ZIP Proposal - 8-15% Opt-in or 4-7.5% Mandatory Dev Free |75% Zcash Foundation 25% ECC|

I think it is very well written. Does it not describe your intention?

Does this help you?

Notice all zips start with this:

This is RFC 2119

That is probably essential reading for getting the wording right.

Wording things in this manner really helps to solidify your ideas and give the programming team something to work with. I know you are busy at the mo, so I will try to help if I get time.

Regarding how the ECC would like them formatted, I think these two posts are very relevant, they probably should be rewritten slightly to generalise them and pinned to the top of the thread category.

This one I think is especially relevant.

and this one is just a general overall, look at the RUST style. There is no real format for this so far (community zips). I think your post is the best we have come up with, im going to be following it and the rust format.

Here is a direct link to the rust style. This is how I see community zips looking - especially when coming from non technical people. Nice write up and bullet points with the requirements in RFC 2119 language. I would go as far as to either caps or bold the MUST must not just to highlight it is rfc language you are using.

2 Likes

Oh, you know what, I think I just figured it out. Discourse is listing the threads created in the past month that have the most replies. The UI doesn’t make it clear, but that makes sense given the results.

1 Like

21 posts were merged into an existing topic: Future of Zcash dev funding — megathread / everything in one place

Disabandoned.

The new modified version of this proposal can now be found here:

1 Like

Hi @boxalex, I agree that someone either from the Foundation or ECC should reply to all proposals which have an active advocate. No reason to spend effort on a proposal if no one wants to drive it forward.

The reason I haven’t responded to all proposals yet is that I only have so much time and many responsibilities. The ones I have responded to were, I think oldest to most recent the last time I reviewed proposals, which was sometime last week I think.

I would really appreciate it if you could practice withholding speculation about nefarious underhanded secret plots all the time. Am I biased? You bet I am! Am I explicit and transparent about it? I strive to be as much as possible. Does my effort and views affect ECC? Yep. Am I representing ECC’s official stance anywhere here: Nope. We’ll be explicit about any stance that we take.

Really? I’m sorry @boxalex, I’ve been pretty silent about your repeated abuse, but this is inexusable, and I’m going to begin calling you out every time you insinuate and insult, conveniently ignoring facts.

Will you now apologize and publicly acknowledge all of my responses on the following threads?

BTW, myself and other ECC employees are working really really hard because we believe that our efforts are actually making a difference to improve the world. I am completely confident that’s apparent to anyone paying attention.

I would really appreciate it if you stop insulting us and our efforts and insinuating we’re irresponsible or malicious, especially based on completely obviously incorrect factual assertions.

Ok, now I’m going to go spend my time responding to other authors who are engaged in a charitable and collaborative spirit regardless of the content of their proposals.

7 Likes

Exactly, it’s more than discouraging NOT to see any help on several proposals that did NOT get any response:

Of course, whenever i’am wrong i have absolutly no problem to acknowledge and excuse and indeed i thought mistfpga’s proposals are 20% ones and it turned out i was wrong!

==> This proposal had not ANY response at the time i wrote!

==> That’s the proposal i made a mistake as i thought mistfpga’s proposal was a 20% one. It turned out it is not. I’am sorry and excuse myself for having made a false accusation here.

==> This proposal did NOT have ANY response when i wrote my comment!

==> The 2nd one of mistfgpa i was wrong about. I’am sorry and excuse myself for being wrong here!

That’s how it should be. I personally really appreciate if a wrong statement, wrong assumption, wrong concern, wrong conclusion, wrong possibility is made that it gets opposed directly. I’am absolutly fine with that, it’s even wishfull. In most of the cases i have concerns i don’t get a response which leads to a personal conclusion that there is a.) lack of transparency b.) i’am right c.) it’s a topic the ECC doesn’t want to have discussed. Means any opposing of a wrong conclusion and correction is more than wishfull.

Now after i excused for the 2 proposals i was wrong as for the other 2 and many more i was just right that still don’t have any input from anybody no matter the last placeholders proposal got full ECC support meanwhile.

Have in mind that at the time i wrote this i really was upset that 2 proposals, 20% funding for ECC, got showcased allover twitter by the ECC, by ECC employees, the foundation, by foundation members. Nearly half of the ECC staff re-twitted that proposal and even after i mentioned it seems to be manipulative and unfair to showcase 2x 20% ECC proposals Zooko just showcased it even more in detail on his Twitter account. And you really wonder why i come at the same time to such conclusion that there is a feeling things are manipulative and favoured?

These 2x 20% ECC funding proposals get showcased to the absolutly wide community on social media accounts that together mostly have around 250k-500k followers while the left proposals on the forum doesn’t make it even to 500 views. Fair? Honest? No way in my opinion. And you really wonder how i came to the conclusion this is going to be manipulative? With an still ongoing “campaign” that absolutly favoured the placeholders 20% proposal where actively a huge part of the ECC is involved on Twitter? I think you shouldn’t wonder.

Counter question as i directly, immediatly excused myself for the wrong conclusion i made on 2 proposals.
Is someone from the ECC admitting it’s absolutly unfair to showcase only proposals that have a 20% reward in them?

Is someone from the ECC excusing to all the other proposal makers that are treated unfair meanwhile?

Maybe you won’t believe, but all these proposal makers, including me used as well huge part of their time contributing on the forum, by the way voluntary as we get not paid for that.

The foundation at least removed the links to these and i doubt they would have done IF they wouldn’t agree that it could be interpreted as manipulative and/or favouring giving proposals. Will the ECC remove the link as well and replace with a link to ALL proposals?

Finally, yes, i made a first-reaction mistake because i was mega upset (the placholder proposals showcase case) when i made this remark about mistfpga’s proposal. It wasn’t correct and i should have known better that while highly emotioned it’s not a good choice to make a post. But just because i make here and there a human mistake (have in mind i have NOT all the insider information you have) pledging guilty & wrong on EVERYTHING i write doesn’t sound right either.

2 Likes

Just adding a thought here.
After the community was asked to make proposals, after the community gets remembered all the time that time for a submission is ticking and that time is running out. After we all know of the importance of the funding question and of course the hardness for many community members or even unability to form a valid zip.

Shouldn’t these proposals (ALL) be high priority than? Maybe having someone from the foundation/ECC dedicated to the proposals would make sense, encourage proposal makers to fine-tune them, make more proposals from interested people and so on.

Let’s be honest, most of us here can’t fine-tune and make the proposals zip ready their own. Having in mind the importance of these, at least i had the impression they are important, and than seeing them just staying around without discussion, official input, improvement suggestion, help on zip, whatever, is absolutly discouraging and i think the Foundation/ECC should have had and still in mind when asking the community to make proposals that this is not going to happen without intensive help.

3 Likes

Tell somebody what is the point of discussing proposals in % of production if we do not know how much zcash will cost and what will happen if the price drops below sufficient to cover the costs.

I confirm that the proposals with% of the spoils receive discussions and likes, despite the fact that overwhelmingly Like members of the fund and the company like.
No one answered my questions.

  1. what will happen if the money is not enough, taking into account the% of production on an ongoing basis.
  2. what is the plan to attract investors (buyers)
  3. Is it possible that the recipients of the founders’ awards become investors, and bear financial risks in the event of a project failure?

That is Sonya (certainly MVP in this regard.) she has amazing levels of forum interaction.

However today I hope to have a nice format and template worked out with sonya, which we can then pass to @daira and Im sorry I cant remember the foundation member who also deals with zips it for feedback. (@sonya please chase me up on this I am really bad at self management)

Then when we have that, I am 100% sure proposals can be fine tuned by the community (ie, me, you, chilibob and other active members) so the feedback actually means something and the poster can put their idea forward in a way that can be judged.

regarding not getting feedback on zips.(I am only mentioning this because I get mentioned a lot in these examples) Nathan @ a person and me asking if our proposals were suitably similar, I responded @ the original zip proposer. I even PM’d them to see if we could work something out. I got zero feedback from that person. So what happens to that ZIP now?

Zooko is pretty amazing in this respect, I notice he hearts a lot of my posts he disagrees with. I initially thought he was doing it ironically. Now I genuinely believe he is hearting them to encourage debate and to show he is keeping an eye on it, and an open mind. even though he has other stuff to do. His input has made my zips better because I have a much better idea of the downstream impact. something I had not considered up until now. (I tend to focus on details and miss the big picture at times)

They can only answer so many posts. It is unfortunate from the way the way forums are structured. Normally the information get posted to one or two people, then it is up to those people to inform other people of what this new info is. This does work while the forum is low volume. Another mechanism might be needed in the future.

The placeholder “zip” caused a lot of kneejerk reactions. I have to admit I initially felt it might have been a deal done behind closed doors. I had a long conversation with Box about this, and I think the upshot was he had more strength to actually come out and say it.

Like him I was over tired and over emotional and reacting in an out of character way.

I get your frustration Nathan. I am very glad you made that post expressing yourself, it certainly helps remind us all that we are human.

Despite how it reads I honestly don’t think box thinks the ECC is acting in bad faith, he is just presenting the most uncharitable position. Which, to be frank, other people will already be thinking. so him saying it and giving the issue a chance to be addressed is a good thing. - he may have over stepped the line, I don’t know, that is not my call. but if he did, I think it is more likely to be a translation issue than malintent.

All this being said. I do not want to derail further. just putting my 2p in because I got mentioned a few times.

1 Like

You couldn’t have worded it better, that’s the problem of a non-native-English speaker when it comes to sensible “format” things.

Interestingly the part, “presenting the most uncharitable position” is self-mentioned as well in many Zcash papers “as going evil”, especially when the reason why the foundation is created gets explained.

1 Like

That would be @gtank (who is not on this forum, I believe; that is his GitHub handle).

2 Likes

Yes, this is a recent change. It’s probably confusing without context. Forum members, you’re getting this news first (although honestly it’s been in his Twitter bio for weeks): George Tankersley recently came on as our director of engineering, and he’s going to replace Josh as the Foundation ZIP editor.

We haven’t announced yet because we want to include some technical roadmap information that’s still being fine-tuned.

4 Likes

I use this forum as my only source of zcash related information. Please keep us in mind when making announcements.

@acityinohio I guess disregard my PM. it will be too late for me to have involvement by the time you have done the switch over.

I will pass my comments on to Sonya and hopefully she can pass them on to you. (sorry for putting so much work at your feet, please tell me to stop if I am burdensome.)

I will try to get a remote link to this laptop but I doubt I can. I might be able to answer emails, so PM’s might work. I don’t know. Probably not.

3 Likes

Not that I know of. Why do you think ECC should be “fair” or “unbiased”?

In my personal opinion, it’s a bad goal to appear unbiased. It will actually make the outcome of community discussions worse, because it ends up giving more air time to bad ideas. Fairness is extremely subjective. I have my own sense of fairness that I consider reasonable and I act according to it.

So if you dislike that people at ECC would retweet or highlight the post from Placeholder, I hear that, but I don’t share your concern.

From my own perspective, I really liked that post for the background. For example, I had not heard the summary of Nic Carter’s research before. I actually don’t have much opinion on the proposed terms in that post, because it was too complicated. I got lost and my eyes glazed over.

Even still, I recommend people read it for the background. I completely biased wholeheartedly endorse that people should read it to understand the state of Zcash better. (I didn’t like/retweet it because I’m taking a break from twitter.)

I do really appreciate the effort people have made to participate here!

Yeah, I hear that. I really appreciate you owning up. I was also emotional, because I too am putting a lot of effort into this discussion, even though I don’t have as many hours per day to keep up with it as I wish.

Maybe it would help you to know more about ECC’s organization and process around these Dev Fund proposals: I’m the only person currently responsible for working directly with proposal authors to improve their proposals towards becoming ZIPs. So far, I’ve only had about one hour each work day for this task this week.

Meanwhile Daira Hopwood and George Tankersley are the ZIP editors, so I’m going help each proposal author who’s available create a ZIP, then whatever feedback or requirements the ZIP editors request, I plan to help the authors sort that out.

Other people at ECC are focused on different things, some more or less related to these proposals. All of the product and engineering people do not have any responsibilities to read/respond to these posts (although some do out of their own interest).

Our executive team plans to review the proposals which get into ZIP draft form within a couple of weeks, but we might not necessarily post any public reviews at that time. We’re also looking into multiple ways to gauge community support for proposals.

So the answer to why “ECC” hasn’t responded to all posts is because it’s my responsibility and I am balancing that with other responsibilities (many of which aren’t related to dev funding discussions).

So I will acknowledge that you are a human and make mistakes and get emotional and it takes time and effort for you to contribute, and I hope you do the same for me, rather than claiming there’s some nefarious plot to explain why we haven’t responded to some of the proposals yet.

Ok, I’m off to go respond to other posts, but before I do I’m going to write suggestions for how to improve proposals to become ZIPs based on a few general patterns I’ve seen.

4 Likes

I strongly disagree with this for two reasons:

  • There is no limit to the number of “most uncharitable positions”. “Zcash is an NSA plot.” “The ASIC resistance debacle is because ECC is compromised by ASIC manufacturers.” “ECC has a secret plot to unduly influence the dev fund discussions.” “ECC’s partnership with JP Morgan is a secret plot for bankers to destroy Bitcoin.” … How much time should we spend on each one?
  • There is no limit to the amount of time to address a single uncharitable theory because it is not possible to resolve such claims in a discussion. They are fundamentally about people’s “hidden intentions”. No amount of evidence or investigation or public vows or attestations will ever settle such claims.

So let me respond to all of them at once:

If Zcash or ECC or the Foundation is compromised and has secret intentions, then the great thing about cryptocurrency is that no one forces you to use it. You can sell your ZEC and tell your friends to avoid it. Done. Problem solved.

Meanwhile- I believe there are many legitimate criticisms of Zcash which are charitable. You can tell the difference because these issues can be addressed by discussion and do not rely on beliefs about people’s hidden intentions.

Maybe ECC hasn’t used funds effectively. Maybe opt-in privacy impedes the big picture goal. Maybe the parameter setup is too risky for a global financial system. Maybe ECC’s biased and has blind spots and that will derail the true potential for Zcash.

4 Likes

Ok, I used my hour today writing two responses on this thread.

None of that effort helped advance any of the proposals towards becoming ZIP ready. So hopefully I’ll have time tomorrow to work on that.

As you can see, it’s costly to respond to each criticism. The cost in this case is that my help towards making existing proposals into ZIPs, and my effort to respond to all posts was taken up explaining why it’s a bad idea to respond to all uncharitable claims because “somebody is probably thinking them.”

I hope people can extrapolate the true cost here. We have about a month to finalize the ZIP proposals and find a way to gauge community stances for a variety of very different stakeholders.

How much time should we spend talking about if ECC is fair when it retweets a given proposal during that month?

For me personally, I am going to spend 0 minutes henceforth on such discussions and instead focus on the discussions that are moving the community decision process forward effectively.

9 Likes

Sorry for taking up your time.

Ok, that’s exactly what it looks and what i thought. Bad ideas, up to the discretion of the ECC, are not to set equal with the good ideas from a ECC point of view, thus 20% continued reward.

I understand fully the reasoning, makes sense from a ECC point of view. But at a later point IF a favoured, advertised by the ECC proposal will make it you will have to deal with accuses that it wasn’t a fair process at all, at least that is my prediction on what will happen with such actions.

I’am out here as well, way too much time spent on bad ideas …

Holy shit, Nathan’s posts above (1, 2, 3) are pure gold. Thank you so much for expressing such important ideas so clearly, Nathan. Everyone should read those three posts carefully, and let’s focus our precious time on helping one another succeed. (Or, like Nathan says, instead spend our precious time on using a different technology and joining a different community.) Thanks to Sonya for drawing attention to those posts.

3 Likes