Practice has shown that the presence of a roadmap does not guarantee the fulfillment of the roadmap.
Understand correctly, I do not represent any of the organizations at all and therefore have an absolutely independent view of the situation, I’ve never worked for any of them and I have no agenda to manipulate anyone’s opinion. But I have a full understanding of what ZF is doing even without a roadmap.
For example, Zebra is key to preserving the value of Zcash. Beyond the technical threats of a memory attack, there is another problem. Zcash can be hijacked by bitcoiners, many of whom dream of implementing everything that has been built up over the years here and paid for by Zcash investors. Individual bitcoiners are constantly making attempts to move the Zcash codebase. And it will easily succeed because they have more money to do so. If we don’t get rid of it in time (zcashd), that’s what will happen. I doubt that’s what you want.
Another example is FROST. I don’t know why it’s not obvious to some people here, but the average user doesn’t need it. Read between the lines. FROST is needed for corporations to use shielded Zcash in their payment services. We simply can’t go corporate without multi-signature tools. It’s axiomatic. Without multisignatures, Zcash will remain a geek’s toy and will never reach the same level as Bitcoin and Ethereum.
I also would like roadmaps. But honestly it would not had made any difference, because for these 4 years the main priority has always been clear: getting Zebra released, and then allowing it to fully replace zcashd so it can be deprecated. Additionally getting FROST released and deployed.
For the record, I talked about our plans for Zebra during an AMA last year.
(The section on Zebra starts at 14:14)
However, a couple of months after that AMA, during Zcon4, we agreed with ECC to colllaborate on working towards deprecating zcashd, and that has been our priority ever since, along with supporting other teams who are building on Zebra (e.g. QEDIT, Zingo).
In effect, we have set aside our own roadmap in order to focus on the work required to deprecate zcashd because that’s a blocker for deploying ZSAs.
Decoupling the block scanner from zebrad and implementing regtest functionality might not seem particularly exciting from the perspective of the average Zcash end user but it’s all necessary work before we can activate ZSAs on mainnet, which is the community’s top priority.
So, for the foreseeable future (at least 11 months), we’ll be:
working with the ECC engineers on a new command line wallet,
adding other functionality that Zebra needs to allow us to sunset zcashd (e.g. functioanlity required to address the block explorer use case),
implementing NU6,
supporting QEDIT in their work implementing ZSAs on Zebra,
implementing NU7, and
(hopefully) overseeing the activation of ZSAs on mainnet.
You can keep abreast of what we do on a sprint-by-sprint basis by reading the engineering updates that @Pili has started posting in the Ecosystem Updates section here on the forums
“We are going to work on abc and collaborate with xyz in the foreseeable future” is not a roadmap. What are you going to deliver in the next 12 months?
If they’re using zcashd source code for this, they’re doing it the hard way. It would be much easier just to use the orchard Rust crate (wrapping what they need in their own FFI layer) and leave the rest of the baggage behind. I suspect that there is essentially no zcashd code in that project; it would be really dumb to try to use the zcashd codebase (for anything.)
Don’t even get me started on the hopes & dreams of this whole yet disparate Zcash ecosystem being posited to miraculously work together to design/ build/ deploy the world’s greatest sausage making factory - the hand waving/ bring me a rock “non-direct funding model”
We’ve collectively struggled for a year in the simple debate about a new Dev Fund; so how on Earth is a project of 100 times more complexity supposed to happen in another year?
Most people choose to extend the fund for two years. I’m among them. We have a ton of improvements on the way out and the next two years could be very fruitful for Zcash with the fund. Or we will just end up with an unfinished masterpiece without the fund. However, if two years proves to be insufficient time, there is no chance of salvation here with or without the fund.
A roadmap lets employees know what the expectations are, lets partners know what they can expect so they can plan their work, lets everyone know what the priorities are, offers a way to hold an organization accountable and determine if funds are being spent well.
Investors offer funds. Not a promise of funds. In return, it would be nice to at least have a promise of deliverables with approximate dates, instead of “in the future we’ll work on important things.”
Grant recipients are evaluated against their milestones. What are your milestones over the next 12 months, Dodger?
No one can clearly articulate what the next 2 years should be - not ZF not ECC - so why should we commit more resources to something that isn’t clear. Not to mention that come renewal time - the block rewards get chopped in half so you’d need to double the dev fund percentage to maintain current run rates without dipping into savings.
I think it has a lot to do with the fact that this is a knowledge-intensive industry and we can’t determine our level of progress in advance. It was only the communists who had a kind of deadline: "You will build us a rocket by September 1, or we will shoot you. If you remember, Vitalik has been telling the Ethereum community about the transition to PoS since 2016. It actually took him 7 years to make it happen.
Yes. I just wanted to emphasize how much is hidden underwater. Funds scold that as if it doesn’t work, but more often than not people just don’t dig deep and make superficial judgments based on the price chart alone. Price does not take everything into account, price only takes into account widely publicized information, most often unreliable.
If it’s of any use I think that the Zcash Foundation brings a lot of value to Zcash. But it’s hard to tell from the outside.
Also ZF is in charge of a lot of “non-promotable tasks” (NPTs). What is a NPT? it’s something that everyone takes for granted. Nobody will ever “be promoted” on a job for doing what everyone expects them to, or for doing what in “the organization” (the ecosystem in this case) is taken from granted.
So it’s unfair in some point to grade ZF in this way, because if ZF says “this year the forum’s uptime was 99.9999%”(IDK what’s the uptime, just putting an example), even though that’s a LOT, people will just say “DUH, that’s your job dude!”
On the other hand ZF could actually do a better job at communicating what it does, why does it do it, and how things are better because those things get done.
I know it’s easier to say this than to do it. Collecting metrics and etceteras is cumbersome, a boring burden, yet-another-NPT but it’s what it can make a difference when you have to face the public eye and show your victories.
From my perspective , the ZF has had a negative impact on zcash.
I will give you a few examples:
I had a frost grant ready to go but after consultation with the ZF, it was rejected because Frost was supposed to be available in the following months. That was 2 years ago. As a result, I removed Frost from ywallet. Note that this affected Zcash users but not other coins that use their own implementation of frost. Ironic when you consider that Frost was invented by a ZF engineer.
At one point, Apple asked to have wallet apps published by a company associated with the coin. Naturally, I requested help from the ZF. Jack refused. As a result, ywallet is published by the Ycash Foundation
The same thing happened with Ledger. They requested the endorsement of an “official” entity behind zcash. Both the ECC and the ZF refused. The ZCG doesn’t have the legal structure to sign contracts. The ZF chose to support Zondax even though they failed to deliver after 2 years. Now it has been more than 3 years and it is still not available. And when it comes out, it will be inferior to the ywallet/ledger app.
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