A note on Electric Coin Company process

General
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I can’t speak directly for the Foundation, but here is my opinion about governance:

Voting isn’t the best approach. Instead, the best approach is to have multiple more or less independent teams with their own control of their own codebases for interacting with Zcash, both full nodes and wallets.

Then, users vote by using their software. If the teams disagree on future protocol evolution, the outcome depends on where the economic and political weight rests among these independent teams.

Obviously a big hurdle here is that ECC receives a portion of block rewards, and has a huge advantage over any other dev team, unless it’s funded by the Foundation, which also receives block rewards.

So, my personal opinion is that I would like to see a more level playing field for independent teams to build Zcash nodes and wallets and then users vote by choosing which products they feel support them best.

I do think polling is crucial. One issue that’s surfaced on this thread and elsewhere is that the governance council vote, the forum members positions, traders, and all the various kinds of stakeholders may want different things and we don’t have a clear picture of how many people want what. In that case I do think stake-based “polling” can help.

I actually would rather give HODLers a higher weight in such polling, so for example if you locked your ZEC for a period of time, you’d get more points in a poll, in order to protect against big traders who might take a temporary position to influence a vote but who aren’t committed on a longer time scale to Zcash’s success. What do people think of that “polling” approach? (I say polling, because I’m still imagining it would not be binding.)

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I like everything about this except the Foundation deciding who gets a vote. I think that’s the core problem of “one person, one vote”.

If you do like this idea, then did you also like the composition of the community governance panel? If not, you’ve just suggested empowering an organization that you believe didn’t succeed at the very job you’re proposing they take on with more authority.

The people in the Foundation are all awesome, and I fully trust them, but I also believe this kind of authority would lead to the organization becoming a target for corruption and coercion over time, and I wouldn’t want to place them in that position.

Edit: If there were a foolproof and fair way to give every human exactly one vote in a permissionless open way, then I would love that!

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While you see it as a negative i see it as a positive. If someone with for example 100,000 ZEC has a way bigger vote than i’am willing to assume that he has the very best in mind with his votes, while someone with 1 ZEC can vote for whatever, no big loss if things don’t work out. The guy just lost 1 ZEC…

Edit: Leave alone the fact that someone could make 10,000 adresses with 1 ZEC each and would get 10,000 votes…

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I don’t have a problem with the Foundation owning/operating such a system, its similar to the ‘electoral roll’ we have here in Chile which is public record.

Efforts could be made to make the ‘electoral roll’ trustworthy, ie: a way to check if you’re on it, a transparent/simple way to join or leave. Prob underestimating the maintenance overhead, maybe the voting tx’s would make it self funding.

Your last post made an interesting distinction between polling & voting - important as many folks confuse them.

(Edit: I don’t have any issue with the Community Gov Panel, it was what we had at the time and thats fair enough. Like all things, it can and should be improved and evolve).

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It was said, multiple times, that until Sapling there would be “no fork”. It was said by Zooko, said by both the foundation and the company.

Those that asked/requested to vote (all but two) were allowed to; Of those the majority that voted ASIC probably had already converted. If not then to continue mining strictly GPU on Zcash would have cost $$$.

From what I read, you think / thought that if the bulk of those that were allowed to vote would have said GPU then ASIC would still have happened. You’re right, but only because of sapling. But I do believe if that had happened both groups would have figured out a permanent solution to go back to GPU rather than the hem and hawing going on now.
Though ASIC’s are here to stay, removing them totally now will remove most of the miners that stayed / converted. Zcash has already pissed of its user base once, I would hope they would not do it again.

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Im not going to go back and re-read 100 post, I havent been active since I was suspened and dont care to look through all the posts again, Can you honestly say no mod or team member said,
the community voted for ASICs? Honestly?
…Yep your right, I guess im wrong /s…

Im done with this forum, im not going to keep trying to prove anything, there is no reason. Go back and look at the some of the posts I made where I got warnings for talking about the voting in “the wrong topic”…I got multiple warnings for being “off-topic” when I was mostly talking about voting on ASICs and how its being presented as “we voted for it”. I created my own thread to vent my problems, and I get suspended 2 weeks for trolling now you want me to go off-topic again…

Yes I know you are looking for ideas, its not my job tho, I dont get paid to come up with voting systems, I dont work for free, just like I know you guys dont work for free. I dont care about Zcash’s voting system or how you guys will change it, im done with Zcash.

Here are the problems I had with the last voting, maybe it will help you or you can ignore it, that is fine also…

The call to vote was very vague on who “contributed to Zcash” and was eligible to vote. This never said we want ALL the community members to participate in the poll. This explains the turn out…

60 or so people out of thousands of community members showed up, what percentage of the community is this? As Zcash Team Members kept repeating to me on all the other evidence against ASICs I presented, “how representative of the community is this”?

The question in the poll was rigged with “Asic resistance should be the priority”, when the question should of said, “Should Zcash stay ASIC resistant” PERIOID, END, DONE ,STOP, no extra words to change the previous meaning. Why is this the only question in the poll represented as stop everything and make it a priority? Do you not see a problem with the way this one question was presented?

Months after the poll, we are told we should of voted if we wanted to be heard and have our voice count, we had the chance to sign up and vote…So I inquire more and more about the voting, and than we are told it would not of counted anyway…Why have this illusion of choice?

When I comment on the fact that if “anyone” could of voted, why did you have to “contribute” to the community and had to be chosen by Zcash people to be in the poll… mods begin to say how the voting didnt count anyway, ZcashCo had the final choice, Saying the voting didnt matter in the end. So what was the point of voting on ASICs?

What more can I say? I was very dissapointed in the way the last vote went down, there was lots of evidence to show ASICs was not what the community wanted, but here we are with ASICs still…

Voting based on ownership of ZEC will give large holders the biggest voice, which is probably people associated with ECC or big whales.

So you dont base it on the most at stake, and you dont base it on majority rule, what do you base voting on then? What system did you use, personal choice?

Why have a community vote on this than? This all seems like it was to save face in the end. This is how I see it and I could be wrong…but when they say the vote does not matter, why even have the community vote for somethign than. Why give the illusion of choice? ← this is the part that pisses me off. This is what companies do to make it look more open with its community and make it seem like they have a voice in the matter, when they didnt…

If you made it this far, thanks for taking the time to read the post. Hope you guys can see the problems with the last voting and can improve the next one. I wish you guys good luck on the Zcash project.

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I do understand your points @Lisfin . It’s pretty obvious now that there was a breakdown in communication with regards to what the poll represented (ie: direction for the Foundation not the Company) That community governance panel and vote was mostly to help guide where funds/efforts of the Foundation should be directed and wasn’t binding on Zcash Companies decisions, that should have been communicated much more clearly. This has lead to confusion regarding what the Zcash Foundation can and can’t (couldn’t) do, along with what the Company will/won’t take into consideration for thier process.

At least this thread has been noticed by @nathan-at-least who is the COO of Zcash Company (now known as Electric Coin Company) and I know that @acityinohio from the Foundation is also taking these things into perspective.

We are in uncharted territory trying to figure out governance of a open-source protocol, there’s no easy answers.

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Thanks for the response, I hope you guys learned a few things from the way voting happened last time.
It could 100% be me who misunderstood everything about it, but a few others were saying they were confused on some of the voting aspects, so Im not alone I guess.

I wish Zcash the best of luck and hope they can make a good voting system where people feel like they have been represented.

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When we talk about voting system, is it possible to have a decred like voting system in zcash? It will also be a measure of decentralisation.

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Be careful not to feed into the myth that the Electric Coin Company or people affiliated with it control a majority of ZEC. I don’t know who controls a majority of ZEC, and neither does anyone else, but I doubt it is any of the people who are affiliated with ECC and who are getting small slices — like at most around 1% each — of the rewards. Even if you added up all of the rewards of all of those people (which wouldn’t make sense because we can’t assume they’d all vote the same way), and even if you assumed they’ve all saved up all the ZEC they’ve gotten, that would still only add up to around 15% of the total ZEC. (Because I’m excluding the Zcash Foundation’s share and the Electric Coin Company Dev Fund from this calculation, and the total is 80% to the miners, around 5% I think to the Zfnd and ECC, and around 15% to the Founders.)

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