Absolutely. My understanding is Bitcoin was funded by charitable work and donations. It was not privately funded. It doesnt take a lot of mental gymnastics to say, ZEC holders paid for it, they own it. Trying to argue, its not privately funded is where the gymnastics come in.
If you cared about the people earning a few dollars a month, you would not be selling them ZEC or arguing for forks. ZEC has no intrinsic value (especially if you think someone can just come fork the code and possibly make it worth less and it has no collateral)…The people you care so much about lost 90% of their money. And you want policies that could cause them to lose 100%.
If anyone is fighting for the little guy, its the people fighting for privacy everywhere, including centrally backed stablecoins, and to do everything possible to retain the value to ZEC holders so people dont lose all their money.
If I make something, Say @ZecHub like @januszgrze did, and someone forks it and makes it better why is this a bad thing exactly? ZCG, whom anyone can apply to join, decided to fund ZecHub, which in turn means the DevFund is supporting our efforts. We might have a fundamental disagreement about this, and that’s OK. I guess from my perspective I’m not insecure about letting the tech speak for itself – If forks happen, its because its useful to the world. I think less focus on making more fiat is appropriate here. Appreciate your thoughts
Sorry to flex our (as forum activists) class and technological status here. Nobody who makes a few dollars a month is a potential crypto user, let alone specific to Zcash. The primary users of Zcash are its investors - the people putting up liquidity to make a battle at letting ZEC retain or grow value over time. Yes, we also have a small set of users of the Zcash network for transactional purposes, but based on evidence that is not the primary reason for people to be involving themselves with Zcash today.
Speculation about the person making $3 a month deciding to use ZEC for common and tiny fiat valued transactions is a fool’s game. Let’s keep our thinking grounded in use cases and protocol upgrades for the next year or two ahead, and a rational framing around who current Zcash users are today, and who our new users may be in the next couple years. Baby steps, we must carefully learn to walk years before we may sprint and leap.
That would be a bad thing because they’ll slowly consume all of your users of today/ of the future. Napster vs Limewire vs MegaUpload, et al show the example timeline for concept and technology grabbing.
I disagree – it’s not about some competition. Its about communicating Zcash education to the world. I’m not working in ZecHub to make a profit – we are non-profit. You can spin what non-profit means but I’m telling you directly how I view it.
It all depends on the funding. It also depends on what you lead people to believe. For example, if you paid me to build your house. Then, when its completed you find its loaded with 10 families. You might say what’s going on? If I tell you, I build public housing; anyone can live here. And, I saved you a room next to the bathroom. Didnt you read the fine print? You might say. I paid you for it. It’s mine. And the builder might say what’s wrong with helping all these needy families. Is that wrong?
Now, again, with @zechub it depends if this is a community project or a privately funded project. There are definitely some things that should be given away for free. In this case it was funded by ZEC to further the ZEC mission. But, if you let Monero fork/copy it, then I think it would be a problem. Again, it comes down to who funded, and what they are led to believe.
I think it is bad to let people believe one thing and then do something that will or could hurt those people. So in my opinion, people buying ZEC expect it to retain and increase in value. They do not believe it’s a charity donation. It’s advertised as money. There is a major conflict in claiming ZEC has value and should be trusted while at the same time allowing something that might result in ZEC to decrease in value. The idea this is a charity donation for society and the world is scary from an investor point view as a consumer point of view. can you imagine the US government allowing someone to take its currency printing press to make more USD? The day you claim ZEC is money and cash it just feels wrong to allow someone to just copy it. I believe a new duty of care and trust to ZEC (and not the rest of the world) was created on that day. That is a duty to protect its software and blockchain because at the end of the day, that is what will give it value. It is also useful to the world to break into a bank, steal all the money and give it to the hungry and homeless. But if its your bank, or where your mom’s pension is held, you might think about it a little differently. And just because a person might work at the bank, and have access to the money, it doesn’t mean they can just raid the vaults to benefit the world no matter how noble the cause. When you claim Zcash is money, its people’s life savings you are playing with and the “store of value” concept is not even in the same ballpark as privacy. Privacy is a very distant second.
Yes, I’m not quite sure why the 21 million cap, which was inherited from Bitcoin, is viewed as more of a “social contract” than say “fungibility of ZEC”. It was my understanding that the fungibility of ZEC was a core tenet of Zcash, but we seem to be willing to disadvantage holders of ZEC that possess the nonfungible property of being in the sapling pool. So indeed, it does seem like a case of groupthink to me as well. There were probably way better answers including “that’s a tricky question, I think everything is up for constructive discussion” which some panelists kind of eluded to which was good to hear.
I think the reason the 21m cap was such a disappointing answer is that there are many obvious reasons to discuss changing the cap. These include funding the security the network into the future and reducing the risk of staker’s not selling their ZEC and eventually collecting more then 50% of the supply . So putting the 21m cap on a pedestal is counterproductive when we know in 5-10 years this topic will come up for serious discussion again.
Luckily for us I believe most of the panelists would be willing to constructively discuss the merits a proposal to changing the market cap. I believe even some pointed that out during the discussion which was good to see.
Funny aside, ZecHub was essentially a fork of EthHub. Did this hurt ETH?
ZEC is a fork of bitcoin. Does it follow with your framework that because someone forked BTC, BTC has suffered?
Can you define what you mean by value? I think it will help me better understand your framework. Having privacy in a all digital world is very valuable to many, but it’s not clear to me that is what you are talking about in this context.
I believe it does. My understanding is BTC was more of a collaboration and didn’t sell coins to people. So it was more of an experiment in a way. It really had no value, people trying to create this new thing. But i could be wrong on that. Zec came out of the gate selling coins, and calling itself money, with a much higher valuation. So As these coins become valuable, i believe the thinking and obligations the people have to their community will evolve as well. I believe it will evolve much like a corporations fiduciary duty to its shareholders. Maybe even stronger because this is supposed to be money. And shouldnt money be less risky than stocks? I don’t think we can have unlimited forms of money with forks everywhere. But if it’s backed by government securities then it could support more because they won’t print an unlimited supply of money, which is implied to me when token based money is forked. Money printing is what kills paper money and it will be no different with digital money.
I did say some things should be given away for free. and my understanding is there is more of a collaboration with ETH. didn’t they help fund some research? But even if they didn’t, we are not a direct competitor as Monero is with ZEC. I’m not saying people should not share; but I am saying ETH also has a duty to ETH holders and good judgement is required on what that means.
ETH purpose is not to create websites. If that was their business, and its community expected them to sell sites. giving it away for free might be a breach of dury. There is a big difference between forking zechub and forking ZEC to create more “money” out of thin air.
The things that give ZEC value. Since ZEC has no collateral its value is not tangible, it’s intangible. It’s software code, it’s brand, it’s network and ecosystem, its corp governance, it’s employee workforce, it’s mission and culture, and the people who pay for it as represented by ZEC. so when people buy ZEC this is what they are buying. And ZEC is selling it to people as money. So they should take special care in protecting it.
I think this is partially right, and many current BTC maxi’s will cringe for me saying it, but the first few years of BTC were what I think was intended from the OG’s. When VP money started flowing, CEX’ became rampant, and a large subset of the BTC ecosystem has essentially evolved into greedy lazor eyes focused on accumulating more FIAT, the system BTC is suppose to replace.
I think many would agree that the manor in which ZEC hit the first CEX was not good. Perhaps setting this project back years.
I think we can, and should. This is, IMHO, the social part of the contract. No one should try and control this. Let folks choose freely and the markets will decide.
Agreed, I just wanted to point out a simple counter example in your framework.
What do you define as money? These questions seem simple but they aren’t.
Well the unintended consequence is you will just end up hurting the people you think you are trying to help. Money is first a store of value. without the store or value part privacy is worthless. so you are taking people for l fools.
Thats a good share, Thanks. Perhaps global crypto investing is a year or two ahead of my understanding, but my opinion doesn’t change wrt this point:
1 billion people making 50 cent transactions on Zcash everyday is not what this project is all about. It is not a project built to serve the world like that, the technical infrastructure doesn’t work for that use case (projects like Ripple or Stellar are where the technology is being built for daily free micro-transactions). Would a billion ZEC users be cool? Yes, but it would destroy the network for everyone.
Zcash users today, and for the foreseeable future, are investors who want to privately store wealth and presumably see its value accrue at or beyond the rate of fiat inflation. Making novel, private, digital, money-like transactions with their private wealth (ZEC) is not what users seek. See the daily average numbers of late for evidence (Coinmetrics, total transactions daily):
Average daily transactions (3,000-4,000) are down about 50% from their rough average 6,000-7,000 during the 2020-2022 crypto bull market. But how can this be explained? Coin supply is significantly higher, and so is the count of ZEC in the shielded pools? Either Zcash is losing adoption, or people are increasingly, and proactively, keeping their ZEC inactive (my point about private store of wealth).
Zcash stakers collecting more than 50% of the supply would be a preferred outcome. Those who put in the most work and who retain their coins longest ought to be compensated well.
Yes, the Zcash teams that forked (left) Bitcoin hurt it because all of the zero-knowledge talent that left (or never made it) to Bitcoin has left Bitcoin technologically impaired in the context of providing base layer privacy. Splintering human talent out of the project suffering the fork leaves that project with a depleted talent pool.
Wrong. I am trying to protect people from losing their money,their labor and their savings. You are trying to use money to try and fight a battle that is beyond money and further your ideology.
It’s not 1/1. its bad analogy. You cant separate light into a particle or wave. You can separate privacy from money which is what you are doing. You argue to have ZEC private; but not have any store of value. would you rather own 1) a public ledger where your money is worth 100% at the end of the year or a private ledger where 2) it could be worth 10% on the dollar? to me the answer is crystal clear. Store of value is more important than privacy. You take the store or value part for granted. money printing leads to option 2; poor culture; poor governance all lead to number 2
I like your honesty. And if that’s how you actually behave i can respect your answer. With that, I hope you have 0 connection with zcash other than as a zec holder. I would never trust you with my savings. money as a store of value is a core tenant.
. So putting the 21m cap on a pedestal is counterproductive when we know in 5-10 years this topic will come up for serious discussion again.
rather be poor, yet private. This is our fundamental disagreement.