You are overloading my statement and taking it out of context. There is no need to attack me for expressing my view. I was not referring to community development or ecosystem growth.
High conviction investments are riskier, but also have higher payoffs. In this case, when making an investment in a particular thing, such as high quality and broadly applicable educational content, it is better to invest deeply in strong talent in support of that thing, establishing strong roots and alignment, than to spray and pray that something good might happen.
I have not at any point attacked you. I simply alluded to a statement you made when someone expressed preference to funding more individuals as opposed to spending millions on funding one media channel, and you seemed to object their point. I apologise that you feel attacked.
@hanh already has youtube video for that. Iâm sure @NighthawkApps & other wallets can publish videos for onboarding to their app & use ZEC for payments & transfers.
So was asking for a plan around this. I would agree that 166 transactions isnât a miraculous number, but would be good to understand how theyâre thinking about using grant funds to drive this metric further.
So regarding this and two points above it, Iâm viewing the bear market as a new opportunity to do this. Thereâs a lot of investment/interest in overall privacy space, so providing high quality materials in channels where people will research various projects they view as the next big thing is something to be considered. I also donât think the buzz around the video releases failed when looking at views/attention garnered. I think the problem might be with the metrics weâre prioritizing.
Iâd agree/expect that no other content (in next 12 months) be as viral as Snowden drop.
I think thatâs why having additional thinking/expectations about how their work could benefit other orgs/persons driving on-chain metrics is needed.
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Thanks for challenging my thinking here. Iâm going to think over the arguments a bit more as conversation continues
Iâve made up my mind. This grant, as is, should not pass. Its just not tangible what the expected âreturn on investmentâ would be plus educational videos is a extrinsic motivator and for so called organic growth we need people to arrive to the insights themselves.
Yes education is crucial, its a good tool to help people recognize the importance and make educated decisions. It empowers them with knowledge. Currently there is enough content that would foster this imo. To invest an additional 1,8m for only one type/kind of educational material seems to me like a gamble.
The importance of privacy is best understood if people experience it. You can hear about it, read about it but in the end it matters who people identify themselves with that determines their decisions. Rational will only get you so far. Similarly, people will most likely adopt behaviour from those they hang out with, on average.
What I am trying to convey is that despite the quality of the educational videoâs there are most likely other avenues that would be more impactfull for adoption. One that comes to mind is to supercharge the ambassadors programme, stimulate grassroots efforts and leaders to get things done in their community.
Instead of educational videos we need better ways to allow people to feel that they belong. Got this term from the âNear Protocolâ, just take a look at their footer for their website:
They have a whole section devoted to how one can belong to the world of the Near Protocol. Imo their community building efforts are good.
Summary:
We should keep 37L as close friends but ~2m, ~20% of the funds, for educational videoâs is perhaps overkill. Rather, more funds could be invested in community building efforts and experimentation making it easier for people to belong to the Zcash community. This can be done through supercharging the ambassadors programme, expanding the Cypher Punk Zero campaign and ofcourse improving UX and adding more features to ZEC like ZSAs and staking.
I did. I setup the interviews and ran them - we edited out me and the questions to create the clips at Zcon0 when everyone was already together. I hired a small team to help with the filming, editing and post production work. It was four years ago, no travel or extra venue costs. I did it on the cheap⌠probably $20k or so + a bunch of my time. I appreciate the compliment, but itâs something less than what I think is possible through 37L over a longer period.
BAM! Now weâre talking. I knew weâd eventually find a solution! P.S. I watched these videos way back when and they reinforced my faith in Zcash. All this to say we do not need a $1.8M budget to move the masses. A lot of the top 50 cryptocurrenciesâ explainer videos are not even all that great tbh. Iâd be down for lower quality production as the above (which is still good quality, really), and then market them, share them with media, etc. (Also I just really want to emphasize that my comments are nothing against Zcash Media. Iâm just trying to stay realistic about the market. And the costs involved)
Guerrilla marketing efforts, if approached strategically, are CERTAIN to provide 10x (possibly even 100x) the return on investment and impact on adoption that this proposal would have.
The first videos produced by 37L were good but not really impactful because that is not the type of marketing best suited drive Zcash adoption, not by many miles.
Also the educational videos that were already funded are all that is needed at such a level of production.
It is like paying 3k to a CV-writing service for them to craft an incredibly professional CV to help in your job hunt, and then after having delivered have them pitching you a deal for 15k and 10 additional alternative and complementary versions of the already incredibly professional CV they gave you.
Like, dude, all I need is one very expensive resume. Thanks but no thanks.
Cardano is one of the top 10 projects (theyâre huge Zcash fans too! but I digress). Anyone who has seen Charles Hoskinsonâs videos can attest to the fact that the quality of those videos is subpar as hell.
The point Iâm trying to make here is that video production quality isnât everything. And maybe we need to take some time to think through what really matters and moves society. Story telling is definitely a part of it. But are there elements of story telling that matter more than others? P.S. Iâd personally like for the Zcash Media channel to still stay active. A lot of effort has gone into it. I just think we need to think of (very) cost friendly ways of how we approach its substinence.
Having said that, I think a $1M+ spent on marketing is definitely a necessity given the size of Zcash addressable market, but letâs do it in an effective way and definitely letâs not do it through proposals that are a lot more likely to end up extracting value from the Zcash community, rather than adding it.
Also, the real-world demand (and therefore, where adoption is more likely to happen) for something like Zcash will likely come from large emerging markets with dire economic situations such as Argentina, Nigeria or Iran.
Those are the markets that will offer the biggest ROI on marketing. They are plug & play markets because the populations are relatively technically savvy, there is high penetration of smart phones and above all, because they have already been using crypto en masse for years to try and go around the gloom of the economic situation of their countries.
Funding a digital marketer / meme artist focused on capitalising, through Zcash memes and virality, the proper ridiculous political and economic things happening in those countries on the daily, would lilely have a way bigger impact on driving Zcash awareness in one year time than 5 years of funding expensive educational videos, and at less 1/100th the price tag.
And thatâs just one example of the many cost effective initiatives that can really drive Zcash adoption.
The idea of taking a large grant put together by a team that has already invested a large amount of time and effort into their operations and breaking it into parts sounds inefficient to me. Especially when finding skilled media people who are also versed in Zcash is like finding a needle in a haystack. By the same logic, we should also break up ECC and ZF.
Recruiting a large team before a major grant is approved âbecause you were planning for successâ is like selling your house to invest in Bitcoin because you really hope that it will one day be worth a million dollars.
We spent 1.5 months building out the grant while also outlining topics. The grant was already super long and we hadnât had enough time to outline every topic definitively. We figured there might be enough faith in our creative skills and general interest in the hosts of topics that Zcash touches on that people might be able to understand there are many things to cover. When asked (very reasonably) to see a potential list of topics, we provided our draft and also committed to seeking community input:
Are you really meaning to tell me that the proposal was already too large to provide to the community with the list of potential topics that would be covered by the videos you were planning to charge us 1.8 million dollars for, but it wasnât too large to provide the names of each, the director, the producer, the line producer, the writer, the researcher, the logic editor, the VFX guy, the sound design and mix guy, the person in charge of âcolorâ, the social media producer, the growth strategist, the community manager and the social content editor?!
Sorry but this is either a very cheap attempt of a spin, or just another example of poor judgement.
Over the course of our proposal, we would be releasing 12x30 (360) daily posts with associated short clips similar in style to Joshâs. Also, we would be releasing 12 videos on the order of magnitude of our first video. It is not an unreasonable estimation that the output we are proposing is 100x greater than the Perspectives on Privacy series, which is conservatively $20,000*100=$2,000,000.
Friendly reminder from the Code of Conduct that Forum members should strive to be kind and respectful. Ideally, your presence in the community should improve the experience for everyone.
P.S. I watched these videos way back when and they reinforced my faith in Zcash. All this to say we do not need a $1.8M budget to move the masses. A lot of the top 50 cryptocurrenciesâ explainer videos are not even all that great tbh. Iâd be down for lower quality production as the above (which is still good quality, really), and then market them, share them with media, etc. (Also I just really want to emphasize that my comments are nothing against Zcash Media. Iâm just trying to stay realistic about the market. And the costs involved)