that for the sake of the project tokenomics, the sake of the brand, and the sake of the engineering teams who are already overloaded with better things to do that its time to simply end block subsidies.

Despite the ideal beliefs about block subsidy, selectively paying a tiny minority of Zcashers, whose unique contributions are important, does in fact create a major unfairness across the entire ecosystem because so few of the majority of Zcash contributors remain unpaid for their efforts.

We all love the great news, the great product improvements, the increasing usability, the positive vibes. I love that parabolic shielded pool chart just as much as the next Zcasher.

Simplifying the NU ahead, simplifying the tokenomics, and simplifying the years ahead for the Zcash contributor teams is what my proposal is inspired by. I understand that this one is not going to be broadly supported, but as noted in the original contents - I’m proposing this because someone needs to do it, and someone needs to form a productive theme behind the suggestion (of ending block subsidy).

Nope, and as I’m trying to communicate above, this is not personal - its certainly not some sort of criticism of Josh’s contributions. I think Josh has been great for the ECC, and wider - for Zcash.

Token holder control is an awesome concept, but sadly the implementation doesn’t exist yet, and is very unlikely to be available in time to be an NU themed proposal for later this year.