Why I work on Zcash

Here’s a thread I posted today on twitter that explains why I work on Zcash as a volunteer and sheds some light on me and my personal and professional situation. Click through to read the whole thing.

Cheers,

David Mercer
Tucson, AZ

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Further stuff I just wrote elsewhere in response to someone who kept insisting that I “not work for free”:

  1. the primary method of funding creative endeavors throughout human history has been via patronage and donation. Installable software is a creative product, as I’m sure you know very well.

  2. the cost of living in Tucson is dirt cheap for an urban area in the US, so I don’t need to pull in much to get by and keep working strictly on what I want, when I want.

  3. Contract work still has a client, scope creep is real, disputes and lawsuits happen. Fuck all that.

  4. Most clients so far have wanted work done that’s not an installable artifact I can point to and keep forever, but enhanced block explorers and shit that has an operational angle where they might call me in the middle of the night. I’ve been on a pager much of the last 20 years, so no

  5. so far as long as I’ve kept releasing, people have so far kept giving

  6. yes, I’m a god damned true believer hippie who is doing this because I believe in it. I can’t say the same of other altcoins.

  7. you may not believe in the existence of altruism, but not everyone has to be an altruist, just enough of them

  8. circling back to 6 above, if not me, then who? I’m doing this because I see a need for the kind of privacy in people’s finances that zcash/zclassic provides. ZcashCo has enough funding and a low enough burn rate to not lose control to outside investors (yeah, @zooko is a cypherpunk true believer, too) while still being able to have a top notch engineering team to work on the linux reference platform and keep the network stable, but not to have the staffing levels for non-linux, non-x86 ports. I’ve been porting unix sw for over 20 years, I love it, and a community this size should certainly be able to keep one “ports guy” with a roof over his head

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