Do Tesla drivers own their teslas or is it just like a weird renting scheme? I’ve heard they’re contractually obligated to have it serviced at Tesla only places, things like that. It kind of feels like a poor comparison to a freely accessible, public good.
I was talking about shares of the company Tesla. I don’t quite see what the relevance of the ownership of the cars have.
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I guess it depends on how you think about it. Whether holding Zcash is more equivalent to holding shares in the Zcash project or whether it is equivalent to holding the end product of the project. Maybe both but I really think more in terms of the latter, don’t really understand the former in this case except for using weight to capture and influence the projects direction.
With the vehicle comparison: It would be the product, not shares, and so I connect those dots. I can have self custody of the coins, could contribute to the code bases (if I were smart enough), download and modify within the constraints of the licenses etc., its free and public. Certainly not the case with the tesla vehicle. Other vehicles not typically so stringent, I can own it and do whatever I what. And so that’s why I point out the, from my perspective, poor comparison.
The problem isn’t coin voting. Doing it on chain is as good as doing it anywhere else. The problem is the same problem there ever was and weighted voting specifically facilitates at least one of them. If the idea is to get a fair voting mechanism, then this is the opposite of that.
I’ve gone on a lot but with the shares thing, I really think there are people who sincerely care and contribute to the project, the mission that even if I knew they had no coins at all it likely wouldnt really change the way I think about their opinion.
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yeah, I can see it is a bit confusing with zcash. Usually, projects distinguish between the coin and the governance token.
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And who-knows-whom is the whole goal of the identity-based polls?
It’s not perfect but I prefer to also have additional input from zodlers compared to having all decisions solely made by the board of one or two orgs (albeit informed by the poll they run for the people they allow to be in the poll).
Is this true in crypto projects? In trad companies yes, but in ecosystems like Cosmos, I believe most projects have 1 token. Sure, some made it so that you have to stake to vote but the underlying is one token/coin.
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I wanted to share an idea that @zooko and I came up with last week, that was later improved on when I discussed it with @str4d
A bit of backstory:
For the coin-weighted poll, I did not want to give un-audited and currently closed-source code access to a significant amount of funds. So, instead, what I did in order to participate in the poll was:
- First, I used a wallet that I fully trust (open-source with audited code) to generate a new random spending key (in this case, via a new random seed).
- During the registration window, I moved the coins that I wanted to vote with to an address controlled by that spending key.
- After the registration window closed, I moved the funds out from that key back into cold storage.
- Then, only once the funds were no longer accessible to that spending key, I imported the seed into a carefully sandboxed YWallet Desktop version, and proceeded to use the key to vote with.
This worked great! What @zooko observed was that once I’d moved the funds out, that spending key was effectively a bearer token that could be used for voting with those coins. And this is really interesting, because, for example, if I wanted to delegate my vote to someone, I could do it by sharing a QR code with them that embedded that bearer token.
Then later, when discussing this with @str4d, he observed that this is exactly the same mechanism as has been suggested for Liberated Payments (ZIP 324: URI-Encapsulated Payments) - you move the funds into a spending key that can be shared, and then if the recipient doesn’t claim the funds you can claw them back by retaining the spending key and sending the funds back to the wallet that generated the liberated payment. In the case of creating a coin-voting bearer token, your wallet would not make the key available for sharing until it had automatically clawed back the payment after the registration window closed. So any wallet that implements the liberated payment concept can use the exact same mechanism to implement bearer-token-coin-voting.
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Is Zero Hybrid Deferred Dev Fund: Transitioning to a Non-Direct Funding Model and One 20% Lockbox?
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Yes, it is!
But Zcash (ZEC) has a unique problem because more than 2 million ZEC were distributed during the Founder’s Reward era… that in my opinion tarnishes the otherwise fair ideal of “Pay-to-win” (because not everyone has paid for their ZEC)
(And of course there are also the current 4-year cycle of Dev Fund ZEC that have been freely distributed among the ZCG, ECC, and ZF)
Among those ~2 million ZEC distributed to the publicly unknown “Founders” we haven’t got any concrete way to know how many of them could press down the needle during coin weighted voting events. (This situation is a bit more cloudy than that of ZCG, ZF, or ECC using their ZEC for coin weighted voting… since afterall, we have some capacity to "know" the activities of their ZEC)
Taking this very first iteration, merely ~420k ZEC voted, out of a total circulation of 15 million!
Until Transparent ZEC are able to vote, I’d assert that there is a great risk of any coin weighted voting event being controlled by one or just a few of the original “Founder’s Reward” recipients.
Put concisely, we have all now seen that Zooko is friends with a ZEC whale who is in control of more than ~350K ZEC! Pay-to-win is the ideal, but how can we be sure that the whale actually paid?
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very fair point i think 
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We’ve all paid insane opportunity cost and experienced mondo price decline from the peak just by holding ZEC. If they’ve held since they got the founders reward, it’s good enough for me. They have suffered enough 
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Everyone pays for ZEC. If not, the system would be broken.
We don’t pay the same way:
- I got them from grants for my work
- Other people buy them on the exchange
- Miners pay electricity
- and the founders by taking risks and putting time and money into an early project.
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No need to get pedantic here.
In common terms “Pay for Play” or “Pay to Win” or whatever the preferred phrase is, is understood as fiat money for weight/ influence.
The Founder’s Reward, and debatably the current 4-year cycle of Dev Funding, have muddied the discussion because there are discretionary, market subjective, geographical, meritocratic, and even more reasons why every ZEC can’t genuinely be assumed as like-kind to the next.
One famous Zcash tale involves a social media influencer being given ZEC to go on a parachuting trip! God Bless @tm3k - I’d happily go parachuting 3 times a month, if I were being given ZEC on each occasion.
I don’t even believe BTC stands up to this sort of critique in its highest form because even with BTC a huge sum of the earliest circulating supply was hoarded up by a relatively tiny group of cryptographers with a massive social & technical headstart.
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I am not being pedantic. I have heard this rhetoric so many times from late adopters who complain that early adopters got in cheap.
And I 100% disagree.
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This coin vote is sort of a farce because we know that it’s essentially dominated by Zooko’s “whale friend”
(almost certainly a recipient of free ZEC via the Founder’s Reward era)
That unsavory fact aside, I still believe that the ecosystem does continue to support the idea of getting coin holder voting into the governance process.
I hope Zooko has 3 whale friends. A few thoughts
1 - If he’s held since founders reward era - he’s had as much liquid at risk this entire time & believes in the project.
2 - If someone rich who has money wants to back a project that is clearly losing ground - they are putting their funds at risk and have earned the vote.
3 - Most of the problems in ZCash have come from people who have too much time & pointless governance squabbling that inhibits progress while bleeding the reserves without getting anything done.
4 - Capital at risk in a liquid market taking an interest in ZCash is the opposite of the whales dumping low float on n00bs with 3% of coin unlock.
5 - “How much do I have to gain or lose” is EXACTLY how votes should be weighted, otherwise we get pointless bureaucrats.
6 - “Governance” should be optimized to get rid of the pointless squabble with no progress & I can’t believe you guys can’t see this yet.
7 - Coin vote is the sibyl resistance & At stake voting we need.
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Amen to that
Again, I’m not advocating that coin holders should be the sole decision makers. I just don’t want polls run by one or two orgs be the sole decision makers.
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You may know the history better than I do. Out of those ~2.1 million ZEC distributed during the Founder’s Reward era, how many are publicly disclosed/ accounted for?
Until the ecosystem has insight into the details, we carry an uncertainty about coin vote fairness. To me its probably an impossible challenge - like auditing the Pentagon, or aid to Ukraine/ Afghanistan/ Haiti/ pick your favorite
You’re confusing Zcash with Bitcoin I think. 1 ZEC = 1 ZEC, that’s all we need to know.
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