Coinholder Polling on Governance and Funding

[aquietinvestor]

There doesn’t appear to be an user-friendly way to participate in a transparent coinholder poll. In previous transparent polls (before a shielded coinholder voting mechanism existed) users would transfer ZEC from a shielded address or another transparent address into a transparent address using Zecwallet Lite. They would then include their vote in the memo field of a small transaction sent to the poll address. It was a rather straightforward process. However, now that shielded voting exists, that process is no longer relevant since you can now vote using your Orchard notes. Transparent-only wallets like Trust Wallet don’t support the memo field, so they can’t be used for this kind of poll.

Given those constraints, the best path forward seems to be the process outlined by @outgoing.doze below, which involves signing a transaction. In addition to what he outlines, it will also be necessary to check the signature. Also, we should consider how to implement this in a way that avoids unnecessary deanonymization of wallets.

@outgoing.doze

This may be the best possible design to vote with transparent address, but I would like to suggest one that, to me, seems a lot easier. Maybe it’s flawed somewhere, in which case hopefully someone can point out where:

1. Sign a message with a user wallet and post it on the forum between a specific date and time window; like your example ( Sample Answer: 1A; 2E Let’s make more Zcash Swag; 3Y). On future votes, signed messages should be published on a more neutral place.
2. Using the API of a Zcash blockchain explorer, we find out what is the lowest amount of ZEC stored on each ZEC address that has signed a message, between the dates of the vote.

And that’s it! It’s not written on chain but what does it change really? The checking for the lowest amount of ZEC stored on each ZEC address is to prevent voting twice with the same tokens.

@outgoing.doze

@outgoing.doze

Using the API of a Zcash blockchain explorer, we find out what is the lowest amount of ZEC stored on each ZEC address that has signed a message, between the dates of the vote.

Ok here’s a solution that can be done manually for now and scripted later whenever we have API access:

Once the vote is over, we use zcashexplorer.app to check two things:

1. That no transfer has been done during the voting period
2. The balance

Example: https://mainnet.zcashexplorer.app/address/t1VydNnkjBzfL1iAMyUbwGKJAF7PgvuCfMY?s=2821396&e=2843789

Take note of the s=2821396&e=2843789 representing the starting and ending points of the vote.

With API access we could allow transfers during the vote and just use the lowest balance during the voting period but given we may have to check things manually, for this one we would need to ask for no balance transfers to make it easier to review manually.

If 100 people vote using their transparent address, with about 30 seconds per address check, the process would take less than an hour to review. Three people could do this for good measure and ideally report identical results.