To me this sounds like this: “It doesn’t matter if we make it easier to vote for women and more people vote, either way men will run politics.”
It’s a defeatist position. Also, when it comes to spending the inflation, it’s quite legitimate to have the vote weighted by stake. Again, we’re not talking about voting on the protocol itself here, we’ve been using the same mechanisms as Bitcoin when it comes to protocol governance.
I’m not sure that is true. See here:
Removed references, I need to source this myself. Thank you for the quick reply and correction.
Democracy is a system one is born into without a choice. The power is created by taking sovereignty at birth and assigning it to the state. That is why separation of powers exist.
Zcash is an opt-in system, and therefore has power dynamics more similar to a company.
We aren’t even talking about the governance of the protocol here, which is ruled by the elegant Nakamoto consensus.
We are talking about the governance of distributing funds generated from inflation which is an implicit tax on coinholders.
Its interesting that people feel entitled to those funds! The actual alternative here is no tax and no funds at all.
That is not an accurate comparison at all. First, women make 50% of the population, so they automatically have 50% of the voting power; while in coinholder voting you will have 1% of the people always having 99% of the voting power (I don’t know the exact numbers, you get the gist) regardless of how many people vote.
You are also making a comparison with democracy why is not supposed to be a plutocracy in the first place.
You’ve missed my point.
You’re essentially saying that because the current stakeholder voting isn’t getting the outcome we want, then that outcome is never going to happen.
My comparison was that for decades many have tried to get women into politics, starting with the right of voting. Because, in the US, for example, women are still a minority in government and it’s only very slowly improving, one may be tempted to say that the whole idea should be abandoned because it hasn’t worked.
But you know, I understand. I understand some people with smaller stakes want a bigger say over the inflation than they are legitimate for. The whole inflation of Zcash was stolen from stakeholders for many years. One thing has changed though. Previously, my view was only shared by a minority. Now yours is.
Btw, the only legitimate alternative to stakeholders control over the dev fund is a termination of the dev fund. Large stakeholders can then simply work together, or individually, to fund what they believe is right.
We’re getting a lot more transparency with the current dev fund progressively controlled by any stakeholders wishing to participate.
This would make a great X space topic.
I assume you meant me, that’s not what I’m saying at all. What I mean is that if buying coins in order to express sentiment via THV is a market process, then selling coins in order to do the same is a market process, too.
My point is these are weak market processes at best and there are probably better market mechanisms out there (futarchy might be one) that would lead to better results. We should experiment with those and not consider THV as the perfect solution for all capital allocation issues.
If we end up having 15 whales electing 3 of their buddies into ZCP in order to hand out money to the projects they like, thereby effectively controlling all dev funds, will that really improve things?
The same for me, I think it’s great that we have THV.
I want Zcash to win as unstoppable private money.
Zcash is not a corporation, it’s something else. That means we have to be very careful to take concepts that apply to corporations and apply them one-to-one to Zcash.
For example, in corporations employees get paid before profits are even generated. Who is going to pay the Zcash protocol devs if the token holders don’t deem it necessary to pay them?
I spent two days of my life helping to run the voting infrastructure. The market decided that’s not worth compensating (or the asked price was too high). Since my time is the scarcest resource I have and I believe in market processes I will listen to this market signal and allocate my time resources in the future elsewhere. Hopefully other volunteers have a lower price for their time (currently zero) and we’ll have people running the voting infrastructure in the future, otherwise we’ll have a problem.
Distributed new coins are inflation, not profits. 80% go to miners as a “security budget”, 12% are effectively controlled by THV, we are talking about 8% here.
The difference is aligned interests. If you have whales, sure they could try to vote their mates in, but the point is, if they are incompetent and don’t actually provide a net positive, and negatively the price, the whale’s wealth is DIRECTLY tied to the market sentiment of ZEC, THAT is the difference. Vs people now who have no requirement to hold any set amount of ZEC and derive benefit from grants getting continually approved at increasing amounts.
For example, in corporations employees get paid before profits are even generated. Who is going to pay the Zcash protocol devs if the token holders don’t deem it necessary to pay them?
This is exactly the crux of it, the value of the work should be subject to scrunity and determined by the market in a transparent way NOT a group of insiders. If the market determines it’s truly a net benefit they those devs will continue to be paid, otherwise if the market deems it wasteful they will not. It improves efficiency.
From the outside the current setup looks like a corrupt looting pit for insiders taxing coinholders.
The insiders (grant recipient ZCAP and ZCG) are on a gravy train at the moment, the pot is significantly larger than 3 months ago. They don’t want to relinquish power and control to THV and lose their benefits. Hence justifying why we should not let the market decide.
To expand a bit more on why I am struggling with the ‘whales’ argument.
The way I see it is either rule by whales, with smaller coinholders still having some influence as a collective, vs a group of primarily insiders and a setup which attracts looters with no direct skin in the game. (As far as I know, projects/stipends etc are paid out in the USD equivalent of ZEC, and NOT a set amout of ZEC, so in a way how ZEC is valued does not directly affect recipients).
If it’s a choice between whales who have put their money where their mouth is and is proven (by virtue of them being whales and having access to large funds) via their market insight, where if I lose money, they also lose money vs potential looters, I know what I would rather choose as a coinholder.
To caveat this. I am relatively new, having been a lurker for the last year. I know there have been excellent projects, and I’m in no way accusing the team of looting in the past. I believe in the project and think a good job has been done to get it to where it is, that is why I am here. I think it was necessary to bootstrap to get it to where it is. So great job there.
However, where ZEC sits in the market today and it’s current market cap, it needs to shift to THV for funding decisions. It is a different beast. Otherwise it will just incentivise corruption and bloat at the detriment of coinholders.
It will be difficult to relinquish control, but it’s necessary for the project to be taken seriously and become a major player compared to BTC and the like. It’s the right thing to do and the market is watching how this is being handled and the decisions made going forward.
I have in the past suggested giving coinholders the ability to withhold devfunds in a lockbox, which is essentially the on/off switch you are demanding. But I still reject the idea that any devfund without this mechanism is “illegitimate”, as that implies that something immoral is going on. Cryptocurrencies are not like countries. Countries are created from a fixed supply of naturally occurring usable land and existing countries have hogged all the supply which limits your ability to start your own country. Zcash is not hogging any finite natural resource and there is practically no limit to how many forks you can create. Participation in Zcash is thus completely voluntary, and any form of devfund that is not based on deception is legitimate.
Indeed, something very immoral has been going on; for almost 6 years now.
“The Founder’s Reward expires in November 2020. While there has been unambiguous agreement that no further funding should be allocated to investors and founders, there was an outstanding question on how future Zcash support and development should be adequately funded and more inclusive of new third parties.”
Now, do I need to point out how the initial rules of the games have been changed? By whom and how?
Stolen. It’s been stolen from stakeholders.
No it wasn’t stolen. The chain forked into Zcash and Ycash and people had the option to choose which fork to use. Ycash got rid of the dev fund. If you did not consent to renewing the dev fund you should have gone with Ycash.
I bought ZEC during the first year. I bought it with the expectation that the agreement above would be respected. It hasn’t. That’s all there is to say really.
You say I could have gone with Ycash. I did too, btw. But it’s unrelated. The agreement was with Zcash.
The agreement was broken using a stakeholders vote (see the irony there) with 0.1% participation.
Wanna dig a deeper hole on this subject?
What exactly do you mean when you say that your agreement was “with Zcash”? Are you talking about the ECC? ZF? Anyone who has owned ZEC? Are you claiming it was illegitimate for anyone to create a fork with a renewed dev fund? Zcash and Ycash were exactly the same blockchain up until the fork, and your expectation was fulfilled by the fork that ended up being called “Ycash”.
My agreement? I have never said such thing. Let’s start by not inventing stuff if you don’t mind.
I’m talking about the people who initiated Zcash, creating in the process, a dev fund that was not supposed to last beyond four years.
You’re almost understanding what’s going on! They could have created a fork with a different name and have had any rules they wanted. Zcash came with an agreement.
If they had given up the trade Zcash trademark from the start, would you have accepted the legitimacy of the renewed devfund?
Ok… Would the devfund have been legitimate if there was no zcash trademark?
The trademark is a big one, but it’s not the only thing that matters indeed.
The people in de facto control of the codebase are both the ones that have created Zcash (along with the 4 years agreement for the dev fund) and the ones that have changed the rules. So, no, I do not believe those are circumstances that make the change legitimate.
Either way, if they would have forked Zcash and created a new token with the new rules they wanted, that would have been a legitimate way to proceed, yes.