On The Brink with Castle Island Josh Cincinnati on the challenge of blockchain governance (EP.144)
Nov 2, 2020
01:19:03
Josh Cincinnati, former Executive Director of the Zcash Foundation, joins the show to talk about his tenure at that organization, and lessons he's taken from the experience. In this episode:
- The genesis of the Zcash Foundation
- Prior foundation mistakes that Josh sought to avoid
- The difference between governing a non-cryptocurrency FOSS project and an open source protocol with an explicit monetary element
- Why Josh chose to step down from the Zcash Foundation
- How the monetary distribution of Zcash was initially devised and how the founder's reward became a developer fund
- The dynamics around the trademark sharing in Zcash
- Trademarks as a last resort tool of power in blockchain governance
- How public blockchains are 'Marxist in their goals, Leninist in their implementations'
- How the mandate of the Zcash Foundation was broader than simply the Zcash ecosystem
- The current outlook for funding Zcash development
- The subtle change in the social contract underlying development funding
- Why poorly formalized social contracts risk opening up projects to capture
- How 'aid dependency' is relevant to blockchain governance
- Why blockchain insiders hide the true mechanisms of power
- Why coin votes might be more of the output of power rather than the input
- Josh's advice to a founder trying to devise funding for a novel cryptocurrency
- Why Rawls' Veil of Ignorance is so important in determining initial conditions for a monetary protocol
- What Josh is working on now
- The story behind PonzICO.win
- Why there is no good satire in the crypto industry
Content mentioned in this episode:
- Angela Walch, Deconstructing 'Decentralization': Exploring the Core Claim of Crypto Systems
- James Prestwich, Zcash Dev Fund Opinions