ZKPodcast: Josh Cincinnati on Zcash, governance and leaving the Zcash Foundation

Transcript

[Music] welcome to xero knowledge a podcast where we talk about the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web the show is hosted by me anna and me frederick in this week's episode we chat with josh cincinnati the former executive director of the zcash foundation who recently left his position there we chat about the history of the foundation the zcash ecosystem the challenges of decentralized governance and more

but before we start in i want to share an update about the zk validator a project that i've been working on which is different but definitely related to the work i do on the podcast so the zk validator started just under a year ago and the purpose of it is to be a community funded advocacy group for zero knowledge research and privacy tech on the proof of stake networks that we work on now if you have no clue what i'm talking about when i say proof of stake or validator then do have a listen to an episode from last year that i did with the guys from bisontrails now bison trails is the technology partner of the zk validator and in that conversation we cover all of those topics

and you can actually find the spark that launched this project now unlike most validators we are not whales ourselves we are purely community funded and have a singular focus we think that when it comes to token ownership or bringing existing business on chain privacy is more than a nice to have it's an absolute requirement for adoption and yet it doesn't tend to have the priority it should on these networks we hope that with the zk validator we can drive this point home the zk validator is currently operational on three networks with a fourth on the horizon we are now live on cosmos kusama and as of this month polka dot so frederick and myself maybe myself to a lesser degree but still uh we have a long-standing relationship

to the polka dot project and so it's pretty exciting to see the validator go live there if you happen to have atoms on cosmos ksm on kusama dots on polka dot and you think privacy matters you want to see more zero-knowledge proofs integrated throughout these networks and generally want to support the initiative head over to the website zkvalidator.com i've added the link in the show notes there you can find instructions on how to stake your tokens to our validator just as a side note usually centralized exchanges will do some sort of staking offer but those rarely go to independent validators so you might want to actually set that up yourself if you want to support us i think it's fair to say that we are the first of our kind in the validator space

and so i hope you will join the zk validator initiative cool and now here is our episode with josh cincinnati [Music] so this week frederick and i are catching up with josh cincinnati welcome to the show josh welcome thanks anna thanks frederick yeah it's great to be here so 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're 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 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 um yeah yeah yeah so yeah i i think that there's always been and and in a positive way there's always been some kind of governance issue that the found the zcash foundation has been embroiled in the middle of um and and the reason i say it's all positive is because i think they've generally resolved 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 uh the executive director of the zcash foundation is that that process itself when you're in that position can be quite exhausting um it can take a lot out of sort of the point of of a foundation to be embroiled in governance uh debates so yeah understandable that that's the case yeah so 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 he did talk about like the research team uh of the z cash foundation we 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 a 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 yeah yeah so um 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 um to summarize so i i'm 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 that in school yeah it was not not fun for me i totally not i hated it um i mean i met some there were some wonderful people i met and it was like that that some of those people were great but like the majority experience was not fun uh 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 um i was very

interested in digital media i had i had gone to business school straight out of undergrad ostensibly because i had done a video podcast in 2005 to 2007 at my undergraduate uh during my undergraduate time and it was really cool like i 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 oh my god yeah it was really it was really fun and uh and i really enjoyed it and i wanted to figure out like how to you know get more involved in that um but i also had a math background an undergrad and a politics background uh which is important for understanding i guess more of what primed 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 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 i went and uh i joined and co-founded an application an android application uh startup that wasn't really 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 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 forms and i i think there's like of people in this field there's all of us who are you

know there's a question of like when were you radicalized and for me it was like it was partially the slashdot article that came out like in 2010 2011 about bitcoin but but that i i kind of viewed it as sort of silly and no like bitcoins just drug money or something there's nothing interesting here and then i met the this engineer who i had the good fortune of hiring and he actually became much more of a mentor to me in understanding the ethos uh behind bitcoin like in 2012 2013 unfortunately i was straddled with uh student debt and uh quite poor trying to do a startup on a shoestring budget so i didn't really get to like have a lot of positive exposure to

bitcoin uh 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 um 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 um to be basically pursuing a very different kind of career and so as a result like i wound up joining block cipher uh as their second employee focused on developer advocacy so i was a developer advocate and did that for for two years and uh and that was great i mean i i

learned a lot about the ecosystem from the perspective of like a silicon valley startup uh love the team that i worked with uh but then they were you know sort of moving toward a different direction uh when i was leaving they're more interested in enterprise stuff and that was not as you know interesting to me so i kind of took a break from crypto and went and 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 uh 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 uh 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 uh really excited about the prospect of like actually building the organization out full-time and that's what led to me becoming executive director of the zcash foundation i wonder like that beginning story of the zcash foundation i'm kind of trying to figure out when was that like was the east was the ecc or at the time the zcash company the electric coin company was that was that already done was it yeah that was what so so the foundation was really something that was crafted um after the fact uh so after you know the the the z cash 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 zero cash paper the zero cash paper was the basis for zcash and it was effectively zcash as a project began when those researchers uh 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 uh bootstrap model uh behind the ecc and the you know the investment and the way that they carved out this founders reward was actually like quite elegant and fair relative to other

you know other models that were prominent at that time um namely like free minds um so so i 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 um but yeah you know i i mean i 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 um that having a singular group basically have unilateral control over the development of a protocol is is bad long term and so they made pledges to donate a

significant portion of the founders reward that they received to set up a non-profit and i think and again my i i joined in like august 2017 um you know part time but my my understanding is i think the foundation was first formed as like an entity in march of 2017 and it had like a um you know a bootstrap board of i think i can't exactly remember the ordering correctly of who joined when but it was basically like i think matt uh matt may have joined later it may have been like andrew peter and naval i'm not sure uh 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 it was a three-person board with an entity that hadn't really been fully formed hadn't even gotten non-profit status from the irs yet that letter came i think right when i joined like or soon after that it was established as a non-profit and then i began in earnest uh around that period to try and set it up into like a real organization that was at that point not it the view wasn't really that it would be a counter balance to the ecc but then that vision kind of took over um in in 2018 as i as i took on more or more of the reigns so yeah that's like uh that's a bit of the of like the foundation history uh in a nutshell what's the significance

of getting that non-profit status like what does that actually mean for the organization yeah well so one one thing that it means um anyone because it's a 501c3 even though we were getting donations from these these fr recipients we could get donations from other folks individuals or businesses uh and they would be tax deductible which is nice um the other piece that i think is kind of important is like um in a non-profit structure there aren't any like owners of the entity it's uh it's an organization that is basically structured to further its own mission and uh the stakeholders can be basically doesn't have to be just

shareholders because there are no shareholders it can be broader community members um and the board has a fiduciary duty to whoever those seiko stakeholders uh you know are meant to be um and then i think the other thing that's actually quite critical 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 uh there's something called a form 990 in the u.s that you're required to file um every year as a 501c3 nonprofit

and the foundation's then operations director now just director uh who's eminently talented anthony hodge uh she she uh understood that she was my first hire and is the one that helped set up uh 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 uh 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 my mo 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 and

publicly yeah uh so so so yeah that 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 um because it felt like we had a very clear-cut mission and we could focus on that mission and really like have more long-term thinking about the way that we were going to operate and build the org we weren't focused on hyper growth we weren't focused on marketing zcash uh we were focused on supporting the ecosystem filling the gaps uh that we thought it 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 um and and so it's like it's it's really like nice to have that kind of focus uh in an organization one thing that i found interesting about the zcash foundation with its dev team model is that the foundation's actually based in the u.s 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 is there a reason they made it in the u.s actually well so part of it is i i think that the um there was a bit of momentum there right because 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 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 you know 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 non-profits have a higher threshold for um for transparency compared to uh other international uh nonprofits and it's like kind of weird

for me to say that when the non-profit that i was involved with is focused very deeply on privacy um 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 um 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 institutions organizations institutions yeah yeah yeah and it's and it's like that that is the right balance here uh and to me anyway it felt like you know having the um zcash foundation be a u.s based non-profit kind of forces us

to be uh to hold ourselves to a higher standard um and i know that that's not again that's not universally true there's some u.s nonprofits that are extremely sketchy uh that do sketchy things uh 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 uh not a universal rule but but i think there is like a general expectation i think the main thing would be that it's it's different i mean that that that alone is sets uh 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 they're all swiss-based and this like if you're actually a

non-profit in switzerland like it the regulation is crazy as well like you you had a super turn like transparency weren't dead the thing is almost no no like cryptocurrency foundations in switzerland are non-profits they're a different class of organization that isn't a non-profit organization it also isn't like a for-profit private company but it's this middle thing uh 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 um yeah yeah yeah

that's that's a great that's a great point like that that is uh 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 on profits or swiss for-profits but it does not surprise me that there would be many um many cryptocurrency orgs that would decide to find the the status that would enable them to operate uh with maybe a maximal amount of opacity and like sometimes there's there's reason for that like i'm not not to cast uh you know 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

uh handle you know their organizations and like uh oftentimes it sort of provides meaningful benefit um for them to make decisions that look short-term bad for their community maybe but are long-term good so like i i see the trade-off 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 and in many foundations the 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 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 it's that that all that is already done not the defrauding part but yeah i hope um yeah yeah um but yeah there's there's there is i think um you know there is still some risk there though you know because there's always like even with a aetherium you know which now seems very strongly in the not a security camp but

that wasn't always the case you know uh uh initially um 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 uh was in fact to set precedent that yes you can have a cryptocurrency focused us-based non-profit operating in good faith uh executing on its mission and doing you know doing all the right things and this was an opportunity to demonstrate that too you know so i i mean i can't i know that there are other there are other cryptocurrency non-profits that existed before the zcash foundation but it may

have been one of the first 501c3s maybe one of the most well-known at least in our community does your knowledge podcast community yeah yeah for sure let's so let's talk a little bit more about zcash and that ecosystem sure uh 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 zuko on i did an event episode on zcon zero yeah where you sadly were not at but i had a chance to interview a number of people who are participating kind of like trying to get a sense of the vibe that was happening there

it feels like a very long time ago now it's wild um 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 z cash actually that is that is a great question uh so for for me like zcash is the the uh it's it's the exit option for people who demand privacy uh in crypto systems so it's if you're you know if you require payment rails or require a way to obfuscate your payments uh z cash is is the way to do it and it's backed by uh 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 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 eccn and the zcash foundation that are like very much aligned with improving uh the fundamental protocol and privacy as a whole 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 um trustlessly uh get directly onto zcash and obviously like there are lots

of people who have various opinions about i 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 even for for this podcast the donation dresses which is the yeah it's totally fine hidden ones i've i've had one request to get those and i actually started to do the research into the wallace and you can probably help me set this up i just i just haven't gotten around to setting it up yeah but i should yeah but yeah and there's and you know i i think people have different perspectives on this but that is something that like so part of that vision that i i or my view of what z cash should be is

indeed informed by things that don't like there's not really great shielded infrastructure yet for things like multi-sig or hardware wallets um and only recently light wallets which was sort of a combined effort from the ecc building their light their light client library and then from the foundation supporting one of the biggest now z multi-platform zcash wallets around uh aditya's work which has just been phenomenal um zek wallet and zek wallet light um so so you know there's there are pieces that still don't exist to make that sort of fully shielded um reality thing and then on top of that like some of those pieces

that don't exist uh are preventing uh zcash from having sort of seamless trustless swaps with other assets places like uh ethereum cosmos polka dot like there there's all this opportunity to engage in trustless private swaps that doesn't quite exist yet we i don't sorry i can't say we anymore because i'm not in the foundation uh but the foundation would very much love to see that happen um yeah i i um i honestly i i do you know to be to be blunt about the governance side of z cash 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 i'm setting up

like uh a non-profit focused on uh zero knowledge and privacy research and i was gonna like build the team uh and then i have to do like a little 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 percent of my job um which is sort of surprising um and and i think you know there are sort of crisis moments that we had um that i can talk about at length uh that that that's what elevated that uh you know or what would have escalated um or made you know made more prominent i don't know but but there's there's definitely like it was sort of unexpected um 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 than uh certainly yeah certainly before the foundation existed so you've just hinted at it a few times this governance process the fact that you you know 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 yeah 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 yeah set up to do yeah so

um the founders reward and and i might not be the best resource for talking about the founders reward 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 uh companies and early or the company and the early employees of that company that were uh 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 uh because there were a group of people in those early risk takers that decided to pledge a very significant portion uh initially 260 000 zac over four years but then uh that was uh reduced to 220 230 i think i think 220 000 zach over four years instead and the reason so part of that is the the reason there was that dilution is that there was this uh i think renegotiation of the founders award among all of those recipients to bolster the ecc's treasury uh 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 z cash is like the ecc is the is the like prime entity that's doing the majority of research and development um 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 uh you know and henry henry talked about it on on that show 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 gonna do when the

founders reward runs out because it was not the founders reward initially 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 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 um you know there's a longer term you know uh like time locked aspect of it um since since you didn't get access to those coins immediately so you arrived two years when when did

it start when was that four year period uh so it started zcash launched october 2016 and so the founders reward was you know um minting minting coins at that point and there was also so zcash had a slow um emission startup too so it was actually like and i don't again i don't know the exact formula because i was not deep in the code but the like actual mining reward started out much smaller than the you know current mining reward um okay uh but it does otherwise follow the same bitcoin reward schedule so halves every four years and so and this was set for four years starting from that point in october getting increasingly large

and you joined in 2000 so you joined about like nine months or 10 months after it started and you started this found you started working on the foundation and then at some point everybody realized i guess that this was gonna end yes yes so was that the first big problem or battle or was it more like was there something before then there was something slightly before then that was actually not even that much of a conflict it was more of uh um it was more of a oh the foundation was losing uh board members so two board members left uh and it was right before z con zero um actually and uh 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 not as much of a crisis but more of a let's figure out how to like involve more community members in foundation governance and make the foundation more of a voice of the community and the way that we did that is 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 and we only had to reject two people uh 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

um 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 and we wound up i i think maybe we got like 10 to 12 candidates maybe uh exact numbers fail me but we ended up electing amber and uh and ian and uh it was an advisory vote but obviously ian and amber are 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

uh so that was like the first like kind of governance experience i think we 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 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 yeah or something like that there was like this this longer you had you actually had to start a bit earlier in on this conversation yeah i think part part of the reason um

for that was that there is there's a network upgrade pipeline process that defines um how z cash hard fork upgrades work and it involved it was sort of established by the ecc and involved it involves like 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 um i think that it was crafted with caution in mind uh but it coincidentally um 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 minor life cycle and how they view you know prospective profit as a proof-of-work minor um so if you give them a weak warning that hey you're going to get 20 percent less than what you expected because the community you know has 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 to say you're telling anyone is 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 and so on so like you 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 uh 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 that completely like it's sort of unknown like trying to even plan cash flow and

profit at that period anyway so it's it's it's much more accommodating to the people securing your network to be up front and open about the fact that something like that was going to happen uh with life given time to prep yeah so i think that was also a big motivation i don't 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 forum mention of it um and i gotta be honest i didn't like hearing rumors about it before the first public forum 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 ah so i think what you're what 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 yeah i mean i think the community became very involved yeah 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 i 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 this 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 gonna happen this is what they're pushing for and then if if someone puts out like if i know zuko 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 gonna have this whole you know internal debate in public as well but i wonder if it sounds like i think 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 it sounds a little bit like josh you have like it sounds like like your philosophy of transparency is very present here where you like because do you not also agree with that the fact that like maybe having that debate in public would have actually been messier oh yeah but it wound up being messy anyway i guess like so so it wound up being messy anyway and uh 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 uh someone out of you know out of the woodwork of those conversations someone publicly suggests it i would feel disingenuous about that series of events now other i think other people wouldn't right and that's that's like you know that's a difference of opinion um 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 discussions started happening and then the the board so all this was happening in parallel by the way so there's another wrinkle to this so regardless like this is sort of orthogonal but important uh when considering the dev fund that like uh at that point like 2018 to 2019 was when this sort of vision of like two of two multisig governance

came to be where there would be this like shared affirmation of like what zcash is between the foundation and the ecc um and even actually at like uh devcon 4 i think i i made a big presentation about it where i sort of like tried to articulate my view of how z cash governance should go forward and a centerpiece of that vision was this idea that there would be shared uh some kind of novel shared trademark uh between the foundation and the ecc i remember that yeah yeah and so it was it 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 uh so there's the sort of like there's the legal you know uh the legal affirmation of that two of two 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 and you know there would be sort of the shared network infrastructure then yeah and here you're talking about the zebra client which is was originally developed by the parity team just so that's the connection it was developed by the parity team and then sort of handed over to the

foundation to maintain and continue building on built-in rest yep yeah yeah and there's i get it right yeah yeah yeah yeah and there's like you know the the current zebra client is like um uh like a a new a new code base entirely uh just because there have been like advances in rust since the uh you know the original zebra client was developed by parity but the original bitcoin club yeah the original and the original bitcoin client but like parity showed us the way and then like we're very very grateful that uh the z cash foundation is very grateful that we had that opportunity and like the the node as you say i always found this interesting in the ethereum debate that 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 aspects to that and there's there's you know it 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 so if you didn't have any sort of note or any technical ability to do that then obviously

you couldn't actually practically oppose anything that that's right and like the the the legal the sort of legal trademark thing is really um 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 um where it was actually like a prominent enough upgrade

that either the ecc or the foundation would not have been able to sneak in like that zip without broad you know like like yeah 100 of the foundation like that would that no that would not have worked and would feel pretty terrible to do that i think because it was the dev fund just to kind of like clarify that the dev fund was hard coded into the like the way mining rewards are hardcoded 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 yeah yeah and and and so yeah there was i i know i've uh if i had a podcast i think it'd be called tangents because i get on so many

of them um uh so i apologize but the but there's there's reason to talk about this like the reason the foundation wanted a node and this trademark piece right because we or when i was at the foundation we uh believed in this vision of 202 multisig um and that became like really clear and important in this ensuing debate so okay we have that trademark agreement but that agreement actually hasn't been struck yet it was still being sort of uh envisioned and articulated in late 2018 there was ongoing negotiation between the ecc and the foundation to try and establish that trademark agreement uh i should note that initially the original vision for the trademark was that it would just be donated to the foundation

but uh i think both the foundation and the ecc saw this two of two multi-sig opportunity as being more robust than simply like the foundation having unilateral control over the mark um 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 uh clearly like there are needs for further development and maintenance and uh it's an opportunity to maybe expand the uh you know who gets what funding um 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 um and 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 wow whatsoever i was actually on the hawkish you know hawkish side of of the of the spectrum uh 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 founders reward was basically like the um 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 a dow treasury or anything like it was just it was there to set things up and then it would just be sort of free market rain and see you know see what happens um and you know i ended up being somewhat practical practically like overruled because there was community um a very strong community contingent which makes sense 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 uh is really important and critical to

critical to furthering not just 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 um uh and and the various other ways that we're contributing to privacy like one could make the argument that like that's you know really worthwhile and worth uh continuing on and changing the social contract a bit um 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 uh that's another sort of another angle another angle there let's understand 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 could describe what were the other kind of camps into like what how did they oh 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 cans foreign 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 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 the entire future of the the coin relies on them and what's the spectrum like speaking about these camps i don't think it's interesting to say just like there were people for or against but like what 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 they they want to get more for their money well you know i 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 le 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 reward 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 uh i i think they maybe have not spent money as

effectively as they could have 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 um you know my perspective while i was there was that well we have a board i answer 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 i resigned they didn't fire me just to be clear um but uh so that didn't happen i don't think uh but but still there's like this checks and balances whereas especially for the first part of

the ecc's um 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 uh that money was being spent and so so i i think that what you actually wind up seeing and i i'm really it's 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. uh or uh sorry was it no sorry so i i might be mistaking my um so sorry it was 2019.

uh so like may 2019 is when this sort of started august 2019 is when the foundation made you know made the statement um 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 uh i i think quite a a like an elegant sort of response about the you know people people who 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 and hear 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 can 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 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 um which is a key part to this chaotic struggle i i really and you maybe maybe it's something you could add as a link because 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 uh long amount of debate and discussion internally to come up with um what we thought was the most pragmatic and uh and i think ethical way to approach uh the possibility of a of a new dev fund like had anybody like it because now because 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 u.s 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 uh i think so i think in that statement we outright rejected the possibility of the foundation accepting all of them okay because we didn't like uh you know no no no no no well no no it's just like i i think that the foundation like the foundation's vision was for that like multi-sig governance model and we didn't want to distribute power away just to reassemble it into a centralized structure that was

the foundation right um so that was at least especially from my perspective not something that was you know that we were willing to entertain um at that point and i don't think really ever like i think that that whatever the result of the death fund was the foundation did not want to be the sole beneficiary um 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 and like especially when it's such a long period like here's a bunch of money it's spent over four years i mean that could go anywhere you have no guarantees what it's going to result in whatsoever and so i i totally understand that i 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 it 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 yeah well honestly i think the end result is pretty close to that um because the end result was i did want to there's just no time but i did want to focus a little bit on um like what wound because there was a crisis within a crisis oh like in its inception moment um but let me just to hint at that to hit

that the answer that question is like the end result i think was a good outcome for everyone involved it involved uh basically the same level of transparency that uh was required of the foundation is required of the ecc uh it demanded that that none of the dev fund proceeds would go to any like future in investors it was of the ecc it was very clear that like it should only be rewarded it should only be not rewarded but like given as payment to people that are working on you know furthering the protocol and privacy tech and you know whatever operations are supplementary to that so it was not it was effectively like the end zip turned the ecc into a non-profit practically like at least in the way

that it's supposed to it's supposed to operate and that is like what the foundation wanted um 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 uh some kind of limited liability corporation that you know where where early investors get to uh accrue more of the gains from protocol reward which seems weird to me um like and it sort of seems that's the problem fundamentally with any of these dev fund rewards is like uh 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 right and the the the real danger with i think a protocol reward without adequate um controls uh or adequate like transparency requirements or if if there is like no way to take away that reward there is literally no signal for that uh group uh you know if they are a business like if 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 uh kind of um it's like contradictory almost like it would yeah yeah work against itself somehow it

would work like you would be like okay well i i have a duty to my stakeholders and that says that i should minimize my cost and get this free revenue and you know send it over to them and now granted like non-profits with no shareholders they they have i think sort of a similar problem uh in that like a lot of the times it just enriches the people that are high level you know high level at those nonprofits 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 yeah um and and that's what's like that that is what the foundation i think came out uh you know again against and

and the end result after all of this uh you know this these governance processes in this discussion debate was uh i i think like uh ample amount of protection uh and requiring the same level of uh transparency and i actually like i i i wouldn't be surprised because the ecc has said that they are interested in figuring out some way to convert to a non-profit uh so i i wouldn't be surprised if they actually go go about and do that um yeah yeah you just mentioned you just mentioned a crisis in a crisis yeah can you talk about what that was yeah of course of course this is like so listen so this is we've sort of put the conclusion up front we now know what happens we're gonna take a moment we're gonna take a

step back and learn how you got there yeah yeah so uh august 2019 we put that statement out lots of proposals start emerging for what people want to see in uh 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 adding extra parties yeah adding extra extra parties to it and at least on the foundation side we saw that as as like that was core to you know us being able to achieve legitimacy in the dev fund process was

like we've been operating under the impression of this two of two multi-sig being the uh you know with the trademark being the predominant way for us to like uh 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 going to add we want to add more people to it who are and uh i mean you know zuko uh so but it'll be like individuals as well as the two oh no oh sorry sorry you mean the people that were yeah zuko 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 okay um 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 uh you know 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 point um but at that time it's at that time sent a wrench into what your understanding of like uh yeah of the yeah and and not just my i mean literally across the community everyone i think was uh uh so zcash foundation board members myself uh lots of community members were like this was a promise that was made

uh 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 um and so what wound up happening is you know we were obviously uh i mean we were upset uh about it and it was it was certainly personally upsetting to me like that was i think part of the personal toll that uh 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 uh our reputation uh 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 multi-sig agreement and then we will restart the process that we said we were going to restart and we made that like public statement and obviously you know made our counterparties probably a little upset um and it delayed the decision-making process quite a bit you know uh 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 statement and um and us

putting pressing the pause button uh we did get a 202 multi-sig style trademark agreement where the foundation owns the mark and is bearing the costs of all of the trademark protection um while the ecc has input into what defines z cash and if we don't have agreement there's like an escalation um and it's all it's all like centered around um community voice i gotta be honest though again me as just an individual not as a foundation member i would 100 prefer there is no trademark agreement and there's no trademark whatsoever buy ip i just don't i don't like i i don't like intellectual property at all this is what i i want to i kind

of want to ask you about like because you're 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 a 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 people might have called it conservative but like something far from your actual opinion yeah and and you know um 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 i think if regardless the outcome to your specific

question yes it was exhausting yes i felt like a little bit out of body uh and not in a fun way um like in a way where i felt like i was uh 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 um the best interests of the foundation of the project of private money in general and not like me as uh 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 yeah you know um uh and i think it's perfectly natural to like want to step away when that becomes like like too difficult to do i think that's so common and like not only can 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 uh definitely like you had to wear a hat that didn't quite fit felt kind of icky right right right right yeah yeah and and i never i never felt like truly icky about the way that the foundation

uh acted or represented um but i did feel like i wasn't fully myself you know and and i mean i'm really grateful that i had the opportunity to do uh all of that work with all those all the wonderful people that are now a part of the the foundation and they're going to continue to do amazing work without me probably more effectively without me to be honest uh um because you know the other reason like that i left is like i that was a very like strained 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 it would have been unfair for me to like keep trying to like work in that environment and hold on to power when um i wouldn't ever really be that effective at being like a collaborative counterparty you know um and uh i it's a better you know it's better for me to like recognize that and to take a step back and give the foundation an opportunity to truly like um 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 uh overreach

i think by by the ecc uh but you know it was ultimately caused uh caused some harm to my you know personal relationship with i think ecc management um and uh 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 um and harder to even say like oh i should maybe step back and let someone else try it 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 yeah i i mean from my perspective i i will say that that advice was given

with the understanding the z cash 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 i think there are things that zcash and and other cryptocurrency communities can learn from other projects uh and part of the crux of that letter was uh this we should be learning those things right so um 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 uh a single

you know charismatic founder uh and and instead letting it organically grow and stand on its own you know two feet now obviously i mean i i love bitcoin uh there are pluses and minuses to the way that the bitcoin community currently works um but that action and of itself was i think one of the strongest aspects of bitcoin is that it is pretty much uh like a leaderless organically self-perpetuating uh 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 uh the z cash foundation

was uh 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 um you know we've gotten closer to that my perspective especially as someone who was ostensibly a leader in the zcash community is the fact that i um can leave right and that uh and that there is a board that i was accountable to uh and that those structures exist uh 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 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 oh so yeah 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 uh 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 a back seat but i think if for an individual z cash community member i i will say like to the extent that you feel like this tinge of skepticism about the way that something is happening uh in in the community you should pull at that thread right i think that what made a large part of the debate for the dev fund um really positive thing is that zcash

had very strong critics that weren't trolls i mean there were certainly trolls too but like those were seemingly filtered out and those strong critics came in um and and really pushed uh i think people that held power in that ecosystem to be more transparent and more honest and i would challenge every individual zcash community member to have that mentality and to try and and pull those threads when they feel like uh you know we feel like something might not be quite right or something someone isn't being totally honest or open you know um and and not to say that that's you know rampant in the z cash ecosystem i don't think that it is but um i do think that it's important to question the people in power

whoever you might be cool yeah 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 great great it does sound like it's been quite a journey yeah yeah 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 being beamed in for z con zero because you just had a baby i just yeah like yeah clara my my two-year-old now which is crazy to think that she's that old um but i i do i i regret not being at z-con zero because it was the first you know conference that i helped uh

organized and then i remember you also on the stage at zecon one 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 um but what were you pitching right then what was the story i forgot oh i think i think i was just talking about how privacy like like oh yeah all the big tech oligarchs were were really going to help us win privacy but in reality they were not they they were not um definitely i definitely shat on libra

quite a bit that was it which yeah which was really fun for me to do that in like a steve jobs persona it was very good 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 uh where they would give me 50 of all money they invested in a ponzi scheme that i created on ethereum um but i 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 uh finance uh column which was a real big win for me personally um but it was it was something that like i really enjoyed doing it was a lot of fun for me and uh and i think now that i am like taking a step back from doing anything serious uh i can kind of maybe revel a bit in that uh in that activity i enjoy doing it quite a bit and i 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 uh i mean there's there's trollishness right but then there's this also like self-seriousness about a lot of the projects that people are involved in where they um where they treat themselves too seriously and i think they like build the shield against the real lowest common denominator trolls and it's it's understandable but i also think it like limits perspective a bit so i'm i'm looking forward to like engaging in a bit more of that kind of uh maybe elevated satire i like to like to consider it maybe we'll see i guess that's a good wrap up uh

we're about at time but uh you know what what is next aside from trolling twitter oh and the podcast which would you guys watch it that's right yeah good cross promo opportunity yeah so uh yeah josh has done voice just follow me on twitter and you'll maybe see it occasionally i don't really have any other mechs of promoting it it's something it's the cast it's like a one minute podcast that's released purely on twitter it's very good thank you i would be a subscriber but i don't know how to do that on twitter so nobody does that's the beauty of the format is that nobody can possibly consistently subscribe to it

um but no i i i honestly like i don't know i don't know what's next i i really like uh as i as i sort of mentioned in my personal farewell letter um i just want to take a bit of a break because 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 you know periods of time but at least for me it's it's time for a little like pause and yeah i'm gonna probably write a lot more satire and uh i i suspect that i'm gonna stay in cryptocurrency i i still am so enamored with the industry and i am such a deep believer in private money too um 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 uh and not not president josh yeah cool yeah yeah but i really appreciate the opportunity to to come on here and and chat with y'all um this has been really really fun 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 um it sounds uh what's the word i don't want to say herculean but it sounds like it was a personal journey of intense kind and yeah a lot of yeah a lot of challenge a lot of fun probably along the way too 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 um 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 to do going forward um i i am so excited for it because they're they're a wonderful group of people and they're gonna do great things so um uh yeah it was a great personal journey and i am very happy to take a bit of a breather and just uh follow on and just watch my twitter timeline with some popcorn in hand and and just enjoy it from the spectator seats you know cool cool well thanks again for being on the show thanks for having me thanks anna thanks frederick thank you very much and to our