You are missing at least a couple of vital parts of the formula that make all the difference from your imperfect reading of what I said: limited resources and competition.
I rest my case.
Given all the things I have already seen behind the “political economy” of Zcash, I would not be surprised if at least some of this “confusion-spreading” was intentional, by the way.
I guess that the end of the day I doesn’t matter who speaks from knowledge, or who speaks from ignorance or bad faith about what are the most and least effective ways of driving Zcash adoption.
What matters is the actual reality of things, the results, and if it is that after 7 years awarding millions and millions and millions of dollars through founders reward and the dev fund to pretty much the same people, is Zcash actually making a dent in the market and getting adopted.
And the answer to that is a resounding “No, of course Zcash is not getting adopted”
That tells us all we need to know about this subject.
Food for thought.
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is it getting adopted? a little, not enough
is it possible to change it? probably yes
That’s just being misleading. It is likely that even “eating Tide pods” saw more adoption than Zcash.
Academic understanding does not imply the latter. Take your field of expertise, there are thousands of books on the subject of security, yet it remains highly debated. However, should we discount every study and rely purely on instincts? Obviously not. But now that I think about it, the most common password is “password”, therefore I suppose the majority of people follow your logic.
I appreciate the sentiment. We all want to feel like someone who knows what they’re doing is in charge. I do too.
I’m commenting with the hope that what I do know, the experiences I’ve had vicariously through talented friends, can help us drive us forward. My job in the Zcash community is to find security bugs before they impact users, and my hobby in the Zcash community is to try to lead us towards better strategies for having our products adopted.
Speaking personally, I would place a lot more trust in anyone who is aware of the boundaries of their ignorance and is still trying to put forward constructive ideas, over anyone who claims things are being done wrong without putting forward any constructive ideas of their own. But it’s hard to put forward constructive ideas, and constructively calling out things we’re doing wrong is valuable too.
I’ll repeat my desire to see all of you post ideas for what you think you should be done. Let yourself feel heard by the community. Put your ideas out there for us all to evaluate, back them up with whatever kinds of research you would like. The more ideas we have out in the open, the more likely it is we’ll head down the right path. The community on this forum is smart and talented; the more ideas and arguments that get put forward, the more likely we are to do the right thing.
I would feel really good knowing that there are lots of people out there who care, who do their research, or who have the experience, who are willing to put in the time to help guide this project to success.
Don’t worry about being wrong. Like I said above, I’m stretching beyond my area of expertise, still trying to put my best ideas forward. If everyone here does that, the best ideas will win out, and that will ultimately lead to the best outcome for Zcash.
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While it is certainly within your rights to maintain your perspective, I must respectfully express my disagreement from the position that allocating a sum of one million dollars towards the creation of YouTube videos, especially in light of the underwhelming performance of the preceding set, is a judicious and constructive course of action.
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I can understand how you see it that way, metrics are one essential way of judging that kind of project’s success. I personally see it as a valuable project, not without flaws or without room for improvement, but I recognize other, bigger decisions elsewhere account for more of the troubles we’re seeing. If you could personally re-direct those million dollars of community funds, how would you spend it? What would be the best use of those funds?
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I wonder what projects we should compare Zcash to. And to prevent cherry-picking to prove a point maybe it’s more useful to compare ourselves to a seperate industry as a whole and rather then individual projects/companies?
Say… AAA game development. It’s software, sometimes requires state of the art graphics engine research/work, ballpark similar cost to develop, and aims to have 100s of millions of users. How do we usually see that playing out?
- Everyone intially estimates it’ll cost $50mil in the beginning but the real figure ends up being closer to $200mil.
- After the first $50mil is spent everyone can see the potential. But if they were to slow development now, and reduce spending, the game would likely flop. So they increase the budget.
- In parallel they start building an in-house marketing team.
- Consequently the marketing can cost almost as much as development. But in-house marketing is still 2x cheaper then outsourcing marketing.
- If all elements from development to marketing align correctly, and a touch of luck is present, it creates a ‘perfect storm’ that leads to a successful game.
Is this a fair or useful comparison? 
Which parts can we learn from?
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Are you saying that the Nobel-prize winning approach on solving this is for Zooko to tweet about Zcash? What “interpersonal communication channels” do we need? How can funding be used to improve those?
an example of business 101 for growing the business would be if the Electric Coin Company did anything with its Facebook page they should start buying some ads to promote ZEC on there.
Is Facebook is still a thing?
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If that’s really what you understood about what I said, then you’re just another perfect example of why:
Also I did not say there was a “Nobel-prize winning approach on solving this” but that there was Nobel prize winning research on innovation adoption, and to be more specific, that particular research was about behavioural economics behind innovation adoption. They did not award a Nobel prize to a marketing plan for technologies, of course.
I’m legitimately asking. What is this research? How can it be applied to Zcash? How funding can help making that happen?
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Judging from the activity on his tweets, I don’t actually think Zooko has as much pull as you may believe he does. But… if we’re comparing it to Zcash media, I would say that a street busker with a Zcash sign would garner more attention that any of those videos.
It seems like ECC is asleep at the wheel wrt marketing on the Zcash front. Not taking advantage of the places that younger generations are on and distilling the message down to something simple to grasp and putting it on TikTok, would have much better ROI than king Zooko blasting off a closed-comment tweet to his echo-chamber of 70k followers.
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