Announcing: a Crowd Funding Campaign for a Gitcoin + Zcash Pilot

Actually, this is a great idea. I’d love to build viewkey import into zecwallet lite. That would be awesome.

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I just contributed. I’m excited for Gitcoin and Zcash to team up to create more funding opportunities for the community.

It’s time to BUILD!

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How about some way for us to see how close we are to the 15K goal? I heard there’s this cool library called SimpleGraph.js… :wink:

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We are at about $3k/$15k right now

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Thanks! I think this podcast, which argues to “perturbing innovation funding models” is somewhat relevant to this thread:

Right now I see 11.1949 ZEC in t1ZDfyfwNkyhYzQiRF7iE3wiob1vMp2VR1D. Are the rest of donations to zs17lcwdj7qlqs9wt04akhs4ytm7k8r65pns6jghh5cdp09qeem5wclvhxpy08ylrwq9ggw50rtkzl ?

Does that exclude or include matching from myself and/or @alchemydc, or is it the literal balance? (If it’s the literal balance, I haven’t sent in any matching contributions yet, and I don’t know if @alchemydc has or has not.)

Can you tell me the ZEC amount so I can track how much I owe due to matching? I think we’ll need to filter out any funds from myself or @alchemydc (otherwise we might get into an endless matching loop :joy:).

If you have an easy way to post that each week, that’d be a nice way to track progress.

If you want help scripting that up I can find some time evenings this weekend.

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Posted a twitter update:

@gitcoin + #zcash pilot community fundraising is at $3k / $15k after the first week: [link to here elided]

Four weeks left to the June 15th deadline. #z2z #zeal

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Right now my balance is ZEC 83.00493278 which is worth about $3.5k !

Here is a screencap from my ZECwallet Screen Shot 2020-05-16 at 9... that includes both the shielded balance and the transparent balance . I know its not cryptographic proof, but its the closest thing I can provide for now :slight_smile:

Thank you for the offer to code something up. The hacker in me is seriously delighted by that option. I’d be happy to commit to just posting a screencap or update here every few days if that’s easier and more lightweight.

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I haven’t made any matching transfers yet. Have you @alchemydc?

If you haven’t yet, and we wait until the end, it will be easier to track progress, because we can multiple the current amount (minus our initial two 10 ZEC donations) by 3. In other words: (83 - 20) * 3 ≈ 189 ZEC ≈ $8888 USD.

That would be over halfway!

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I like community involvement, but we should ditch the quadratic part of the voting mechanism. It is not meaningfully possible in Zcash. In a sense it’s antithetical and it certainly is misleading.

In quadratic voting, $1 is is one vote. But $1,000 from the same person is not 1,000 votes. Voting power diminishes quadratically with how many votes you buy. This is a nice idea in theory as it prevents a plutocracy where the wealthy rule. The problem of course, is a wealthy account/address could split up its funds into multiple sybil accounts/addresses and pretend to be a “grass roots” set of voters. There are various proposals to deal with this by tracking identities, coin age, etc. But none of them work in zcash where you are supposed to be able to be anonymous.

Bottom line, quadratic voting gives a false impression of the properties any money based voting system has in Zcash. So we should just be clear this can be manipulated by well funded individuals because Zcash lets you remain anonymous.

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There are various proposals to deal with this by tracking identities, coin age, etc. But none of them work in zcash where you are supposed to be able to be anonymous.

Hi there,

I think that your concerns are super valid - sybil attacks (and collusion attacks) are a major attack vector to quadratic funding.

Research is ongoing about how to mitigate these issues, and some solutions we all recognize are: MACI, DIDs, KYC, SMS verification, OAuth, verifiable credentials, etc.

In the Ethereum ecosystem, we’ve used Github Accounts (and privacy-preserving SMS verification via BUILD- As a user, I want Sybil resistance via new identity mechanism, and to remove the aged github requirement, so we can be more sybil resistent. · Issue #6549 · gitcoinco/web · GitHub ) to make the system sybil resistent. As a mechanism of preserving privacy, Gitcoin knows the txids of each contribution, but does not expose them anywhere to the outside world.

I haven’t thought far enough into this to know exactly what the anti-sybil mechanism in a Gitcoin-ZEC prototype should be. It’d certainly be one of the important considerations to design around, and I would be happy to transprently co-design this with the ZEC community. My perspective is that, the upside of having decentralized funding mechanisms for the ecosystem, is worth the effort of trying to mitigate the problem. But if you don’t want to contribute to the crowdfund, or participate in the round, then I respect that.

Thanks,
Kevin

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By my (admittedly, rather simplistic math), given @nathan-at-least and @alchemydc’s offers to contribute up to 100 ZEC (roughly $4700 each) in matching to the pot , the goal for the crowdfunded portion is about 15000-(4700*2) = 5600.

The wallet currently has 83 ZEC in it, of which 63 ($3000) is not from you two. So yes it seems we are halfway there.

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@owocki I like crowd sourced funding and am excited to see this in the community. Really, but I suggest we get rid of the quadratic part of the voting mechanism. Just do stake weighted voting with all the known issues.

Because it’s misleading to do otherwise in Zcash without some anti sybil mechanism. And given that Zcash is focused on privacy, I’m skeptical we can come up with an anti-sybil mechanism that doesn’t exclude people. I’m certainly willing to try. But I’d suggest we remove the quadratic version of voting until we find one. Because again, until we have one, the quadratic part will confuse people.

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Hey! Might’n’t this conflict with the Hackathon? I want to participate in both.

Just do stake weighted voting

The problem with stake weighted voting, if you’re trying to incentivize participation by smaller players, is that its tilted towards whales. You also lose the powerful “contribute 0.1 ZEC, get matched 5 ZEC” psychology that QF provides.

The proposal is to have an anti-sybil mechanism. Did you see post above on how we do anti sybil in Gitcoin Grants now? Do you think that approach would not work on Gitcoin Grants for Zcash?

they are complimentary, not competitive. you can participate in both.

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Nathan, I’m waiting until the end, which as you suggested, will be easier to track.

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@owocki We appear to be talking past each other.

I’m aware of the problems with stake weighted voting and what quadratic voting wants to solve.

The issue is I don’t think you are going to find a sybil protection mechanism that is compatible with an anonymous cryptocurrency. The entire thing that makes zcash special is its about privacy. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for trying to figure one out and totally willing to help. But IMHO, that’s harder than designing zcash itself.

Suppose you had an anti sybil mechanism that worked well: why not just let people vote with that instead of money? There are two answers. One is you like voting with money provided you avoid the whale problem. The second answer is because none of the mechanisms actually work well enough to trust alone. So you’re relying on money + the specific sms/KYC/w/e as the anti sybil mechanism Maybe in a transparent system, they work well enough and you can detect failures. It doesn’t in zcash.

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It is possible not to completely solve the problem with whale voices, but to minimize it as much as possible without violating anonymity, it is enough to make a vote with the greatest complication to repeat the vote, for example, during the voting process, you need to fill out a form manually, if you exclude the automation option, then the threat of voice repetition through the separation of funds will be reduced to a minimum, add blocking of funds or lifting the balance at the time of voting and get a minimum of double vote violations.
By increasing the threshold for voting by the number of votes (for example, 1,500 instead of any), this gives an additional reduction in the influence of a double vote on the overall picture. A set of measures will give a working system.

Python scripts are pretty easy to write. You can of course throw captcha’s up, but I can just answer those myself or pay people to do it on mturk. Ok, so now you start doing KYC or SMS auth. First, thats a major privacy issue. Second, its a trusted party, third it’s also readily gmeable with money. Phone numbers cost like 10 cents to get. You really cannot readily stop automated vote submission. And indeed, this was precisely why you vote with money: it makes there be some cost to spamming votes.