,
16 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
Zcash is not failing to provide solid entertainment at least. I'll give my completely unsolicited explanation and advice \1
There are two entities here: A for-profit company called the Electric Coin Company, or ECC, and a not-for-profit call the Zcash Foundation. The ECC wholly owns the trademark to 'Zcash' while the Zcash Foundation owns bupkis. \2
For a while there were founder's rewards being handed out as part of Zcash mining and those have now run out, raising funding for ECC, Zcash Foundation, and general ongoing development. \3
How much money is currently sitting in both entities I don't know, nor what their current burn is, or which of them is employing how many developers, but they're acting like the situation is dire, so let's assume that for the sake of conversation \4
This was all scheduled to happen in advance. Why it was planned out this way I don't know, but nobody can be expected to predict Y2K. Now that Y2K has unexpectedly happened they're scrambling to figure out what to do about it \5
The ECC in response has come up with a plan to hard fork Zcash to give themselves money to fund new development and has a development roadmap which is... let's just say it has a lot of ambitious features and is possibly unrealistic \6
The likely objections to this are (1) Such redefine-the-rewards-to-give-yourself-money schemes are exactly what cryptocurrencies are supposed to prevent (2) The roadmap is overly risky, especially for a privacy coin which is fragile enough to begin with, and (3) Fuck you \7
With this as background the ECC has flatly told the Zcash foundation that they aren't giving the Zcash foundation any say in what happens with the Zcash trademark, presumably because the Zcash foundation would try to stop this caper \8
Now the question becomes what happens next. The ECC has the legal right to redefine what 'Zcash' means and sue exchanges and anyone else who lists 'Zcash' as being anything other than what they claim, including the current non-hardforked version \9
Unless, that is, the entire community says 'fuck you' to the inevitable legislation for long enough that the ECC loses their trademark, at least in the US where you can lose trademarks that way. Let's just assume that isn't going to happen \10
Let's assume from the point of view of the Zcash foundation that talks have clearly broken down and this is now all out war. What to do? First of all, change your damn name. You can't survive with a name which is trademarked by a hostile entity \11
The way this works is you want to come up with a name which is as close as possible to the existing one so people can guess the association without causing actual confusion. The existence of zcoin throws a monkey wrench in here \12
Zcoin may be non-trademarked, or the trademark owner may be willing to license or sell it. This is a big mess. In any case, the Zcash foundation needs to figure out what name they're going to use and get a trademark for that \13
Next step is convincing the exchanges to change the name they're listing Zcash under. If an exchange lists the cryptocurrency formerly known as Zcash under any other name the ECC has no leverage over them whatsoever \14
And of course who has the developers matters a lot. A project with no developers will whither and die (unless it's like Litecoin and is a minimal diff and just pulls in changes from an active project) and this is doubly true of one with ambitious plans like ECC \15
Where the developer allegiances lie, and which if either of these two entities has money to pay them or litigate this crap I have no idea, so I'm just watching from the sidelines offering suggestions for things people could do which would add to the entertainment value \fin
