Announcing Ycash, The First "Friendly Fork" of the Zcash Blockchain

[hloo]

@acityinohio

One of the main reasons why you’re forking Zcash is concern that currently unmined ZEC will be redirected from miners in the future. You cite a promise about monetary distribution which you feel is in danger of being violated. Hence you want to create a new funding distribution scheme… which violates the same promise in the opposite direction, because it redirects unmined ZEC from the people who would receive it under the current rules.

I’m not redirecting any ZEC. I have no power to do that. And I am very much against any proposal to do that. When in July 2018 Eric Meltzer proposed redirecting ZEC from the Founders Award recipients, I argued strongly against it.

@acityinohio

Do the old promises not apply to a forked blockchain? You could argue in either direction, and the cryptocurrency world is still establishing its norms. But it seems strange to ensure a promise (that has not yet been broken) by breaking it differently.

I never made any promises to anyone about Zcash; I was not involved in its launch. But I am involved in the launch of Ycash, and last week I made several promises about Ycash that I intend to keep. This is a fresh set of promises that were born last week. One of them—that 90% of the Ycash monetary supply will be allocated via the mining process—is similar to a promise made by the ECC regarding Zcash before its launch. The similarity between the two distinct promises may be of interest to people (like myself) that invested in Zcash in part based on the ECC’s promise.

@acityinohio

I would generally discourage the use of the royal we in making proposals. It can be confusing in the case when you are not speaking for a multi-person team.

Just to be clear, I do have a multi-person team. I haven’t written C++ code in 20 years. If I was making the source code changes myself, God help us all.

@acityinohio

It seems likely that promises around monetary policy would have to be modified if Ycash migrated to Proof of Stake (based on the need for continuous inflation in that system). You may even have to modify it for Proof of Work. (Based on some work on the instability of fee-based blockchains .) Maintaining low fees will make keeping the promise even more difficult.

The 21 million coin cap on Ycash will NEVER be violated. If a future group of Ycash users want to increase the money supply, they are welcome to launch their own chain fork and do so, but their fork won’t be able to use the trademarked Ycash name owned by the Ycash Foundation. If I figure out a way to legally bind the Ycash Foundation to honoring in perpetuity the 21 million coin cap, I will do so.

@acityinohio

My view is that if there’s a technical or economic reason to break a promise, the onus is on the proposer to explain why it’s worth it, and to cultivate broad, overwhelming consensus as best as they can. Just as the onus is on @hloo (and soon the Ycash Foundation) to encourage users of Ycash to restore promises that he sees as broken. Absent a polling or governance mechanism that can authoritatively describe consensus, perhaps the best measure will be how much an alternative fork catches on.

I agree that popular will should be able override some types of past promises. If a stake-based poll showed that a simple (stake-weighted) majority of ZEC holders favored a new ZEC development fund (managed by the Zcash Foundation) even though it would violate the “90% of the Zcash monetary base goes to the miners” promise made by the ECC, I would not take issue with the ECC supporting such a fund.

@acityinohio

I am optimistic that a shielded pool polling mechanism can help, but it’s only one input in a sea of noisy data, and it’s possible for users to lack the information needed for a sound decision. I don’t have any concrete answers here, but the question is fundamental to the governance challenges of any protocol aspiring for decentralized power and decision-making.

I am a huge supporter of the draft ZIP that you proposed. I have previously argued that stake-based polling could serve as an important community-organizing tool, especially in a community where privacy concerns might impeded collective action.