I put most of my printed dollars into here pretty quickly:
The world needs to have access is how I view it.
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I haven’t found things here that ZEC owners want, it’s mostly developers priorities. The percentage that voted for the 5-10% steaking speaks volumes.
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Can someone explain to me, a redneck from a backward country, the advantages of Venmo over what I already have in any wallet for Zcash? Why this is driving up the demand for ZEC? Is it realistic to create it in 12 months? How much of a fund would it require?
Right now ZEC is already disappearing from all services it existed on in Russia due to loss of its capitalization and popularity. Why do people need to install this new app to do what?
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It seems to me that the Venmo’s secret sauce is pretty great business development / partnerships.
Something that zcash hasn’t been very good at.
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The reality is that ZEC has never been a good choice for payment, compared to fiat or other crypto. Too few places accept it.
Hopefully this will change in the future, but after seeing down-only for its whole life, I doubt non-Zcashers can see the appeal of holding ZEC. Unless some crazy up only days happen after I swapped my shielded ZEC into other shielded assets, on Zcash or other Sapling chains. 
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Yes, it’s a pretty good choice for payment in theory but it lacks support from crypto payment providers. I find it harder and harder to use it directly (I often have to swap to USDT).
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For me it comes down to priorities. Of course I wouldn’t mind staking for yield, but for me that is less important that letting the masses have easy, decentralized access to ZEC.
If we could integrate into the existing system easily, this problem wouldn’t matter. Maybe a better question is why wouldn’t the existing system want to integrate with ZEC? For me what many might need is access to private digital cash because of reasons.
Comfort. Folks who have not learned about bitcoin, or ether, or any newer technology are less likely to try new things if support is not built into an application they already have used for years, and might trust. This is why I think major banks are partnering with Zelle, and Venmo, it is a smart strategy. But these older systems will never offer what ZEC does, and then this problem becomes, imho, all about education.
Appreciate your thoughts 
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These “masses”… are they in this thread with us now?
Fwiw, staking for yield is worthless if you’re receiving tokens that don’t appreciate in value.
What “system”?
Very compelling argument 
how big is this theoretical demographic intersection? That is: people who learn about Zcash before the king (BTC)?
Lots of delusion coming across in there.
I’ll clarify the point of my rhetorical claim.
In 2020, when ZCAP adopted the developer fund by a nearly unanimous decision, we realized that we had a huge amount of room to work with. We had a great theoretical solution in hand in the form of Halo and Orchard and obviously it was done beautifully here. However, the practical implementation of these things didn’t show up in SDK 2.0, a software kernel that only recently appeared. The last 3 ZCONs we’ve heard great things about the future for ZSA. In 2021, the community was alarmed by the PoS proposal. There has been enough time that today after Zeboot we can outline a timeline for the implementation of these things that have become expected already for many. We’ve heard great things in the form of discovery keys, improvements to lookup keys for individual transactions, and other interesting theoretical proposals. Yes, there were problems in the form of sandblasting, but today it’s gone. And I honestly expected to hear proposals to implement these issues that are already clear to everyone, the need for which no one doubts anymore.
And probably all the things listed here deserve our attention. But!
Why are we now taking the focus away from the previous roadmap? I understand that Zeboot’s task was voiced as “let’s do something in a short period of time that will improve ZEC’s position on the market right now”. Maybe that’s my problem and I misunderstood something. But I don’t see how we’re going to do Venmo in the short term. How is it even possible to do it without funding funds after November? Or are we now just saying that we know ZCAP will accept funding anyway because you have no other choice? We’ll just keep saying PoS will be ahead of the curve and it will take years. ZSA will be ahead but right now we don’t need it. Any additional “ahead of the curve” and “it will take time”. But ask yourself, what on this list can we implement during this year? I don’t see any options and it looks like “ok, let’s look left and right” instead of looking at what we can implement this year of what we wanted to implement in the past.
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Bear in mind that the above summary and wrapup are not yet a real plan for action.
The primary purpose of Zeboot was to figure out what direction to direct ECCs efforts for the immediate future.
Now that it’s over ZF and ECC can coordinate how to move forward with a more concrete timeline:
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Seems like the two should just merge. This mirage of two “separate” entities, adds too much friction/back and forth. But maybe that’s for the elaborate 501 scheme that is set up. 
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It’s not a mirage, it’s two distinct legal entities. This goes back to the days when ECC was the for-profit and the founders donated a portion to a nonprofit, thereby creating ZF which had an entirely different goal. It was only later that ECC restructured to be under a nonprofit 501c org as well.
Could the two merge at some point? Possibly, especially since Zcashd is combining with Zebra there seems like there could be some overlap of roles. But as it sits right now imho, it still makes sense for ECC and ZF to maintain their separate development teams to work on their respective sides of the Zcash house until Zcashd is completely retired.
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Got it. Thanks for the explanation.
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Someone explain to me why a principal engineer that failed to keep Zcash free from the sand blasting and other nasty techdebt over the years promoted to an engineering manager is a good thing for the community ? Failing gets rewarded ?
You answered your own question.
Daira wasn’t the team manager and thereby wasn’t the one making the final decisions for what the team focused on.
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Absolutely 
. ZEC and Zcash can be great without any moonshot changes needed. Stick to the knitting, keep chopping wood, make the protocol and core products better and better. Pay down all tech debt. Iterative improvements can make Zcash more attractive and usable for devs as well as common users and put us in a position where bigger changes become more feasible.
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No, I’m referring to anyone who has maybe only heard of Bitcoin/Eth/Crypto and has never actually used it. I’m assuming this is a rather large percentage of the public. I’ve noticed more mainstream bashing post FTX, and its unfortunately not going to help win over the folks I’m trying to describe.
I think we need to focus on current crypto users. That’s one less step in the flywheel.
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I think everyone is eager, but I think we need to have realistic expectations. A lot has happened in about a months time (since Josh’s role change).
Can you be more specific here? I’m not sure I agree but maybe you can help me understand.
Good question, and its a question our community needs to answer. I am pro dev-fund, but at a reduced rate to encourage faster convergence and execution. This is a hot topic obviously 
I think your not giving credit to those who are working hard behind the scenes. This stuff is hard and I happen to believe we can get stuff done, but we need to find focus first.
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That’s a fair viewpoint imho, and am curious how others may feel. I guess I feel the folks who might care about privacy more aren’t ready for crypto ( baby boomers? )