sarang: twitter.com/zooko/status/1347569341781344257

Seems like a pre-announcement only... ZIP 224 isn't out yet?

Yep: twitter.com/jswihart/status/1347578273207750656

There are a few things at play here. There's the Halo 2 stuff, and then there's the Zcash-protocol-using-Halo-2 stuff

AFAIK the Halo 2 code is available in progress, but the protocol stuff is not

(correct me if wrong)

i think that's the situation

Unfortunately a lot of the design decisions leading to the Halo 2 commits seems to be taking place internally onl

*only

A lot of the commits and PRs don't really contain much design detail at all

Which is unfortunate, given how the design choices for earlier work tended to be very open and took place on GitHub

Perhaps this is changing, or isn't the case anymore?

Eh, watching the Zcash community try to eat the ECC over the last year, they're perpetually in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation

I don't know if that's really the case

Discussing ideas early via GitHub worked really well for them

Marketing ideas early before results seems unwise, but that's different

discussing ideas openly for monero has never led to problems

idk what you gain from close doors

Competitive advantage

are there any other competitors in that space than ... Monero?

I guess so, but it's a bit contradictory to the decentralization ethos... what's the point of a decentralized consensus if it has no hope of existing without centralized decision making

and the code gets open sourced in the end anyway lol

I think that key parts of open source development are releasing code, encouraging testing, feedback period before merging changes into the codebase, etc.

I don't think that every project requires (or even benefits from) input at every stage from every community member

Now that we have hte extremes out of the way, we have a much clearer view.

Or... do we...

Reading some of the response to their announcement, it seems that part of the issue is the appearance of setting timelines for the former (releasing, testing, merging) before the design and R&D is made available for review

typica corporate management approach

And that this change from then (design publicly, with a lot of great input) to now (design internally) just sorta... happened, with no apparent community input

I think practically speaking closed doors can reduce the noise for those engaged in R&D, but also increases uncertainty around where the project is going for those not 'in the know', and reduces the amount of time users get to really assess new changes

Could reduce noise, but it seemed to be very much a net positive for them in the past

and the number of smart brains that get to provide input

there's a time and a place, I think. when you're trying to figure out if something will work at all, you only need other developers' input

when you figure that out, and then need to figure out how to make it usable, then you get the users involved

Perhaps one additional issue is that their company is funded by that community, and I don't really recall seeing serious discussion about standards for open development and research discussed when the funding situations were being worked out

My perception is that the ECC mentality makes sense with the ECC/ZF split.

The Zcash Foundation works very openly with the community, providing a space in some ways analogous to MRL & -dev

The ECC is more of a self-contained team which makes it easier to go heads down and crush out a bunch of brilliant stuff like Halo 1 & 2 in rapid succession

Just my personal opinion/take

I suspect that if ECC had said "if you fund us again, we're going to start working internally more", there could have been a productive discussion about this in their community

but AFAIK that never really happened

I thought this was kind of understood with ZIP 1014 but that might have just been my reading into the conversations

(I guess my comment was a tangent. in either case, you still have th discussions in the open)

Isthmus: particular link?

I'd like to know if that was indeed the case

the split between privat corporation and public foundation like this just underscores that there's no actual open source development process there

seen it plenty of times before, with Sun and other corporate "open source" projects

that never engaged outside contributors, never accepted other contributions

@sarang Boatloads of tweets from late 2019 that I didn't bookmark, some forum discussion about the topic, but here's the ZIP itself zips.z.cash/zip-1014

Of course the ZIP speaks more to the structure than the spirit.

The text about the ECC/BP slice states "This slice will be used at the discretion of the Bootstrap Project for any purpose within its mandate to support financial privacy and the Zcash platform" and then the next section asks for disclosures only when research is NOT Zcash related

Also +1 hyc

At any rate, I think there are good lessons to be learned

But not so much to be learned about their fancy new protocol?

Inge-: it looks like they are starting to put some design notes on GitHub