Not to mention the âsex workers and taboo games should never be allowed access to the financial system or be representedâ is the exact rhetoric peddled by Visa and Mastercard, who Zcash was supposed to REPLACE.
If not them, then who are we offering privacy to? The people using Mastercard and Visa? Forever remain a competitor? Bring no actual impact to anyone?
This makes exactly my point.
ZSAs only have value as a protocol feature. Coinholders were asked about exactly that, and 98.6% said no. Funding more ZSA work afterward is obviously funding toward the thing they rejected.
âPreserving the workâ doesnât need $455K. The code is open source, itâs not going anywhere. A dedicated ZSA testnet is continuation of work, not preservation.
And you note the poll was âadvisory and non-binding.â Thatâs precisely the issue: coinholders pay for ZCG, and their views on how that money is spent are non-binding.
After five years and $5.76M, coinholders shouldnât have to keep paying to tie up loose ends on a feature they voted against.
Enough is enough.
I also want to raise a serious question, and I hope to receive some genuine answers.
You view ZCGâs decisions negatively and believe that all authority should be in the hands of Coinholders. You have also expressed concerns about the âdangers of enemies capturing funds through ZCAP.â
So I would like to ask you the following.
Question 1:
Approximately 2.1 million ZEC votes were cast in the latest Coinholder funding vote.
With the circulating supply close to 17 million ZEC, that means only around 12% of the circulating supply participated in the vote.
How can we be certain that the remaining 88% will not return in the future and make completely different decisions?
Question 2:
If you are concerned about ZCG being captured by hostile actors, why arenât you equally concerned about the possibility of hostile actors accumulating enough voting power to influence Coinholder decisions?
If an individual, organization, or alliance hostile to Zcash were to control 30% of the voting power participating in a future vote, what safeguards would prevent them from using the Coinholder system to harm the ecosystem?
Question 3:
Does ZIP 1016 contain any specific safeguards against scenarios like this? If so, what are they, and how effective would they be against coordinated voting or an attempt to capture the funding process?
Question 4:
Why are some people so critical of ZCG while placing such strong trust in Coinholder governance?
Wouldnât it be more reasonable to evaluate both systems using the same standards rather than assuming that one is inherently safer than the other?
Finally, if only around 12% of the circulating supply participated in the latest vote, how can we be certain that the outcome reflects the broader interests of ZEC holders rather than primarily the preferences of the large holders who actively participated?
What happens if previously inactive holdersâor new actors with hostile intentionsâdecide to participate in future votes and attempt to influence the outcome?
Iâm not claiming that this will necessarily happen. Iâm simply asking why this risk deserves less attention than the possibility of ZCG being captured.
If we are truly serious about protecting Zcash, shouldnât we examine the vulnerabilities of both governance models with the same level of scrutiny?
AFAIK it relies on the program being ended after the boundary. It has been reauthorised twice in the past, ZIP 1014 â ZIP 1015 â ZIP 1016. It is very similar to how US defense authorisations work (NDAA).
That is the intended mechanism to stop the program, which is why I say that coinholders already earmarked the funds.
A clarification.
The grant is about adapting the ZSA code with protocol changes and merging it with the upstream crates.
I have done the integration and I am currently running the ZSA testnet to see if there is interest from builders. This was not funded by the ZCG.
There was no decision by the coin holders to shut down ZSA. The decision was solely to ânot include it in NU7."
The question didnât say âin NU7.â It asked about including ZSAs as a protocol feature, full stop. 98.6% of coinholders opposed.
And the burden shouldnât be on coinholders to vote âshut it down.â If coinholders oppose a feature, ZCG shouldnât keep funding it with their money until they say stop twice.
See this image (source):
I think a reasonable starting point for discussion is to establish:
Something of the form âIf ZCG holdings exceeds $25M based on a 6 month trailing ZEC TWAP, excess funds are returned to the NSMâ. Its pretty hard to argue IMO that there is need for a grants program to manage more than that. ZCG spending over the last 6 years is $23M, with the majority of big expenses being washes (Zaino for instance).
ZCG as infrastructure was built to manage far smaller amounts, on the order of < $10 million.
Iâm doing a proposal similar to that, when Iâm done Iâll send it to you if you want to check it out. I think I have your Signal?
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Your screenshot is not from the ZODL app, it shows March 10, the vote was in January / February.
But set that aside. 98.6% against is not a result that needs interpreting. Coinholders were loud about it at the time, everywhere. Nobody reading that vote thought âtheyâd like ZSAs later.â
Coinholders said no. ZCG funded it anyway. Thatâs the issue.
Iâve been posting my concerns for much longer than the current hype cycle. You didnât even exist in the forums when I first proposed to remove ZCG.
Its morally wrong to steal money and give it to others to spend.
Please stop censoring radbro who has continuously proposed the only sensible resolution
So⌠what exactly qualifies as stealing money?
I suspect only #2 is justified no? HmmâŚ
And while I may not have been on the forums that back, I did read up all of it.
Man, sorry I canât take a screenshot of my wallet â my special phone in lock mode all time. It would be ridiculous for me to do that, but you know, I have a really good memory. If you need confirmation, people from the local communities whoâve created tons of guides on how to vote can back me up. I donât know why youâre grasping at straws.
Actually, artkor, he is right.
The poll was in general about NU7, and you did acknowledge the failure of ZCAP, even declaring:
Which I fully agree with. ZSAs were always a nonsense proposal peddled by QEDIT to be as big as Tachyon, when it was nothing even close. Somehow core protocol developers supported it, so it got through. I will go as far as to say QEDIT did a grift.
But it doesnât mean ZCG was corrupt, nor is it a reason anyone should backtrack. Itâs not like the ZCG did it on their own, it had a lot of protocol developer support.
You have never polled coinholders. You have never polled ZCAP.
You are showing weakness and caving to the pressure of a very small handful of people.
Coinholders are not polled. Amount-holders are polled.
No country lets people vote with their money. Zcash currently does.
Do not make any change, give the community at least a month to debate this, and letâs find a governance approach that doesnât let a few billionaires decide everything for a human rights technology.
Your team isnât equipped to handle this much money. Thatâs fine, we hit a windfall jackpot as a community. Hire a team that has managed this size before. Donât succumb to self-interested miner pressure. Serve the community.
This proposal is premature and should absolutely not move forward until MUCH more debate and polling is allowed to happen.
Max, you keep treating your preference for exclusive coinholder control as though it were an ownership right that ZCG has violated. You still need to establish that.
Coinholders have real economic exposure to issuance and spending decisions. But that does not automatically give them ownership of the grants treasury or exclusive authority over it. The funding model deliberately gives community grants and coinholder grants independent decision-making channels. You can argue for changing that arrangement. Repeatedly calling the treasury âour moneyâ does not settle the argument.
The 98.6% result deserves serious consideration. It also needs to be represented accurately: that was participating coin weight, not 98.6% of all holders. The poll announcement expressly described the individual results as advisory and non-binding. Continuing ZSA work after that result demands an explanation. It does not establish that ZCG violated a binding veto or that every coinholder shares your position.
I agree that âpreserving the workâ is insufficient justification for another $455,000. Previous spending cannot justify the next dollar. But code remaining available on GitHub is not the same as keeping it compatible with changing protocol requirements and integrating it upstream. Those are concrete parts of the grantâs scope. The argument should be about whether that additional work is worth funding, with clear deliverables and a stopping point.
There are fair questions about this proposal too. Why retain that much treasury? What budget supports continued funding through 2032? A reduction in inflows does not answer every accountability concern. Those questions deserve answers rather than being used as a shortcut to âabolition is the only acceptable solution.â
And âcommittees never workâ is an assertion, not an argument. Comparing a grant committee to communist central planning does nothing to establish that concentrated coinweight voting or private underwriting would produce better decisions. Those mechanisms have their own conflicts, information gaps and concentration risks.
Having served on this committee, I have no problem with scrutiny of its spending or structure. I do have a problem with treating independent funding as inherently illegitimate whenever it disagrees with the preferences of participating capital holders. That independence has a purpose.
If you want all funding decisions ultimately subject to coinholder approval, make the case for why that serves Zcash better. You cannot establish it simply by declaring that the money belongs to coinholders and then treating disagreement as misuse.
