Anna (00:03:00):
So this week, Fredrik and I are catching up with Josh Cincinnati. Welcome to the show. Josh.

Josh (00:03:07):
Welcome. Thanks Anna. Thanks Fredrik. Yeah, it's great to be here.

Anna (00:03:10):
It's been a long while that I've been trying to get you to come on this show. Every time that we kind of talked about it, you were sort of in the middle of something, at the Zcash foundation where you were the executive director, you're always in the middle of something. So you were always like, Oh, let's talk after this thing or let's talk after that thing and it didn't end up happening. And so we now have you on the show at a very interesting moment.

Josh (00:03:36):
Yeah. Yes, because I have, I have nothing going on because I'm no longer the executive director of the Zcash foundation. It's real perfect timing actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, I, I think that there's always been, and, and in, in a positive way, there's always been some kind of governance issue that the Zcash foundation has been in embroiled in the middle of. And, and the reason I say it's all positive is, cause I think they've generally resolve themselves in a way that I certainly have always felt pretty good about. And I think that the broader Zcash community felt good about, the problem and part of why I'm no longer the executive director of the Zcash foundation is that, that process itself, when you're in that position can be quite exhausting. It can take a lot out of...

Fredrik:
Sort of the point of a foundation to be embroiled in governance. So it's understandable that that's the case.

Anna (00:04:40):
Before we dive into what's going on now, we actually want to cover in this episode a little bit more about like, I mean, I think that the goal is to like dive into the foundation itself. We never, I mean, we had Henry de Valence on. Oh yeah. We did talk about like the research team of the Zcash foundation.

Fredrik (00:05:02):
It had Amber on before that it would be interesting for me to hear a little bit about what you did before the foundation, because I've interacted with you. I don't know when we first started talking over year or year and a half ago, but I've always just known you as the executive director at the foundation. I don't know much else about you. So it would be interesting to see or to hear a little bit more about your history.

Josh (00:05:27):
Yeah, yeah. So I am terrible at being succinct, which is ironic given the focus on succinctness in my role now, but I will, I will do my best to, to summarize. So I, I am kind of an odd one in, in this field because I actually, I went to business school and I don't like to talk about it because I didn't like this school.

Josh (00:05:51):
It was not, not fun for me. I, I hated it. I mean, I met some, there were some wonderful people I met and it was like that the, some of those people were, were great, but like the, the majority experience is not fun. And I graduated in 2009. So pro tip don't ever graduate in 2009 from business school, not a great time to do that, but I, I actually originally, I was very interested in digital media. I had, I'd gone to business school straight out of undergrad, because I had done a video podcast in 2005 to 2007 at my undergraduate during my undergraduate time. And it was really cool. Like I I've built this thing from the ground up. It was one of the first video podcasts listed on iTunes back when such a thing was possible.

Anna:
Oh my God.

Josh (00:06:39):
Yeah, it was really, it was really fun. And and I really enjoyed it and I wanted to figure out like how to get more involved in that. But I also had a math background and undergrad and a politics background which is important for understanding, I guess, more of what prime me to get interested in this particular industry. So I, I ended up going actually working at the Washington Post after business school for about two years doing like this business development and product management there. And then I caught the startup bug and I was like, I want to make my own digital media thing. So I went in joined an co founded an application, an Android application, a startup, that wasn't really, it was, it was sort of Ad-focused and I didn't really like Ads very much. So it was confusing as to why I was doing that.

Josh (00:07:22):
But, and this, this all ties in, I swear to God it ties into like me actually entering into this field. I had the very good fortune of hiring an Android application developer, who was one of the like earliest members on the Bitcoin talk forums. And I think there is like of people in this field. There's all of us who were, you know, there's a question of like, when were you radicalized? And for me, it was like, it was partially the slash dot article that came, came out like in 2010, 2011 about Bitcoin. But, but that, I, I kind of viewed it as sort of silly and no, like Bitcoin's just drug money or something. There's nothing interesting here. And then I met this engineer who I had the good fortune of hiring, and he actually became much more of a mentor to me and understanding the ethos behind Bitcoin, like in 2012, 2013, unfortunately I was straddled with student debt and quite poor trying to do a startup on a shoestring budget.

Josh (00:08:21):
So I didn't really get to like have a lot of positive exposure to Bitcoin in a financial sense, but I definitely got exposed to the ethos and the technology and the economic incentives behind it. And I was immediately like, I was just, this is, this is the future. And I have to be involved in this. So the startup failed as it, often as those things often do, but that experience with that engineer was really like impactful for me. And it led me to to be basically pursuing a very different kind of career. And so as a result, like I wound up joining BlockCypher as their second employee focused on developer advocacy. So I was a developer advocate and did that for two years. And and that was great. I mean, I, I learned a lot about the ecosystem from the perspective of like a Silicon Valley startup, love the team that I worked with.

Josh (00:09:15):
But then they were, you know, sort of moving toward a different direction when I was leaving, they're more interested in enterprise stuff and that was not as interesting to me. So I kind of took a break from crypto and went and worked at Lyft to be a developer advocate at Lyft for, for a year. And it was during that period when I was taking the break that I was approached by Andrew Miller to help set up the Zcash foundation. And it was sort of a side job for me while I was at Lyft. But in that process you know, I became more and more interested in the work and I became much more sensitive to the privacy issues that surround blockchains today and was really excited about the prospect of like actually building the organization out full time. And that's what led to me becoming a executive director of the Zcash foundation.

Anna (00:10:04):
I wonder like that beginning story of the Zcash foundation, I'm kind of trying to figure out when was that like, was the ECC or at the time the Zcash company, the electric coin company was that, was that already done?

Josh (00:10:17):
Yeah, that was so, so the foundation was really something that was crafted after the fact. So after, you know, the Zcash history and granted a lot of the early stuff, I'm not as familiar with because I really got more involved in 2017, but my understanding is there was the Zerocoin paper that was then improved by a bunch of researchers into the Zerocash paper. The Zerocash paper was the basis for Zcash. And it was effectively Zcash is a project began when those researchers partnered with the group that would become the electric coin company to create Zcash. And I thought, you know, especially as an outsider looking in, I thought that the bootstrap model behind the ECC and the, you know, the investment and the way that they carved out this founder's reward was actually like quite elegant and fair relative to other, you know, other models that were prominent at that time.

Josh (00:11:17):
Namely like premines. So, so I thought that was like quite well done and, and honestly like a pretty good trade off, although I now have very different feelings about dev funds, which we can talk about later. But yeah, you know, I, I mean, I was, I was really impressed with what they were doing, and there was a collection of individuals that were beneficiaries of the founders reward that understood that having a singular group basically have unilateral control over the development of a protocol is, is bad longterm. And so they made pledges to donate a significant portion of the founders reward that they received to set up a nonprofit. And I think, and again, my, I, I joined in like August, 2017 you know, part time, but am I, my understanding is I think the foundation was first formed as like an entity in March of 2017.

Josh (00:12:15):
And it had like a you know, a bootstrap board of, I think, I can't exactly remember the, the order incorrectly of who joined when, but it was basically like, I think Matt...Matt may have joined later. It may have been like Andrew, Peter and Naval. I'm not sure. I don't, I don't recall like exactly who joined at one point, but it may have been Matt, Andrew and Peter, I don't know. But in any event at that point, there was a three person board with the entity that hadn't really been fully formed. Hadn't even gotten nonprofit status from the IRS yet that letter came, I think, right when I joined, like or soon after that it was established as a nonprofit. And then I began an earnest at, around that period to try and set it up into like a, a real organization that was at that point, not the view wasn't really that it would be a counterbalance to the ECC, but then that vision kind of took over in, in 2018 as I, as I took on more of, or more of the reigns. So, yeah, that's like a, that's a bit of the, of like the foundation history in a nutshell,

Fredrik (00:13:21):
What's the significance of getting that nonprofit status, like, what does that actually mean for the organization?

Josh (00:13:27):
Yeah, well, so one, one thing that it means anyone, because of the 501(c)(3) even though we were getting donations from these, these recipients, we could get donations from other folks, individuals or businesses and they would be tax deductible, which is nice. The other piece that I think is kind of important is like in a nonprofit structure, there aren't any like owners of the entity it's it's an organization that is basically structured to further its own mission. And the stakeholders can be basically, it doesn't have to be just shareholders because there are no shareholders it's can be broader community members. And the board has a fiduciary duty to whoever those stakeholders you know, are meant to be. And then I think the other thing that's actually quite critical and, and granted, there are lots of private companies that do a good job of providing like transparency reports and being open about the way that they're spending their money, but in the nonprofit context, in order to maintain your nonprofit status in the US you have to be much, much more public about how you're spending your money, where that money goes.

Josh (00:14:38):
There's something called a form 990 in the US that you're required to file every year as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and the foundations then operations director now just director who's eminently talented Antonie Hodge. She, she understood that she was my first hire and is the one that helped set up all of our sort of reporting to the IRS and, and really handled that quite beautifully. But, but it's something that like, we, you have to be public about. And if unlike, I think a lot of places where, and granted some nonprofits still do a good job of hiding a lot of what they're doing, but that was definitely not mine IMO. And I think it's harder to engage in what people would call creative accounting when you are forced to you know, provide that information to the IRS and publicly.

Josh (00:15:31):
So, so, so yeah, I think that was, those were a bunch of the big differences. I definitely like, for me, it was the first time I'd worked in a nonprofit actually, but it was very refreshing because it felt like we had a very clear cut mission and we could focus on that mission and really like, have more longterm thinking about the way that we were going to operate and build the org. We weren't focused on hypergrowth. We weren't focused on marketing Zcash. We were focused on supporting the ecosystem, filling the gaps that we thought, you know, existed, and then building our own homegrown research team to provide, you know, alternative software for people to use outside of the software that's provided by the ECC. And, and so it's like, it's, it's really like nice to have that kind of focus in, in an organization.

Anna (00:16:24):
And I found interesting about the Zcash foundation with its dev team model is that the foundation's actually based in the US because you see all of these other teams where they'll have a foundation as well, and they're based in Switzerland. Was that even a thought, do you know? I mean, I know that you weren't necessarily there at the decision making moment, but like, was there a reason they made it in the US？

Josh (00:16:45):
Actually well, so part of it is I think that the there was a bit of momentum there, right? Like, cause the ECC was established as a US-based company. And so I think there was like part of the reason is that so many people that were interested in establishing the foundation were associated with the ECC. They knew how to go about setting up US-based entities. They didn't want to like mess with that, but even if I hadn't been involved, I would have pushed for it being a US-based entity, because I think there's, I don't know if this is universally true, but I think there is something that at least there's a perception that US-based nonprofits have a higher threshold for for transparency compared to other international nonprofits. And I know it's kind of weird for me to say that when the nonprofit that I was involved with is focused very deeply on privacy.

Josh (00:17:41):
But, but the privacy it's, it's, you know, I, I know I've heard someone in the Ethereum community say this and I think they were maybe paraphrasing someone else, but it's, it's this idea of and I, I feel bad. I can't credit them with this. I can't remember who it was, but it was something like privacy for individuals, but, you know, transparency for organizations, institutions. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's, and it's like that, that is the right balance here. And to me anyway, it felt like, you know, having the Zcash foundation be a US-based nonprofit kind of forces us to be to hold ourselves to a higher standard. And I know that that's not, again, that's not universally true. There's some US nonprofits that are extremely sketchy that do sketchy things. There are some comparatively there's some, you know, Swiss or other international nonprofits that are way more above board than those. So I, you know, that's just, that's not a not a universal rule, but, but I think there is like a general expectation.

Fredrik (00:18:41):
I think the main thing would be that it's, it's different. I mean, that, that alone is sets a sort of tone. Why is it different? And like, you, you think about it a little bit more. I mean, because like the, the majority of foundations that I know of, they're all Swiss based and there's like, if you're actually a nonprofit in Switzerland, like the regulation is crazy as well. Like you, you have a super trend, like transparency oriented. The thing is almost no, no like cryptocurrency foundations in Switzerland are nonprofits. They're a different class of organization that isn't a nonprofit organization. It also, isn't like a for-profit private company, but it's this middle thing. And going with the nonprofit status is, I mean, like you're talking about, it's a signal of trust that it's, I mean, it doesn't really matter how much transparency is there or not. I mean, it's just like, we're trying it's that signal.

Josh (00:19:42):
Yeah, yeah. That's a, that's a great, that's a great point like that, that is a, I think part of what entered into the equation to the people deciding to go, to, to go this route. And it's, I mean, I, I know nothing about Swiss non-profits or Swiss for-profits, but it does not surprise me that there would be many many cryptocurrency or that would decide to find the, the status that would enable them to operate with maybe a maximal amount of opacity. And like, sometimes there's, there's reason for that. Like, I, I'm not, not to cast aspersions on, on everyone who's doing that. I think a lot of the times it's like you want some people want control and want that privacy in the way that they handle, you know, their organizations. And like, oftentimes it's sort of provides meaningful benefit for them to make decisions that look short term bad for their community, maybe, but our longterm good. So like, I, I see the trade off,

Fredrik (00:20:40):
But there's another thing too, that is that sets the Zcash foundation apart. And that the foundation was created after the token was created.

Josh (00:20:50):
And in many foundations, the foundation is created as a legal protection entity, because I mean, if we take Switzerland as an example, they have clear regulation around what you're allowed to do. The US does not. And so if you're a, an entity launching a token in the US you're living under extreme uncertainty, if you're a Swiss entity launching a token, it's still uncertain, but much less so. And so, because the token was already launched the foundation, doesn't have to worry about that. It's not going to get under the foot of the SEC because it's, you know, trying to defraud investors or anything like that, all that is already done,

Anna (00:21:31):
Not the defrauding part, but yeah, I hope

Josh (00:21:37):
But yeah, no, there's, there's, there is, I think you know, there, there is still some risk there though, you know, cause there's always like, even with Ethereum you know, which now seems very strongly in the, not a security camp, but that wasn't always the case, you know initially and, and I think like, you know, there was, there was a little bit of like unknown or uncertain potential outcomes even with the foundation being established after the fact. But I think part of the motivation for creating it was in fact, a set precedent that yes, you can have a cryptocurrency-focused, US-based nonprofit operating in good faith executing on its mission and doing, you know, doing all the right things. And this was an opportunity to demonstrate that to, you know, so, I mean, I can't, I know that there were other, there were other cryptocurrency nonprofits that existed before the Zcash foundation, but it may have been one of the first 501(c)(3). Don't quote me.

Anna (00:22:38):
Maybe the most well known, at least in our community. You see, the Zero Knowledge podcast community.

Josh (00:22:45):
Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

Anna (00:22:47):
Let's so let's talk a little bit more about Zcash and that ecosystem. As Frederick mentioned, we have had a few people on who did talk about like a little bit of governance. We've had a number of engineers from the ECC, come on and talk about various protocols. We've had Zooko on, I did an event episode on Zcon0, where you sadly, we're not asked, but I I've had a chance to interview a number of people who are participating kind of like trying to get a sense of the vibe that's happening there. It feels like a very long time ago. Now it's wild. And I'll add, by the way, I'll add all of this in the show notes for anyone who wants to listen to some of those other episodes, but I guess like from your perspective, what is Zcash actually?

Josh (00:23:34):
That is, that is a great question. So for me like Zcash is the, the it's, it's the exit option for people who demand privacy in, in crypto system, so it's, if you're, you know, if you, if you require payment rails or require a way to obfuscate your payments Zcash is the way to do it. And it's backed by not just, you know, proof of work mining, but the fact that there is like a robust governance structure that so far has, I think, prevented any anyone from having, you know, overwhelming power to change the direction of the protocol and, and further backed by some of those brilliant engineers that you've had on both from the ECC and, and the Zcash foundation that are like very much aligned with improving the fundamental protocol and privacy as a whole and in cryptocurrency systems. And that's like, you know, some of that, I think vision is maybe aspirational because it's, it's still not very easy to trustlessly get directly on to Zcash. And obviously, like there are lots of people have various opinions about, I hate transparent addresses. I hate that they exist. I, I really would prefer that they didn't, but then again, like that's the convenient mechanism for people like I even for, for this podcast, the donation address...

Anna (00:25:06):
I've, I've had one request to get those, and I actually started to do the research into the wallets and you can probably help me set this up. I just, I just haven't gotten around to setting it up, but I should.

Josh (00:25:21):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then, you know, I, I, I think people have different perspectives on this, but that is something that like, so part of that vision that I, I I've, or my view of what's the Zcash should be, is indeed informed by things that don't like, there's not really great shielded infrastructure yet for things like multisig or hardware wallets. And only recently light wallets, which was sort of a combined effort from the ECC building their light client library, and then from the foundation supporting one of the biggest now multi-platform Zcash wallets around DTS work, which has just been phenomenal ZEC wallet and ZEC wallet light. So, so, you know, there's, there are pieces that still don't exist to make that sort of fully shielded reality of thing. And then on top of that, like some of those pieces that don't exist are preventing Zcash from having sort of seamless trustless swaps with other assets in places like Ethereum, Cosmos, Polkadot, like there there's all this opportunity to engage in trustless, private swaps that doesn't quite exist yet.

Josh (00:26:32):
We are, sorry, I can't say we anymore. Cause I'm not at the foundation, but the foundation would very much love to see that happen. Yeah, I, I I honestly, I do, you know, to be, to be blunt about the governance side of Zcash. I know you didn't ask this question, but I did not expect my job to revolve around governance crises when I joined, I expected it to be, Oh, I'm setting up like a nonprofit focused on zero knowledge and privacy research. And I was going to like build the team. And then I have to do like a little we're we're, we're kind of like an arbiter for some governance decisions. So I'll just have to do a little bit of that, but that wound up becoming something like 70 or 80% of my job which was, which was sort of surprising.

Josh (00:27:19):
And, and I think, you know, there, there are sort of crisis moments that we had that I can talk about at length that, that that's what elevated that you know, or what would have escalated or made, you know, made more prominent. I don't know, but, but there's, there's definitely like, it was sort of unexpected. But the, the, I think the positive conclusion to that is as a result of all that effort, I think Zcash now is viewed as having a much more like robust governance process then certainly yeah, certainly before the foundation existed.

Anna (00:27:52):
So you've just hinted at it a few times, this governance process, the fact that you had to get more involved in the governance than you expected. And at least from the outside perspective, it looked like at the core of this kind of governance debate, at least one of them was this dev fund and this was the founder's reward and like how it was distributed out, let's learn a little bit more about this founder's reward and what that was.

Josh (00:28:19):
Yeah. So the founders reward and I might not be the best resource for talking about the founders rewards since it was established, you know, before, before I joined and everything, but like the idea behind the founders reward, I think for a lot of people in the Zcash ecosystem, especially in 2016, 2017, when it launched was this was a bootstrapping mechanism to support the people that were taking a risk to launch Zcash and to support the companies and early, or the company and the early employees of that company that were similarly taking like, you know, personal risk and, and trying to build this out. And, you know, the foundation was obviously a beneficiary of the founders award because there were a group of people in those early risk takers that decided to pledge a very significant portion initially 260,000 ZEC over four years.

Josh (00:29:13):
But then that was reduced to 220 230, I think, I think 220,000 ZEC over four years instead. And the reason, so part of that is the, the reason there was that solution is that there was this I think renegotiation of the founders award among all of those recipients to bolster the ECCs treasury. And that's why like the foundation wound up with like slightly, slightly less. So, so one of the things that has been like clear in, in, in Zcash is like the ECC is the, is the like prime entity that's doing the majority of research and development or, or at least was, I would say 2016 to 2018 19, you know and then the foundation started getting more involved and we've now got this like, you know, world class engineering team that's about to ship like you know, and Henry, Henry talks about it on on, on that show.

Josh (00:30:15):
But like, you know, there's, there's like a lot more work that the foundation is doing in that regard, but that wasn't really true. I think when people started considering like, well, what are we going to do when the founder founders reward runs out? Because it was not the founders award initially it was not conceived as a revenue source for the ECC, or really as a funding source for the foundation. It was a reward mechanism to bootstrap the ecosystem. And one that like was targeted to the people that were taking the risk to support it early on, but in a, you know, unlike a pre-mine or something else, it was a sort of vested-like you know, there's a longer term, you know like time locked aspect of it. Since, since you didn't get access to those coins immediately.

Anna (00:31:05):
So you arrived two years when, when did it start? When was that four year period?

Josh (00:31:11):
So it started Zcash launched October, 2016. And so the founders reward was, you know minting, minting coins at that point. And there was also, so Zcash had a slow emission startup too. So it was actually like, and I don't, again, I don't know the exact cause I was not deep in the code, but the like actual mining reward started out much smaller than the current mining reward. But it does otherwise follow the same Bitcoin reward schedule. So halves every four years.

Anna (00:31:45):
And this was set for four years, starting from that point in October getting increasingly large. And you joined in..., so you joined about like nine months or 10 months after it started and you started this, you started working on the foundation and then at some point everybody realized, I guess, that this was gonna end. So was that the first big problem or battle or was it more like, was there something before then?

Josh (00:32:15):
There was something slightly before then, that was actually not even that much of a conflict. It was more of a, it was more of a, Oh, the foundation was losing a board members. So two board members left and it was right before Zcon0 actually, and we viewed it as an opportunity to like, Oh, well, let's, let's try and like create an avenue for more community input. So it was that summer and again, as much of a crisis, but more of a let's figure out how to like involve more community members and foundation governance and make the foundation more of a voice of the community. And the way that we did that, as we established what was then called the community governance panel now called the community advisory panel and anyone in the Zcash community could be a part of it. They just had to email us and we reserved the right to like reject anyone that seemed to be an outright scammer.

Josh (00:30:06):
And we only had to reject two people. And I don't want to call them out, but you can look it up. It's on GitHub. It's pretty funny who we rejected, but in any event I'm like everyone else was included in that panel that wanted to be, and then on top of that, anyone outside of the Zcash community could open up a GitHub, you know, pull request to establish their candidacy for the board of the Zcash foundation. And we wound up, I think maybe we got like 10 to 12 candidates, maybe a exact numbers family, me, but we ended up electing Amber and Ian. And it was an advisory vote, but obviously Ian and Amber like wonderful people to be on the board, the existing Zcash foundation board had no problem affirming the community's recommendation and, you know, they voted them in. So that was like the first like kind of governance experience I think we had on the foundation side and that like advisory panel and the positive results of it. I think informed how we approached the future crises.

Anna (00:34:11):
When did the actual, like, when did this even come up? Like, I remember you actually explaining something to me. I think it was like in Japan Devcon or something like that, but you were saying that like a lot of the decision making for this fund for this four year plan would actually have to happen a year before the end of it or something like that. There was like this this longer you had to, you actually had to start a bit earlier in on this conversation.

Josh (00:34:37):
Yeah. I think part, part of the reason for that was that there is, there is a network upgrade pipeline process that defines how Zcash, hard fork upgrades work and it involved, it was sort of established by the ECC and involved in involves a number of steps that take a lot of time to start in order to like, feel comfortable with engaging in a hard fork. And it's, you know, there's, there's a lot of I think that it was crafted with caution in mind but it coincidentally it, it also, I think demanded that we start talking about this sooner than I think a lot of people expected it would be talked about. The other piece that I think is important to consider, especially when talking about a new dev fund that people were not anticipating is you have to think about like the miner life cycle and how they view, you know, perspective, profit as a proof of work miner.

Josh (00:25:39):
So if you give them a weak warning that, Hey, you're going to get 20% less than what you expected because the community, you know, have voted for this new dev fund, that would be very bad. Right. And that would, that would be problematic for any number of reasons. Whereas like, if you're telling everyone a year in advance that like, Hey, just FYI and say, you're telling anyone it's not really accurate. It's more like there's going to be this piece of software that lots of people choose to run that affirms that this is the hard fork upgrade of Zcash and so on. So like, you know, I have to be careful about what, what is actually being said or delivered there, but in any event, like if it's clear that there is an upgrade that includes a dev fund and miners know about it a year in advance, then they won't be nearly as upset because it won't be lost revenue for them because they're going to be new ASICs out at that point that have different, you know, and they're going to have the completely, like it's sort of unknown, like trying to even plan cashflow and profit at that period anyway.

Josh (00:33:48):
So it's, it's, it's much more accommodating to the people securing your network to be upfront and open about the fact that something like that was going to happen with lots of time, given time to prep. Yeah. So I think that was also a big motivation. I don't know. I can't really pinpoint exactly when I heard about the possibility for a new dev fund. I will say that it seems like I heard rumors of people being interested in such a thing before the first public form mention of it. And I gotta be honest. I didn't like hearing rumors about it before the first public form mentioned. I don't think that is really great. Like if I think if people were interested in carving that path out, they should have been more public and open about it earlier on personally.

Anna:
So I think what you're, what I hear is a little bit, like there was rumbling, like there was sort of a, a plan of forming and it wasn't necessarily completely with the community involved in that part.

Josh:
Yeah. I mean, I think the community became very involved soon after that, but certainly prior to that, it seemed like it was more of a closed door process. That was not very open that even the initiation of such a thing,

Fredrik (00:38:10):
I think that's natural though, where, I mean, the people involved, like the people who would be proposing this, if they can't agree amongst each other, that there should be proposed. Like it's obviously dangerous to go out with it in public. As soon as you say anything in public, it's like, Oh, this is going to happen. This is what they're pushing for. And then if, if someone puts out, like if I don't know, Zooko put out an idea like, Hey, maybe we should have that. And then other Zcash engineers chime in and say, no, we probably shouldn't or this or that. It looks, I mean, it's, it's weird in that internal sense. It might make sense from a public sense, but it's, I can totally understand wanting to get aligned with your friends first and then proposing something coherent together rather than like, Oh, we're going to have this whole, you know, internal debate in public as well.

Josh (00:39:03):
I wonder, it sounds like...

Fredrik (00:39:05):
You're right at the end of the day, it should, should be in public, but it's, I can understand it's super hard.

Anna (00:39:10):
Sounds a little bit like Josh, you have, like, it sounds like, like your philosophy of transparency is very present here where you, like, do you not also agree with that? The fact that like, maybe having that debate in public would have actually been messier.

Josh:
Oh yeah. But it wound up being messy anyway, I guess. So it wound up being messy anyway. And my, my view is like if I had been the originator of an additional dev fund and I had talked to a number of people beforehand about how they feel and whether they would support that publicly and then someone out, you know, out of the woodwork of those conversations, someone publicly suggests it. I would feel disingenuous about that series of events now, other people, I think other people wouldn't, right. And that's, that's like, you know, that's a difference of opinion.

Josh (00:40:07):
And, and I see like Frederick, I see the point that you were making, right. That, that there is an importance about like internal alignment, like within a given organization and the like, but, you know, I think that the, the foundation, like really didn't start considering the possibility of the dev fund. I can tell you, at least from like board discussions that, that were happening at the time. And those are like also like, you know, we have some limited board notes that are available that people can see, but like, we didn't really even think about it until those public, like a discussion started happening and then the board, so all of this was happening in parallel, by the way. So there's another wrinkle to this is that regardless of like, this is sort of orthogonal, but important when considering the dev fund that like at that point, like 2018 to 2019 was when this sort of vision of like 2-of-2 multisig governance came to be where there would be this like shared affirmation of like what's the cash is between the foundation and the ECC.

Josh (00:41:08):
And even actually at like Devcon for, I think I, I made a big presentation about it where I sort of like tried to articulate my view of how Zcash governance should go forward. And as centerpiece of that vision was this idea that there would be shared some kind of novel shared trademark between the foundation and the ECC.

Anna:
I remember that.

Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. And so it was like, that was, that was a keystone of this plan and the other, the other piece of it as, as a Frederick knows, is like, we wanted the foundation to have independent develop node software that so there's the sort of like, there's the legal, you know the legal affirmation of that 2-of-2 multisig model. And then there's a, like practical, real politic. We have a node where we like have more control over the upgrade and development process.

Josh (00:42:09):
And, you know, there, there would be sort of the shared network infrastructure then.

Anna:
And here, you're talking about the Zebra client, which is, was originally developed by the Parity team. Just so that's the connection that was developed by the Parity team and then sort of hand it over to the foundation to maintain and continue building on in Rust.

Josh:
Yep. Yeah, yeah. And there's yeah. Yeah. And there's like, you know, the, the current Zebra client is like like a new, a new code base entirely just because there've been like advances in rust since the you know, the original Zebra client was developed by Parity, and the original Bitcoin, the original, and the original Bitcoin client, but like Parity showed us the way. And like, we're very, very grateful that the Zcash foundation is very grateful that we had that opportunity.

Fredrik (00:42:58):
And like the, the node, as you say, and I always found this interesting in the Ethereum debates are going on. There's so few people who realize who actually has power and, and the people who actually have power are the ones that are in control of the software. And it is not only the devs who are in control of the software. There are also, you know, community aspect to that. And there's, there's, it's multifaceted in itself, but like at the very end of the day, if the foundation disagreed with a ZIP, the only tool it would have to oppose that would be to release another client without that ZIP implemented like that practically that's the only thing that you could actually do. And so if you didn't have any sort of node or any technical ability to do that, then obviously you couldn't actually practically oppose anything.

Josh (00:43:51):
That's right. And like the, the, the legal, the sort of legal trademark thing is really I mean, it's, it's still, it's like somewhat important for if you're interacting with like US-based exchanges and you want to tell them, no, you can't call that Zcash because we haven't agreed on this, you know, hard fork upgrade like that has some power, but I think you're right, Frederick that it doesn't really, the real power is in the software. That's being run the development process around that software who controls what upgrades get into that software. And, and never has that been more clear than like in the ensuing dev fund debate where it was actually like a prominent enough upgrade that you, the ECC or the foundation would have been able to sneak in like that ZIP without broad, you know, like we could be like, yeah, a hundred percent of the validation like that. No, that would not have worked and feel pretty terrible to do that. I think

Anna (00:44:45):
It was the dev fund. And just to kind of like clarify that the dev fund was hard coded into the, like, the way mining rewards are hard, coded into a blockchain, the dev fund allocation was also hard-coded. And so you would have needed, you need to have some sort of agreement, I guess, or someone to push that into the code base itself.

Josh (00:45:05):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And, and, and so, yeah, there was, I know I've, I've if I had a podcast, I think it'd be called tangents cause I get on so many of them. So I apologize, but, but there's, there's reason to talk about this. Like the reason the foundation wanted to note and this trademark piece, right. Because we, or when I was at the foundation, we believed in this vision of 2-2 multisig and that became like really clear and important in this ensuing debate. So, okay. We have that trademark dream, but that agreement actually hasn't been struck yet. It was still being sort of envisioned and articulated in late 2018. There is ongoing negotiation between the ECC and the foundation to try and establish that trademark agreement. I should note that initially the original vision for the trademark was that it would just be donated to the foundation.

Josh (00:45:53):
But I think both the foundation and ECC saw this two-of-two multisig opportunity as being more robust than simply like the foundation having unilateral control over the mark. Okay. So that's all set up dev fund discussion starts in earnest in May, June, and you get to see all these people talking about like, what should we do? How should we, you know, what, what are, you know, we should maybe have a dev fund because clearly, like there are needs for further development and maintenance and it's an opportunity to maybe expand the, you know, who gets what funding. But then we at the foundation at the time, like we were still mulling, like what our approach would be. Should we even accept a dev fund? Like this seems like, like I gotta be honest. And I'm, I'm very happy with the outcome just to be clear that said, like, I think the community's outcome far diverges from my own personal preference, which would have been no dev fund whatsoever.

Josh (00:46:55):
I was actually on the hawkish hawkish side of of the, of the spectrum when discussing this internally in the foundation, because when I started using Zcash as a community member, it was my understanding. I felt like there was this implicit view that the founder's reward was basically like the you know, the bootstrapping mechanism. It was not a like endless supply of native asset for either, you know, a particular company or a foundation or any other entity. It was, or like a, you know, DAO treasury or anything. Like it was just, it was there to set things up and then it would just be sort of free market reign and see, you know, see what happens. And, you know, I ended up being somewhat practically, like overruled, because there was community a very strong community contingent, which makes sense.

Josh (00:47:50):
And I should be overruled if that was the case, but then, you know, there's also this I think the research that the ECC engineering team is doing is really important and critical to critical to furthering not just the Zcash, but other privacy research. And then, you know, on the foundation side, there's an argument to be made that like the work that we were ramping up to do, and especially I think with the release of Zebra, once that comes out and, and the various other ways that we're controlling to privacy, like one could make the argument that like that's, you know, really worthwhile and worth continuing on and changing the social contract a bit. However, as you may have seen from like my farewell letter, I don't think that people involved in architecting those processes should be beneficiaries of them, but that's that's another sort of another angle there.

Anna:
Let's map out a little bit what was going on here. So you sort of said, you put yourself in this hawkish camp that you felt like as a, as a community member, you saw this as sort of a temporary bootstrap mechanism, but what was like, were there other, maybe we can describe what were the other kind of camps into? Like what, how do they...

Fredrik (00:49:04):
Yeah, I really curious to hear, especially because, I mean, I was following some of the debates and there's obviously pro and con and like there's clearly two accounts for any opinion and they have various arguments of various quality. One thing that I, I think like from my impression, everyone seems to agree that people should get paid for their work. The ECC is doing valuable work for Zcash. I mean, both in terms of direct, like now ongoing development work on the clients, as well as the research to like shard it and do like scalability work and all this stuff in the future. But at the core it's like people should get paid for their work, but there was in the like against camp, there were these super weird arguments of like, Oh, but they already got their money. They should have been done by now with that money.

Fredrik (00:50:04):
Like if they're not done, they're incompetent and they shouldn't get more money. And then in the pro camp, it's like, Oh no, we need to just give as much money to these people as possible because of the entire future of the coin relies on them. And what's the spectrum, like speaking about these camps? I don't think it's just interesting to say just like there were people for or against, but like, what are the complaints like, why do, why are people opposed? I mean, is it a political thing or is it that they actually think that, you know, they, they want to get more for their money?

Josh (00:50:36):
Well, you know, I actually, so part of I can tell you from like one extreme of that spectrum, which was me as, as a personal community member, not a, not a representative of the foundation my opposition was about like it more on the implicit social contract side and less and less about like, you know, that they should be done. Right. It's more that, like when this was sort of established, it seemed like, and there was never, of course an explicit promise made, but it seemed like there was an implicit promise that the founders rewards would be it. And, and honestly, like I think people from the ECC would probably point at the way that I ran the foundation as being too conservative and not willing to spend as much money as, as rapidly, but one could make the argument that the ECC for all of the, you know, beneficial research that they've, that they've done and everything that they've done to support Zcash, there are a lot of ways in which I think they maybe have not spent money as effectively as they could have.

Josh (00:51:36):
Right. And I think that was the, the strongest argument against, from a purely like practical perspective is like, what is the mechanism by which you can enforce fiduciary discipline? And at least on the foundation side you know, my perspective while I was there was that, well, we have a board, I answered to that board. If I spend money in a bad way, the board is going to let me go. Like, that's, you know, I resigned, they didn't fire me just to be. But so that didn't happen. Don't think of, but, but still there's like this checks and balances, whereas especially for the first part of the ECCs existence, you know, it was a private company and it was their right to keep that private, but they're operating in a very different environment than most private companies. And I think that there was legitimate concern about the way that money was being spent.

Josh (00:52:37):
And so, so I think that what you actually wind up seeing, and I I'm really, it's something that maybe now is sort of under the radar, but I'm really proud of the stance that the foundation took in August of 2018 or sorry, was it no 2019, 2019? So I might be mistaking my I'm so sorry. It was 2019. So like May, 2019 is when this sort of started August, 2019 is when the foundation made, you know, made the statement. And that statement literally took like so much corralling of all of the members of the foundation, board of understanding where the community was. And it was I think quite a, an like an, an elegant sort of response about the you know, people, people wanted there to be a dev fund. The foundation took the stance of like, okay, you know what? We can see that working here are the ways in which we would like to judge community sentiment for accepting it.

Josh (00:53:33):
And here are the things that the foundation wants to ensure that there will be like fiscal discipline and transparency for the people that wind up accepting the dev fund. And, you know, again, I personally would prefer no dev fund at all, but that con that sort of conclusion about here are the things that we like would like to see happen on the ECC or on any like proposal and, you know, proposal for funding them and funding the foundation and funding any outside group. Here's how we would like to go about doing that. And, and then also here are the three ways. So we had three different methods of collecting community sentiment that we were going to use to inform the foundation's input into the trademark agreement that had not yet been signed at that point which is a key part to this chaotic struggle. I really, and, and maybe, maybe it's something you could add as a link. Cause I, I actually really proud of that, of that statement, even though it was, it was just a statement, but it was something that was like took a very long amount of debate and discussion internally to come up with what we thought was the most pragmatic. And and I think ethical way to approach the possibility of a, of a, of a new dev fund.

Anna (00:54:50):
Like had anybody like it. Cause now, cause now I think this is sort of opening up this, this issue a little bit where there was this dev fund and it was going to be potentially partly allocated to the foundation, partly allocated to the ECC, the foundation operating as this US-based nonprofit with certain rules and regulations and a board and then the ECC not. So was it just like, was there ever a proposal to do it all through the foundation?

Josh (00:55:16):
I think so. I think in that statement, we outright rejected the possibility of the foundation accepting all of the dev fund. Cause we didn't like you know, it's it's no, no, no, no, no, well, no, no, no. It's just like, I think that the foundation, but the foundation's vision was for that like multisig governance model and we didn't want to distribute power away just to reassemble it into a centralized structure, that was the foundation. Right. so that was at least, especially from my perspective, not something that was you know, that we were willing to entertain at that point. And I don't think really ever, like I think that whatever the result of the dev fund was, the foundation did not want to be the sole beneficiary. 

Fredrik (00:56:04):
I think it, it totally makes sense that there should be checks and balances on anyone receiving anything. Right. And it is obviously a problem in like, especially when it's such a long period of like here's a bunch of money to spend or four years, I mean that could go anywhere. You have no guarantees what it's going to result in whatsoever. And so I totally understand that mean you could imagine structures that introduces checks and balances, but then adds overhead. But in this, this document that you talked about, you outlined here are things that makes this acceptable to us, kind of what is the document like what would be the dream that takes it from this is acceptable to, this is something good. This is what a good way of rewarding developers is.

Josh (00:56:50):
Yeah, well honestly I think the end result is pretty close to that. Because the end result was, I did want to, there's just no time, but I did want to focus a little bit on like what wound, because there is a crisis within a crisis, like an inception moment. But let me just to hint at that, to hit the answer to that question is like the end result, I think, was a good outcome for everyone involved and involved. Basically the same level of transparency that was required of the foundation is required of the ECC. It demanded that that none of the dev fund proceeds would go to any like future investors. It was above the ECC. It was very clear that like, it should only be rewarded. It should only be not rewarded, but like given his payment to people that are working on, you know, furthering the protocol and privacy tech and, you know, whatever operations are supplementary to that.

Josh (00:57:46):
So it was not, it was effectively like the end ZIP turned the ECC into a nonprofit practically, like at least in the way that it's supposed to is supposed to operate. And that is like what the foundation wanted. And, and what the community wanted to be clear. I think like it's not, not just like we harangued the ECC into making this. I think it's like the more that this was discussed it, the more it became clear that like, that was a better model rather than like having a some kind of limited liability corporation that, you know, where we're early investors get to accrue more of the gains from protocol reward, which seems weird to me. Like, and it sort of seems that's the problem fundamentally with any of these dev fund rewards is like when you're talking about accountability in like the business world, you're ultimately accountable to your bottom line, because if you aren't profitable, you won't survive as a business.

Josh (00:58:41):
Right. And the, the, the real danger with, I think, a protocol reward without adequate controls or adequate like transparency requirements, or if there is no way to take away that reward, there is literally no signal for that group you know, if they are a business, like if they're a business and they care about profit maximization, then they're going to reduce their costs. I'm not saying the ECC would do this, but there is like this, like kind of contradictory work against itself. Somehow it would work like you would be like, okay, well, I have a duty to my stakeholders. And that says that I should minimize my costs and get this free revenue and, you know, send it over to them. And that little granted like nonprofits with no shareholders, they have, I think sort of a similar problem in that like a lot of the times it just enriches the people that are high level, you know, high level at that, at those nonprofits.

Josh (00:59:44):
Right. So it's not like that's, that's a unique problem, but it's, I think it's particularly acute to like the protocol reward directly to a, for-profit entity. And, and that's, what's like that, that is what the foundation I think came out you know, against, and, and the end result after all of this you know, this, these governance processes and this discussion debate was I think like ample amount of protection and requiring the same level of transparency. And I actually, like, I, I wouldn't be surprised because the ECC has said that they are interested in figuring out some way to convert to a nonprofit. So I, I wouldn't be surprised if they actually go go back and do that. Yeah.

Anna (01:00:26):
And you just mentioned a crisis in a crisis. Can you talk about what that was?

Josh (01:00:32):
Yeah, of course, of course this is like full inception.

Anna (01:00:35):
We've sort of put the conclusion upfront. We now know what happens, but we're going to take them off. We're going to take a step back and learn how you got there.

Josh (01:00:44):
Yeah. Yeah. So August, 2019, we put that statement out, lots of proposals start emerging for what people want to see in in the dev fund. And then out of the blue the ECC comes out and says, Hey, you know, that trademark agreement that we've been negotiating, we think it'd be great if it was like more parties to it. And rather than just adding extra, extra parties to it. And at least on the foundation side, we saw that as, as like that was core to dis you know, us being able to achieve legitimacy in the dev fund process was like, we've been operating under the impression of this 2-of-2 multisig being the you know, with the trademark being the predominant way for us to like to both establish legitimacy over the process and to exercise the foundation and community's voice in that process. And all of a sudden someone from the ECC says, now, we're, we're going to add, we want to add more people to it.

Anna:
Who would be the people?

Josh:
I mean, you know, Zooko...

Anna (01:01:52):
But it will be individuals as well as the two...

Josh (01:01:57):
Oh, sorry, sorry. You mean, the people that were added. Zooko was the one that proposed this, I don't know who the, that was the weirdest thing is that it was unclear like who the other parties would be like, and as yet established as yet, unestablished third party. Now, granted, we now have a third party that's being established through the ZIP process. And if they prove themselves out as like a you know, a, a strong steward of the project, then maybe they can be added to that trademark agreement at some point. I mean, it's definitely out of my hands at this ...

Anna (01:02:29):
At that time it's center wrench into what your understanding of like, yeah.

Josh (01:02:35):
And, and, and not just mine, I mean, literally across the community, everyone I think was so Zcash foundation, board members, myself lots of community members were like, this was a promise that was made the community and the foundation is operating under the impression that this was going to be signed and executed on before a dev fund, like decision was even going to be made by the community. And and so what wound up happening is, you know, we were obviously I mean, we were upset about it, and it was, it was certainly personally upsetting to me like that was, I think, part of the personal toll that that felt like pretty stark for me, but like ultimately what wound up happening is the foundation leveraged something. The only thing that we had at that point, which was our reputation and we, we said, we're not going to continue adjudicating the decision making process for this dev fund until the ECC comes back to the negotiating table, reaffirms that we're having this two of two multisig agreement.

Josh (01:03:41):
And then we will restart the process that we said we were going to restart. And we made that public statement and obviously, you know, made our counterparties probably a little upset. And it delayed the decision making process quite a bit, you know? So we didn't really have a full, you know, dev fund agreement until February of this year, as opposed to like what I think people were expecting like November or December. But yeah, it was, we did wind up like as a result of that public statements and and us putting, pressing the pause button we did get a two of two multisig style trademark agreement where the foundation owns the mark and is bearing the costs of all of the trademark protection, while the ECC has input into what defines Zcash. And if we don't have agreement, there's like an escalation. And it's all, it's all like centered around community voice. I gotta be honest though, again, me as just an individual, not as a foundation member, I would a hundred percent prefer there is no trademark agreement and there's no trademark whatsoever by IP. I just don't, I don't like, I don't like intellectual property at all.

Anna (01:04:52):
This is what I want to, I kind of want to ask you about like, cause you wearing two hats all the time, and this must be exhausting. There was like you as a community member who had, you know, hawkish somewhat out, like on the far end feelings about a lot of this stuff. And then at the same time having to represent and argue for kind of a middle, or I know some who might've called it conservative, but like something far from your actual opinion.

Josh (01:05:21):
Yeah. And, and, you know all due credit to my personal opinions, I think it was that middle compromise, you know, perspective that led to a better outcome. Yeah. You know, to be honest, like I think if regardless of the outcome to your specific question, yes, it was exhausting. Yes. I felt like a little bit out of body and not in a fun way. Like in a way where I felt like I was two people kind of battling with myself internally and I had to, you know, because I, I taking on the job was me taking on the job to represent the best interests of the foundation of the project of private money in general. And not like me as having like personal views about how I wanted the, like what, what I would view personally, as ideal if I had like unilateral control for everything. Right. It's a hard thing to do. And it's why I'm, it's one of the main reasons I'm not still there because I can't, I don't think I could keep doing it, you know? And I think it's perfectly natural to like want to step away when that becomes like, like too difficult to do.

Anna (01:06:34):
I think that's so common and not only you're in this kind of space, but, you know, when I, when I was doing my startup and had to do excessive amounts of sales, which isn't my favorite thing to do definitely like you had to wear a hat that didn't quite fit felt kind of icky. Right, right, right. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I never, I never

Josh (01:06:55):
Felt like truly icky about the way that the foundation acted or represented. But I did feel like I wasn't fully myself, you know, and, and I'm, I mean, I'm, I'm really grateful that I had the opportunity to do all of that work with all those, all the wonderful people that are now a part of the foundation. And they're going to continue to do amazing work without me, probably more effectively without me, to be honest. Because, you know, the, the other reason like that I left is like, I, that was a very like strange moment, those negotiations, the fallout of those negotiations. I really feel like there's mutual trust that was lost. And I think there's like a divergence of perspective in how, you know, how, how these decisions should be made. And as I sort of alluded to earlier, and like, I think it's, it's like unfair.

Josh (01:07:50):
It would have been unfair for me to like, keep trying to like work in that environment and hold onto power when I wouldn't ever really be that effective at being like a collaborative counterparty, you know? And I it's been better, you know, it's, it's better for me to like, recognize that and to take a step back and give the foundation an opportunity to truly like shine without some of that like baggage that was necessary to create in order to like, represent the best interests of the Zcash community and to like push back on overreach, I think by by the ECC. But you know, it was ultimately caused caused some harm to my interpersonal relationship with I think, ECC management. And and that's, that's like that's normal, I think, in these sorts of things. And I think it's, it's just, it's sometimes can be hard to recognize it and harder to even say like, Oh, I should maybe step back and let someone else try it.

Anna (01:08:54):
In the letter you wrote where you announced that you were leaving the foundation, you had this whole section, which was like advice to the community. Can you say something about that? Like what, what is your advice to the community?

Josh (01:09:05):
I, I mean, from my perspective, I will say that that advice was given with the understanding that the Zcash community is already in a pretty good spot. You know, we've gone through a fairly contentious, but amicable governance process and the result was predominantly positive, but I think there are things that Zcash and other cryptocurrency communities can learn from other projects. And part of the crux of that letter was that we should be learning those things. Right. So I think just to try to summarize in the most succinct way possible, one of the greatest gifts that I think Satoshi Nakamoto ever gave the Bitcoin community was leaving, not letting that community fall under the spell of a single, you know, charismatic founder and, and instead letting it organically grow and stand on its own two feet. Now, obviously, I mean, I, I, I love Bitcoin.

Josh (01:10:07):
There are pluses and minuses to the way that the quaint community currently works. But that action in and of itself was I think one of the strongest aspects of Bitcoin is that it is pretty much like a leaderless organically self perpetuating cryptocurrency community. And that's a remarkable feat. And I think that, you know, for me, what I really wanted when I was part of the Zcash foundation was I wanted to help guide the Zcash community to be closer to that ideal. And I, and I like to think that, you know, we've you know, we've gotten closer to that. My perspective, especially as someone who was a sensibly, a leader in the Zcash community is the fact that I can leave, right. And that and that there is a board that I was accountable to and that those structures exist is a really good thing. And it's the kind of example that I think should be set for other players in the Zcash ecosystem, but certainly for, for broader you know, broader cryptocurrency projects as well.

Anna (01:11:17):
Are there any sort of words of advice you'd also give to individuals in the community? I mean, I guess you are still an individual in the community, so

Josh (01:11:26):
Yeah, although I am, I am made, I've made a kind of commitment, you know, I'm going to vote, I think, in the MGRC. But that's going to be the extent of my voice in the community. I don't want, I really want to do my best to take a back seat, but I think if for an individuals, the Zcash community member, I will say, like, to the extent that you feel like this tinge of skepticism about the way that something is happening in, in the community, you should pull that thread. Right. I, I think that what made a large part of the debate for the dev fund really positive thing is that Zcash had very strong critics that weren't trolls. I mean, there are certainly trolls too, but like, those are seemingly filtered out and those strong critics came in and, and really pushed I think people that help power in that ecosystem to be more transparent and more honest, and I would challenge every individual's, he cashed community member to have that mentality and to try and pull those threads when they feel like you know, we feel like something might not be quite right or something, someone isn't being totally honest or open, you know?

Josh (01:12:35):
And, and not to say that that's, you know, rampant in the Zcash ecosystem. I don't think that it is, but I do think that it's important to question the people in power, whoever you might be cool. Yeah.

Anna (01:12:46):
And I think we'll put the letter, I mean, that, that was actually a really interesting letter that I, that you tweeted and, and shared on GitHub. And so we'll probably put a link to that in the show notes as well. 

Josh (01:12:55):
Great, great.

Anna (01:12:58):
It does sound like it's been quite a journey, three years, just talking about that beginning and we've had a chance to, we've seen you along the way. Like I remember you're, you're you being beamed in for Zcon0, cause you're just had a baby.

Josh (01:13:14):
I just, yeah, like Clara my, my two year old now, which is crazy to think she's that old. But I, I do, I regret not being it's Zcon0, cause it was the first conference that I helped or organized.

Anna (01:13:28):
And then I remember you also on the stage at Zcon1 this legendary presentation where you came out with your turtleneck and Steve jobs did or so well, but what, what I forgot to forget, like what was, what was the, I shouldn't say I forget because it was amazing. I just, I was laughing a lot. Well, what were you pitching right then? What was the story? I forget,

Josh (01:13:55):
I think I was just talking about how privacy, like, like all the big tech oligarchs were, were really going to help us win privacy, but in reality they were not, they were not. Yeah. I definitely, I definitely shat on Libra quite a bit, which yeah, which is really fun for me to do that in like a Steve jobs persona. Yeah. It was, it was real fun. You can probably expect, I, I have to admit one of the things I did before joining the Zcash foundation. I don't know if y'all are familiar with ponzico.win, but I wrote a white paper in May of 2017 that was accompanied by a solidity smart contract that enabled anyone to invest in this brilliant new, innovative scheme where they would give me 50% of all money. They invested in a Ponzi scheme that I created on Ethereum.

Josh (01:14:51):
But I, I really enjoyed that. I really enjoyed writing that and obviously very, very distinct from like that was a satirical art project. And it sort of like checked a number of boxes for me, not least of which is being quoted in Matt. Levine's like Bloomberg finance column, which was a real big win for me personally. But it was, it was something that like I really enjoyed doing. It was a lot of fun for me. And and I think now that I am like taking a step back from doing anything serious I can kind of maybe revel a bit in that in that activity I enjoy doing it quite a bit. And I really think like as productive and impactful as my serious professional time was with the Zcash foundation, I do feel like we as an industry kind of I mean, there's, there's trollish goodness. Right. But then there's this also like self seriousness about a lot of the projects that people are involved in where they where they treat themselves too seriously. And I think they like build the shield against the real lowest common denominator trolls, and it's understandable, but I also think it like limits perspective a bit. So I'm looking forward to like engaging in a bit more of that kind of maybe elevated satire. I like to like to consider it. Maybe we'll see.

Fredrik (01:16:39):
I guess that's a good wrap up. We're about at time, but you know, what, what is next aside from trolling Twitter?

Josh (01:16:51):
That's right. Yeah. Good cross-firm opportunity. So yeah, Josh has done voice. Just follow me on Twitter and you'll maybe see it occasionally. I don't really have any other Mexicans promoting it. It's cast, it's like one minute podcast that's released purely on Twitter.

Anna (01:17:12):
Very good. Thank you. I wouldn't be a subscriber, but I don't know how to do that on Twitter.

Josh (01:17:18):
No, nobody does. That's the beauty of the format is that nobody can possibly consistently subscribed to it. But no, I, I honestly, like, I don't know. I don't know what's next. I, I really like as I, as I sort of mentioned in my personal farewell letter I just want to take a bit of a break cause I've been kind of working, working my ass off for like six years. And I know there are lots of people that can do that for far longer periods of time, but at least for me, it's, it's time for a little like pause and yeah, I'm going to probably write a lot more satire and I suspect that I'm going to stay in cryptocurrency. I still am so enamored with the industry and I am such a deep believer in private money too. That I, I think that I, whatever I do, there's going to be some kind of support for, for that. But, you know, I, I'm giving, I'm making that a problem for future Josh and not, not present Josh. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, no, but I really appreciate the opportunity to, to come on here and chat with y'all. This has been really, really fun. Yeah.

Anna (01:18:26):
Well, I'm so glad we did get a chance to get you on and to talk about all of this and to talk about this adventure that you've been on. It sounds what's the word, I don't want to say Herculean, but it sounds like it was a personal journey of intense kind and a lot of, a lot of challenge, a lot of fun along the way too.

Josh (01:18:46):
Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I, I know I said it before, but I'm, I'm so proud of, of the foundation as an entity that really has like very little to do with me being there. Just the people themselves that are part of that organization today and what they're going to do going forward. I am so excited for it because they're, they're wonderful group of people and they're going to do great things. So yeah, it was a great personal journey and I am very happy to take a bit of a breather and just a follow on and just watch my Twitter timeline with some popcorn in hand and just enjoy it from the spectator seats, you know. Cool. Cool.

Anna (01:19:26):
Well, thanks again for being on the show.

Josh (01:19:29):
Okay. Thanks Anna. Thanks Frederick. Thank you very much.

Anna (01:19:32):
And to our listeners. Thanks for it.

Josh (01:19:34):
Thanks for listening.