This week’s Perspectives series focuses on governance.
Nathan Wilcox, the Zcash Company’s Chief Technology Officer, says the approach to governance in this early phase of the company’s history is to keep the process simple to understand and let people choose what they want to do. Zcash utilizes a two-tiered model for protocol upgrades, introduced with the Overwinter activation.
“Technically, we want the users to be safe and have a choice.” — N. Wilcox
Jonathan Zeppettini (JZ) is the International Operations Lead at Decred, a cryptocurrency with a strong focus on community input, open governance, and sustainable funding and development. It utilizes a hybrid “proof-of-work” and “proof-of-stake” system which grants coin holders all the power to decide the consensus rules, as well as the direction of the project. This link elaborates on Decred’s model: Introduction to Decred governance.
“The idea with Decred is we … want to be able to integrate all of the best ideas from the space. So what we did first is the really hard part, building a technical foundation to be able to have that kind of thing happen. Bring features in and have controlled hard forks on-chain, and go from there.” — JZ
Vitalik Buterin, the Founder and Chief Scientist of the Ethereum Project, discusses why he had a change of heart about on-chain governance and how coin voting governance manages to fail in allocating capital.
“So, a couple of years ago, I would of been more firmly in the … camp that says there should be explicit on-chain governance, and now I’m absolutely against that, and I think that stuff is crazy.” — V. Buterin
For more on governance, check out a recent discussion by some notable thought leaders that recently took place at Zcon0: Keynote Panel: Cryptocurrency Governance.
A library of prior videos in the Perspectives series is available on the Zcash YouTube channel; each link appears below as well.
On Privacy:
Eran Tromer Zash Founding Scientist, Associate Professor at Tel Aviv University and Associate Research Scientist at Columbia University
Zooko Wilcox Zcash Founder and CEO
Linda Xie Co-Founder of Scalar Capital
Zcash CTO Nathan Wilcox
Ethereum Founder and Chief Scientist Vitalik Buterin
Coin Center Director of Research and Zcash Foundation Board Member Peter Van Valkenburgh
Industry Thought Leader Jill Carlson
On Sapling:
Zcash Engineer Sean Bowe
Zcash Engineer Ariel Gabizon