All of the groups are illustrative at this stage, but possible. The concept with that group is that core protocol developers could express an opinion of equal weight to any of the other participating groups, regardless of where they might be employed.
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100% here too
100% here too
The November Halving/ NU has been known for a very long time, I think a poor precedent would be sent by optioning a 1-year extension. Because then why not extend it another year, when all of the parties building the multi-sig grants system plea to the community that they just need one more year.
Thanks for the further in depth revisions/ updates here Josh. I really like your proposal in concept, but like also mentioned, I feel like its too ambitious in such a short timeline… nothing happens fast in Zcash, and i’ll assert that especially nothing will happen fast with regards to building an ecosystem encompassing grants model, sitting atop whats basically a DAO-like governing structure.
This ecosystem struggles to hit deadlines. Full Stop. And that is largely in the context of assorted teams working in their own silos on technical work. Considering the broader challenge here… we’re assuming both a huge technical design & implementation, with its correlating social/ consensus/ counsel related efforts.
Lastly, and my only questions atm How large of an impact to the existing org roadmaps/ other product deliveries/ other day-to-day responsibilities would the building of your mandated grants system have?
My guess is that the impact would be significant. Creating consensus around what the best grant model would be will take a lot of time and resources. And then comes the actual designing/ engineering/ deployment of it.
Because human resources in the Zcash ecosystem are basically a zero sum equation, we’ve got to assume that people will be pulled away from things like ZcashD deprecation, Zebra, ZSAs, Zashi, lobbying, marketing, legal, et et all.
If the estimate is correct, that the grants model system would take 1 calendar year to complete, then I’d wager that it would in aggregate move back 1 year’s worth of work on other products, research initiatives, and so forth.
What would be the failure scenario? Let’s suppose just like today, after 8 months of back and forth, the ecosystem simply hasn’t come together around an agreed grants model? Some grand projects never break the point of inertia and have to be abandoned 
Would an additional extension be lobbied for? If the ecosystem puts 8 months into this new project and then decides to walk away, that would be a ton of burnt energy.
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You are making a lot of assumptions that I don’t agree with. It’s my opinion that the current model does not work in the best interests of Zcash or its community, and we need to draw a hard line in the sand. If we there is a dev fund, doubling down on the status quo is not good for the project.
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Who is proposed to carry out the development work for this?..
In the interest of speeding up the development process and not shuffling any of the current published road map, if this proposal is accepted, I suggest farming this out through ZCG or even better QEDIT is a good candidate to tackle this as they are wrapping up ZSA 1.0
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Pointing those out would be helpful, because I don’t see any assumptions in my comment/ questions that are particularly reaching.
I’m looking at these proposals and mandates and what not through a risk lense. What are the risks to existing work/ roadmap objectives? What are potential contingent paths or compromises? What are failure scenarios?
I agree with this generally, but caution that we actually don’t know if the current model is better or worse than any other hypothetical model of the future. We won’t know until it happens. Yes there have been struggles, yes there are frictions, yes past leadership made poor decisions, yes there are dozens of valid grievances.
Post Halving, we’ll be out of the status quo du jour if for no other reason than the fact that its going to apply even more austerity to the ZF, ECC, ZCG than is already present. I don’t really think there is a Zcash status quo, the project has changed many times in just a few years, I don’t think anyone is proposing to keep a status quo.
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Hi @joshs I personally like the idea of your funding bloc but I don’t trust that it won’t be abused or mismanaged whether that be deliberate or non-deliberate. For example when you mention “to fund an organisations operations for an entire year or period of time”, this undermines the whole point of the idea of a grants based funding bloc and how it’s purpose/label is defined and perceived. At the very core of it, it’s not that much different from what we have now and it leaves the window wide open for conflicting interests and mismanagement (waste and inefficiency being the least of them imo, project alignment of resources in whichever direction being one of the bigger ones).
I think if we want to really fix this 20% that’s been our blessing and our curse then we ought to give careful consideration to what Hanh’s suggesting here. Even when thinking purely from the perspective of selling the dev fund/funding bloc idea to a prospect, this will go a long way towards making that process easier.
Would love your take on this Josh, maybe you have another reason why it’s a good idea, or why it won’t work or why it’s not the right time for it, etc.
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Thanks @ZcashRabbi.
It’s not a committee, but a federation of Zcash community participants who vote on whether or not something should be funded. I can only see the potential for abuse if the majority of signers collude.
This was just an example of what someone might request. It’s up to the signers to determine if they want to fund the request. They might signal that they want to see a shorter time periods, milestone payments, etc. Majority signaling will help with alignment and more community inclusivity.
@hanh’s suggestion sounds consistent with this proposal but perhaps I’m misunderstanding. This proposal only takes funds into a community-owned wallet and the funds are not dispersed until the majority of key holders decide to fund the work.
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Mine is different. Funds are not pooled into a wallet and then distributed based on the decision of a committee.
Instead, projects are directly funded from users similarly to the Kickstarter model
The more they get, the more they pledge to deliver.
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Or they hold the ZEC they have and ZEC goes up dramatically and they have plenty of funding left.
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Thanks for the clarification. So your preference is no dev fund and orgs are funded from direct community donations. Is that correct?
FWIW, in this proposal, there is no committee. Rather, its more similar to a DAO.
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Agree.
Also, @hanh is truly one of the best assets of the open source Zcash community. I’d give this guy more power and funding only if I could.
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What did you mean by “including mining rewards” then?
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I meant that miners have zec and can choose to donate. It is kinda obvious but I wanted to add that clarification.
Also if you like the dao model, you could donate to a project run by it, like zechub.
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I can see that a lot of people from the community are fond of @hanh idea. And not one person or post is against it (so far). I also think the majority of the community trust his judgement on big decisions like this and it’ll be a pity if his opinion and suggestion just gets lost in the speed of things.
If this is truly a community decision and path forward considerate of all of us and one that truly intends to free Zcash, I would like to see you give this more attention @joshs. Maybe it will take on a slightly different form or you and ECC can add your flair to it to encompass what you’re trying to achieve holistically. But completely ignoring it and rushing to the finish line before anyone can blink is not a way to finesse this great idea/funding bloc of yours.
Maybe a savvy way to do it is to distinguish between grants, grant recipients, their level of priority/protection and how they’re funded from now.
Two pools:
-
critical path software research, development, maintenance, security, etc - this is the stuff that is 99% the responsibility of the ZF and ECC… slowly now Qedit and Shielded Labs are stepping into this responsibility set
-
everything else which is not critical, but is wanted and helpful - education, content, 3rd party wallets, websites, twitter, lobbying politicians, podcasts, legal, regulatory, communities
Imo number 1 is the high priority stuff and warrants a level of leniency and sustainable guaranteed funding no matter the weather. Even if you told me that we need x amount to keep the likes of Daira, Sean, Conrado, Nutty for the next 4 years, I’m sure no one would object to that because it’s specific and obvious. But using the umbrella of ECC or ZF or any organisation to justify x amount for running or operational costs is too vague and hence should go down the Hanh route.
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I’d love to see it flushed out. I’m not trying to rush the funding bloc idea. I’m advocating for a year to work through it, as well as alternatives. 
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Asking for an extension to the dev fund may be challenging for investors.
Four years ago, the dev fund was supposed to end. The community renewed it based on the premise that further development funding would add value. Objectively, from a financial point of view, at least, it failed.
IMO, if one extra year is needed to resolve governance issues, this shows inadequate project management and planning. It further reinforces the opinion that Zcash cannot meet its deadlines.
As an alternative, let’s stop the dev fund in Nov and put the establishment of your proposal as a project to fund. If it gains enough support via donations, it gets implemented. If not, the community was not keen on it anyway.
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I don’t trust voluntary donations to raise enough revenue. Can you point to a blockchain where development is based on voluntary donations and the speed of development is akin to the likes of Solana or Avalanche? I interpreted your statement originally as the k of n signers would sign off on allocating a percentage of future mining rewards to a project instead of always taking out 20 percent and then allocating it.
I agree, but I think it failed due to a series of bad decisions from the previous leadership at the ECC. I think and hope the ECC has a more practical vision now and that we will see better returns.
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Bitcoin, Ethereum (except the ICO that raised 18 m.). I’m having trouble finding a project where mining rewards are automatically allocated to organizations.
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We must reverse the previous bad impression, its the time to end the 20% tax on miners as scheduled, because a large number of ordinary investors in the market have expected that ZEC will end the 20% development tax in november this year 2024, and price expectations have begun to rise.
If another one-year extension is due to some reasons, this is not a good start. It will make bullish investors think that ZEC is unreliable, because they can decide to extend it for one year this year, and next year they will ask for an extension two years again? This has no sense of trust at all and will knock down the price of ZEC again! What investment coins value is team ability and trust.
If stop the 20% tax on miners and cause a shortage of money, we can consider selling some BTC to support it for a short period of time. The negative impact of deferring the tax for one year is far greater than the value of selling some storage assets.
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Maybe I’m just ignorant of what they ship, but my impression is that they are both very slow in getting stuff done
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