Coin Holder Polling - Next Steps

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Coin Holder Polling - Next Steps

Thank you to everyone who provided feedback related to the upcoming coin-holder poll conducted by ECC. Over 10 days, there were 50+ comments in this thread expressing a range of opinions. The feedback we received fell into two main buckets:

Poll significance and ECC interpretation of the results

Several pieces of feedback focused on the significance of the poll (eg: binding vs non-binding) and ECC’s interpretation of poll results.

As we have previously mentioned, this coin holder poll, similar to the ZCAP poll that recently concluded, is non-binding. For ECC, the purpose of coin holder polling is simply to have more ways to assess community sentiment. It will be interesting to compare the results of this upcoming coin holder poll to previous coin holder polls as well as to the most recent ZCAP poll.

While we don’t have specific “goal posts” in mind, there are a few hypotheses that a poll like this could help us test. For example, regarding minimum participation levels, we would like to see more coins and more addresses in this poll than in previous polls. In our view, that would be a good indicator that coin holders have an appetite to voice their opinions through an on-chain mechanism.

Polling mechanism improvements

There were multiple suggestions for how to improve polling in the future including voting keys, a QT app with simple UI, a payment URI, and quadratic voting mechanisms such as Gitcoin’s approach to funding. These improvements and others could help address the concerns raised regarding coin holder privacy and preventing Sybil attacks.

As for the poll itself, we received a few specific suggestions for how to design and interpret the poll. One suggestion was to reframe the first two questions to follow a STAR voting format. Although this voting format could be valuable for future polls, we believe it might add confusion and complexity when interpreting the outcomes. We will however add an “Other” option so that coin holders can add their own suggestions for Zcash’s priorities.

[EDIT] Coin holder poll instructions will be posted week of 9/20.
The poll will run from Monday, September 27th to Friday, October 1st.

FINALIZED POLL QUESTIONS

What should be the first priority for Zcash following the activation of NU5?

  • Improve Zcash’s scalability
  • Change in consensus mechanism from proof of work to another, such as proof of stake or a hybrid solution.
  • Programmability on Zcash
  • ZSAs (Zcash shielded assets)
  • Other (please specify)

What should be the second priority for Zcash following the activation of NU5?

  • Improve Zcash’s scalability
  • Change in consensus mechanism from proof of work to another, such as proof of stake or a hybrid solution.
  • Programmability on Zcash
  • ZSAs (Zcash shielded assets)
  • Other (please specify)

Do you support making amendments to ZIP 1014 based on recommendations of current committee members, specifically Chris Burniske’s suggestions?

  • Y
  • N
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There were multiple suggestions for how to improve polling in the future including voting keys, a QT app with simple UI, a payment URI, and quadratic voting mechanisms such as Gitcoin’s approach to funding. These improvements and others could help address the concerns raised regarding coin holder privacy and preventing Sybil attacks.

Does ECC intend to analyze how these suggestions would actually help resolve the fundamental privacy/security concerns linked in the discussion? And wait for these suggestions to be implemented before invoking the poll?

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The current plan is to

  • Run a coin-holder poll from Monday, September 27th and go until Friday, October 1st to gather sentiment around ongoing community discussions related to PoW, Zcash Shielded Assets and ZIP 1014.
  • The poll will be identical in structure to earlier ZEC coin-holder polls, namely Andrew Miller’s Straw Poll. The poll would be coin-weighted to 1 coin, 1 vote.

For future polls, ECC may analyze those suggestions and iterate on different polling mechanisms.

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The poll will be identical in structure to earlier ZEC coin-holder

I observe, then, that ECC yet again decided to flatly ignore privacy and security concerns about the voting scheme that it’s promoting (both by advocacy and by saying the poll result will affect decisions).

You are actively pushing ZEC holders into harm’s way.

Your feedback request was a sham, judging both by the above and by the fact you did not allocate any cryptography/protocol engineers to working on this cryptographic voting protocol.

This is highly uncharacteristic of ECC’s top-notch privacy/security standards in other matters, and quite bewildering.

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As the provacteur that hosted the earlier polls and an advocate for unpopular ideas (i.e., not speaking in capacity as part of ZF here), I would really like to see this come with some kind of iteration and improvement, beyond just replicating the structure from last time. There’s still 17 days left, why not put up a bounty or hackathon prize or something else, for a wallet feature prototype or new design and analysis or something else that could be used to participate in such votes while minimizing the privacy & coin loss risk?

While we don’t have specific “goal posts” in mind, there are a few hypotheses that a poll like this could help us test. For example, regarding minimum participation levels, we would like to see more coins and more addresses in this poll than in previous polls. In our view, that would be a good indicator that coin holders have an appetite to voice their opinions through an on-chain mechanism.

Are there other hypotheses in mind? Hypotheses for an experiment are best registered in advance. I disagree that more addresses participating indicates more appetite given the ease of sybil attacking by writing a script that splits votes across multiple t addresses.

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So far I haven’t weighed in on the issue of coin holder voting. I echo concerns about privacy and security of coin holder voting, but I also personally really want there to be a way for long-term coin holders to express their opinions. I have a substantial amount of ZEC that I’m holding long-term, like I won’t sell for 10+ years, because I believe it’s a good investment, and I want to express to the community why I think it’s a good investment and which strategies we should adopt in order for it to remain a good investment.

I don’t think that I should be given a stronger voice because I own a lot of ZEC, but I do think that staking a lot of my personal wealth behind a decision should indicate how strong my personal convictions are, and that’s worth something, because it forces me to really think before deciding. It shouldn’t dictate strategy, because I want ZEC to be a useful product for people that currently don’t have a lot of money or ZEC (in fact I want to vote for that), but it’s a useful data point we should collect even if it’s not binding.

It might be interesting to think about weighting future polls in units of “ZEC-years”, e.g. if I’m willing to commit to locking up a large amount of ZEC for a whole 10 years in favor of one strategy, that should be worth more than someone who borrows a 5x more ZEC for a few weeks to cast their vote. Ideally, in a good coin-holder voting scheme, I should lose value if I voted for a bad strategy and win value if I made a good judgement. Implementing that in a private and decentralized way would be really challenging, but I think it’s something we could work towards.

Note that a lot of the problems with coinholder voting are identical to problems private businesses face when their investors / board of directors vote on something: investors must disclose how many shares they own, investors could borrow shares prior to important votes and sell them later, etc. In practice that seems to still work for the most part, but we should be always thinking about how to make it better.

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Yes, weighing by coins × lockup period would be different, and possibly better, than weighing by a single-point-in-time snapshot.

Or perhaps backward-looking coins × holding period, which doesn’t as accurately capture future skin-in-the-game, but is still an indication of ZODLing and mitigates lend-to-vote.

However, there are difficult questions on defining/implementing such lockups, since people need to move money around between their own wallets and across pools in network upgrades. See, e.g., these questions. I would love to figure out how we want to define the desired lockup/holding period, and then find a privacy-preserving way to implement that.

I do think that staking a lot of my personal wealth behind a decision should indicate how strong my personal convictions are, and that’s worth something

One problem with this argument is that “a lot of my personal wealth” is relative. Does a rich millionaire, who used 1% of their net worth to buy $100k of ZEC because YOLO, have x10 the personal conviction (and thus weight) compared to a brilliant young ZODLer with student loans and a mortgage who holds on to $10k of ZEC? [1]

I would much rather hear what they have to say, here or on zecpages, than try to guess the derivative of their utility curve as a function of their ZEC holdings and price.

[1] By no means implying the latter is a good idea. Holding volatile assets while in debt is leveraged speculation, and will probably wreck you — if not this time around, then by setting you up with a really bad habit.

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For the record, the Zcash Foundation will not use the coins it controls (either directly or indirectly) to participate in this poll, nor will it lobby or encourage anyone to participate or refrain from participating in the poll.

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[EDIT] Coin holder poll instructions will be posted week of 9/20.

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