Zcash Protocol Hangout, Dev Fund Edition

Community Collaborations protocol
41

In my opinion, ECC has been exceptionally accommodating in letting its employees express their personal opinions. This is truly laudable, and I think that legitimatizing such free conversations, even critical ones, has been very helpful in building ECC’s credibility and reputation.

(It also led to the occasional confusion, but I think that’s a price worth paying.)

As for bolstering the frequency and substance of community interactions, I share the sentiment and strongly support that.

And indeed let’s make sure that Zcash community members can track just one or two websites and know they’re not missing anything important. If ECC posts important news/content in random corners on the Internet, then let’s make sure to reference it from the Forum.

(E.g., @joshs, I don’t know what you mean by “Blockfolio for official comms”, and I was lucky in noticing your highly informative and insightful Twitter thread about OKEx a few days ago.)

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42

Blockfolio is a crypto price tracking and news feed app. One can follow a development team or such and receive forwarded updates in the same fashion as Twitter and so forth. I haven’t actually used it in a while but I remember it being kind of popular.

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43

Hi,

No, it is an ECC problem, and it is 100% a problem not an opportunity. One that didn’t exist 18 months ago (or roughtly around the time the forums were “given” to the foundation).

This so much. This is what we need for a community to thrive, but if you look back these people have come and gone for various reasons.

Thank you, it does feel like I am singling him out. But all my comments are directed at the ECC not the employees, and especially not @joshs. it is just he is the only person answering things :man_shrugging:

I would like to say though, that the engineering have always been really happy to get involved in the community, until about 18months to 12 months ago. then the whole dynamic changed. I don’t know why. I suggest you privately speak with daira and str4d.

And when you need to put fires out on the bridges currently being burnt. If you could please push the ECC for a response to the following:

@joshs @zooko @nathan-at-least

Can you please provide me with the official two way (interactive) public methods of communication that you support are please. (I don’t care about announcements, I know where to get them.)

Is GitHub officially supported? Are the forums?

Thank you for time.

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44

I can look into this for you. In addition to this forum, Rocketchat and Github are good ways to interact with the ECC team. I am not sure what you mean by “officially supported” - could you elaborate?

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45

I am listening and trying to keep focused on the dialogue, but for some reason I cant shake the feeling that this is rushed and too many people want a quick solution NOT THE BEST SOLUTION.

This is just a funding acquisition and it seems the emotional fallout is comparable to quantum tangibility concerns.

I hope to see some light by the end of this 7 hours and I will reflect deeply along with mention those reflections to the ZCASH ONLY facebook group.

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46

Thank you Josh Cincinnati for firmly standing against changing any of the coin distribution aspects or total coin counts. DO NOT CHANGE THE SUPPLY SCHEDULE, all my coins are getting sold 4 months before that hardfork as soon as the dev cycle announces litterally 0.00001 ZEC difference from 21 million.

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47

Hi,

Thanks for taking the time to respond. There is quite a bit of history in these forums and how they used to be structured, compared to now.

here is a long answer to a short question. welcome to my posts :slight_smile:

Sure, it means that the ECC commits to having conversations on here about important topics, at a minimum. Not just posting announcements. It doesn’t mean I can at zooko and expect a response, but I should be able to at someone and get a response, either via an already made statement or a conversation.

I cant break the privacy of DM’s but I know the ECC still does look over these forums, and upper management do care a great deal about building a community. (before it was a mining based community, but now we have ASIC’s, fire and forget devices) - it needs to move over to an ideas based community. For that we need the ECC to engage in ideas with us.

Sometimes this means answering hard questions. Sometimes there are no or easy questions. The point is there is a place that the ECC will officially support conversation, actual stances should probably be posted as statements on the blog, but we would like to discuss them before and after with your company.

I really respect nathans stance I quoted in that post. - it has been a point of consternation before, where the ECC feel they cant post because they will be take for having the official stance. - speak with sonya, she has had this issue and got it solved pretty well imho.

The point I am trying to get across is that it is a community thing.

We need a place to call home. That was always these forums, but seems to becoming less and less a place for interaction. We don’t have miners coming here for help too often so the only real way to get a community going is to talk about what is coming up and what an actual announcement means. I have made comments on stuff then had great dm conversations with the foundation or public ones too. The halo thread got the engineers talking it was nice, like old times.

So to go slightly further than what tromer said

and add that “the ECC is open to discussing it on the forum and should provide a discussion link in the article if possible” - I understand you cant stop discussion in comments sections elsewhere and nor should you. But the forum used to be a central repository of not only ideas and knowledge, but opinions and feelings too. The people left might seem critical of the ECC, but we are not here to criticise we are here to rebuild and learn from the mistakes of the past.

btw you know that the ECC used to own and maintain the forums - therefore by default making them the “official” discussion place for ECC interaction. We were promised that this interaction would not stop when the foundation was given the forums. but it has, slowly over time. Nobody sees this as the desired outcome. (not the ECC, not the ZFND, not the community)

So if someone had a great idea, they would post it and generally the ECC would respond. now the foundation does and it feels like the ECC skips over it.

There does need to be a buffer between the ECC and the community (the ECC isn’t going to be around forever supporting zcash, well not like it currently is) and the ZFND has done a great job in building that gap, but it seems to have been at the expense of ECC representation. The ECC lost a lot of goodwill over the dwindling interaction on the forums.

I don’t think this is a lost cause, and I think the ECC fully embracing the forums would go a massive way to improve community relations and to rebuild some bridges. It might even bring some people back.

Josh s called it the forum that could be. I still think of it as the forum that was - and it wouldnt be that hard to rebuild.

Does this help?

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48

Yes that context is really helpful. Thank you!

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49

I’d like to second what @mistfpga says above. It feels that ECC’s community engagement, especially the interactive kind, has been tapering off just at the time when it’s needed most. (cc @elenita @joshs)

This isn’t just about the Dev Fund funding discussions. There are big decisions afoot on the strategic directions and vision for Zcash, and development priorities, at ECC. The community does not get to participate in these discussions, and is not even meaningfully informed about what’s going on. The latest major update was the focus on scalability, announced out of the blue half a year ago. And now we read (via CoinDesk, not here!) that a new priority is a "wrapped ZEC token that can be used on the ethereum blockchain" — what that means is anyone’s guess, since no details are offered. Inbetween, we had essentially silence on technical plans.

Of course, ECC doesn’t have to do any of that. It’s a private company and can do whatever it wants. But ECC has been holding itself to very high standards of transparency and community engagement, and will most likely double down on such commitments as part of the Dev Fund. And whereas in the past (e.g., around the ASIC mining discussion) we had a huge amount of open interaction and radical transparency, common sentiment is that the current trend is downhill.

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50

That’s fair, but some discussions have various implications that we need to work through before sharing. It’s not simple and takes time. I got the message. Stay tuned.

We set the near/mid term strategy with the full ECC team a couple weeks ago. I was opportunistic at devcon to leak some things as I had a stage, access to a reporter and it had a direct correlation with Defi which was a hot topic at Ethereum’s conference. I didn’t want to wait for a more detailed and official announcement and then loose the opportunity. The order of operations was off due to my opportunism. Blame me for that. But I’d likely do it again. Also, this is a great example where simply asking for clarification can help. I would have responded as I’m doing here.

We also recently made an internal change to our communications structure. I am taking this all very seriously. Helena is no longer affiliated with the company, formally as of last week. @adjychris is taking interim responsibility for corporate communications along with @elenita and Savannah as part of a comms team while we work through the best long-term comms structure moving forward. @elenita also has responsibility for designing and executing a healthy community program. She’s already started to engage here. There are other elements to this that I’ll wait to share as we’re actively working through details.

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51

@joshs, thanks for this perspective! Great to hear this is getting renewed attention and looking forward to the fruits!

Point taken. :smile:
So, can we please have some technical explanation of “wrapped ZEC” and what it entails? (An informal forum topic would do, I’m not asking for a perfected blog post.)

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52

I’m going to take tomorrow and this weekend off. :slight_smile: There are a couple possible implementations including WZEC and TZEC. Matt Luongo provided an overview of TBTC (the BTC equivalent) here: https://slideslive.com/38919761/devcon5-hall-a2-day4 at about 42:09.

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53

Who knows how it works with TBTC? Are these additional tokens or do you need to freeze the zec equivalent in order to get a token on ETH?

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The video explains quite well. You lock up BTC to get TBTC, as in a federated sidechain. Difference here is that the federation controlling the two-way peg is randomly generated from a large pool of bond holders, who can be slashed on misbehaviour.

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55

Please note that the total eventual issuance is not exactly 21 million ZEC (not is it exactly 21 million BTC in Bitcoin). It is subject to rounding effects, which may change. For example, the Blossom upgrade will result in a small change to total eventual issuance, on the order of a few zatoshi if I remember correctly, as a side effect of halving the block time.

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56

I just watched Bitcoin Private complete the mining of the finally coins and will expect a similar result. anything over 5% and I will not be impressed.

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Ill recognize these post-deadline proposals, but with protest! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Hello Antoinette, thank you for your heartfelt letter. I just now finally had time to start catching up on reading some forum posts, now that the trademark sharing agreement and the ECC livestream are both done.

I’m sorry that our relative silence has been discouraging, both to you and to others. The causes for this (like I think Josh Swihart and other ECCers have alluded to) is nothing negative, but just a combination of things:

  1. Like you mentioned, we’re all super busy advancing the Zcash mission in our specific jobs every day. (I hope you saw the livestream today where we tried to explain all the various initiatives we’ve been advancing and how they tie together.)

  2. We had some people leave and some people join. I hope you’ll get to know @elenita well and that she’ll be part of ECC and part of the community for a long time. :heart:

  3. I thought it was necessary for the community to have a collective conversation about the future of Zcash without too much input from my voice. This is both because ECC is a likely beneficiary of future funding, and because I am widely (but incorrectly) suspected by people outside the community of having a dominant influence on the community. It’s also because I don’t have the answers. These are difficult choices the community is making, and there is great uncertainty about what the future holds in one and five and ten years. I have my opinions and my preferences, but they are not necessarily better guides than anyone else’s.

Anyway, welcome to the community, Antoinette. Stick around! We’re nice, and we’re here for the long term. :relaxed:

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59

Now, don’t we expect something like this in practice?

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https://renproject.io/ is live. Uniswap Info

Not much liquidity there yet.

Thesis is part of the ZDA. tZEC is on their roadmap. Working on wZEC.

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