Besides I’m not convinced this poll will be indicative of general community sentiment anyway considering that I don’t think 90% of the community is both willing and able to follow this voting process.
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Well, if everybody thinks your way, indeed the community sentiment is not going to be expressed.
But I feel you… If nobody is able to gauge community sentiment, we might as well scrap the community and ask the ECC to take full control & leadership over the Zcash future, instead of wasting time polling a dead community…
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I dont think the community is dead, I just think the polling mechanism is too challenging and time consuming for the majority of holders to figure out.
All I am saying is there needs to be a more streamlined voting process.
I think I saw zip 1014 had 88 votes, I’m pretty sure there is an order of magnitude more holders than that.
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It has to be simpler for any result to be meaningful & the nerdy bits are awkward enough to suppress the ‘muggle vote’…which is an uncomfortable thought.
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I’m sorry but I would not recommend following instructions that are so complicated and involve commands like dump_privkey.
Even if they are safe in this particular instance, it goes against security practices.
Don’t type in commands in a shell that you don’t understand especially when it involves crypto and they come from the internet.
Nothing personal.
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Zecwallet lite does limit the user to a single taddy and would make it harder for those users to fudge the numbers simply because they would need multiple instances. Using Zcashd to do it is only slightly more complex requiring some experience with using the CL and converting the memo to hex but theres otherwise nothing that prevents a user from generating multiple votes and so I would place no faith in the idea that it’s inherit complexity is any kind of sybil defense.
(But starting to use the command line is just a hurdle and a little one at that. People are encouraged to run full nodes if they can (it strengthens the network and contributes to a social good) and to practice and become acquainted with the terminal (If that weren’t true then there would be support for Windows) plus there’s always other people here willing to help with that.)
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I understand the spirit of the experiment and that wonderful things can come from unorthodox thinking and the problem isn’t that naivety but that this experiment has no control data and that anybody expects any kind of meaningful results without that.
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One can indeed vote a thousand times, but a thousand times 0 is still going to give a voting weight of 0.
can i just vote from my existing t addr (if i dont care about linkage & tracing)?
I would imagine this is absolutely an option, for as long as the wallet you use supports editing the memo field. I do not believe that is the case with Ledger Live.
This means your vote is trivially linked to any other t-address activity, past of future, done with that Zecwallet Lite instance (or seed). If you ever reveal your Zecwallet Lite taddr to anyone, or will do so in the future, then they know what you voted and with how many coins.
Worse yet, the user may not even initiate or be aware of such t-address activity. The auto-shielding behavior opens up a host of t-address-based deanonymization attacks. For example, if I happen to know you’re about to make a shielded payment from your zaddr to another zaddr, I can send some dust ZEC to your taddr (or to all voting taddrs) shortly before, and see if it’s gathered up by the auto-shielding at the expected time.
Edited to add:
This linkability also works the other way: if your “anonymous” vote is sufficiently unique and linkable to you (e.g., because you expressed the same opinion elsewhere), then you’re effectively broadcasting that you’re the owner of that (unchanging!) t-address, along any transactions it did and will do.
also on what @amiller says above:
The original post makes a strong claim that there is no on chain linkage, but this is only true if you start out with your funds in a shielded address.
Plus, of course, all the usability and operational-risk issues raised above.
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Couldn’t agree more.
To follow up on this, I made a script to audit the poll that basically checks whether the T-addresses participating in the poll are following the suggested instructions to use an ephemeral t-address, or whether they’re leaving some trail of on-chain linkability to follow. Here’s hoping this nudges the coinholder poll participants to stay anon 
BTW so far so good, the test transactions from ecc came from some 2-year old t-addresses, and the “pure swiss made pos” poster has some change addresses but otherwise no trail.
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This feedback is as valuable as actual polling results. Thanks.
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Yes, it’s important if you decide to participate to only use an amount you are comfortable with, and it’s very reasonable for many users to use a separate low-stakes wallet with a smaller amount.
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I would consider it extremely antisocial for an institution to use their customers’ funds to participate in a vote. Before this kind of coin-weighted polling becomes more common-place, this is definitely something the Zcash community would have to address. (I think it has been addressed by various exchanges and institutions for specific coins that offer voting, staking, etc…)
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I have updated the instructions with
- Cut off block height 1410115
- screen shots from ZecWallet lite desktop app
+1 to this being a very complicated way of voting and hope the results are advisory and not binding. 
I probably won’t vote due to how complex the process is. I understand the instructions but the process sure is a chore. 
Also whilst out doesn’t matter so much for this vote, it’s interesting that you’re giving the richest people the biggest sway in the vote process. Money talks. 
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Unfortunately I don’t feel like coin holder votes will gain much traction until HALO launches and there’s z addy support for hardware wallets.
We all know what the community wants, we don’t need a poll that 95% of people wont vote on to tell us the same thing. I feel super uncomfortable with this method.
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If this were the only feedback method used in Zcash decision making, I too would feel uncomfortable with this.
However, it’s important to compare it to all the alternatives:
Devs just making decisions without any feedback: Upsides - “benevolent dictator” style benefits such as making short-term unpopular decisions for long-term benefit, more efficient / faster to iterate, etc… Downsides - no user / community feedback! Centralized governance, single point of failure/attack, etc…
Coin-weighted polling: Upside - Any ZEC holder can participate (theoretically; obviously the current UX is terrible). Coin weight is some representation of skin in the game. Downside - Anonymous means no reputation at stake. Borrow-to-vote schemes. Wealthier participants have heavier voice.
Community Advisory Panel: Upsides - Members have some reputation on the line. Membership is transparent. Clear good voting system. Downsides - No guarantee of skin-in-the-ZEC-game, membership gate-keeping, may not be representative of users.
Forum Participation: Upsides - A long history of participation allows participants to develop reputations; pseudonymity is possible. Downsides - Difficult to determine any consensus from free-form discussions and polls aren’t rigorous and don’t have strong privacy. No guarantee of skin-in-the-ZEC-game, membership gatekeeping, may not be representative of users.
All approaches have some common downsides:
- language/cultural barriers: a lot of the forum is in English, and a lot of the governance and dev participants use English, but Zcash has many non-native-English-speaking users.
- corruption-by-wealth: people tend to point to this as a downside of coin-weighted voting, but money can buy corruption in any of these systems. We don’t know who gets paid by whom, and it’s (unfortunately) not uncommon across the greater crypto space for a lot of non-transparent payments to happen for influencers to support various positions. The best antidote to this, IMO, is transparency and reputation where we can.
Anyway, my current thinking from looking at all these benefits and concerns is that Zcash governance should use a mixture of methods, we should encourage anyone to add or support new methods, and we should balance the results against each other from different methods.
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