Hi @joshs, I see that you’re taking time to respond to some queries that you’re having difficulty understanding.
I think it’s critical that we as a community take the time to thoughtfully, in both the emotional and intellectual senses of the word, engage people where they are.
With that having been said, it’s also important to allocate our energies thoughtfully, and cultivate our precious attention in a way that respects that very value.
In order to make wise choices, we need to pay attention to what is..
On that note, I’d like to point out that the daily trading volume (24 hour) as reported by “tradingview” seems to be about 60.17 million USD.
A dramatic sell off, might temporarily depress the market.. but then again.. a sell implies a buy! And that means different parties become interested.
I recommend to watch this short conversation between @aquietinvestor and @zooko to anyone participating to the vote, including those, or maybe particularly those, against giving power to ZEC stakeholders.
With Coinholder Voting 2.0, we have already come a good deal closer to what a meaningful governance system could look like.
What still needs to be improved in my view:
Instead of having to move your coins in a certain block range or refresh/update the notes, it should be possible to vote with a final balance of coins at a certain deadline.
This way time weighted voting should also be easier to implement. You can simply load up a secure hardware wallet with old and new coins (call it your personal voting vault) without having to carry out transactions on other wallets. This also results in less stress and time pressure to move coins around until the end of the registration period.
You should be able to vote without having to enter your seed phrase anywhere. This would make it feel easier and safer to vote with a big amount stored on hardware wallet like Keystone.
I agree with all you said. I’m curious how difficult each of those suggestions is to implement.
Do you have an opinion on the fact that, while on one side the token voting is becoming better on many fronts, ZF and ECC can still interpret the outcome any way they like?
Specifically, if say ZEC holders and the “community of dev fund recipients” have opposite views, we don’t know which one they intend to follow. To me this is the last frontier, the most broken thing that needs to be fixed in our governance.
That’s actually the only reason why I will vote against continuing the dev fund, because the voting structure does not make any sense whatsoever and I think this is quite dangerous.
This is a tough one to answer. In your specific example the coin holder voting would be about ending or continuing block reward distributions, whereas the potential recipients of these block rewards (“devs”) ultimately also would have to implement the changes in the protocol.
So your concern is 100% valid - if coin holders decide to stop distributing block rewards to these recipients, how can we make sure that they will implement this change and adhere to the will of the coin holders/the ZIP they voted on?
Referencing hanh´s talk at the last ZCon, the parties who carry out such a vote and interpret the results, should be as neutral and independent as possible.
Furthermore you also need an independent third party to audit the actual implementation from a technical perspective. → Was the result of the coin holder voting implemented as envisioned by the holders?
What if the devs resist the result and, for example, ignore it or deliberately implement it incorrectly? → The result would be kind of a civil war in this forum, right?
It would be a massive breach of trust and could throw the entire community into turmoil. Many would probably sell their coins. Ultimately, that would probably also be the strongest “antidote”, as the devs are also dependent on good prices and fiat liquidity, otherwise the block rewards would be of no use to them.
Like I said, it is tough to answer just because of the fact that the coin holders who vote are not necessarily the ones implementing the changes (atleast not as a collective).
You know what’s great? We have an amazing way to confirm your hypothesis though: stakeholder voting. Let’s get rid of the non-sense of random people participating to some side-channel vote and other random people interpreting the vote.
At the end of the day you have to trust that devs will implement the outcome and that node operators will upgrade their nodes with the implemented outcome. You can’t magically turn any polling result into deployed nodes.
Right. Yet, ZF and ECC could totally pledge to abide by the result of the token vote. We already trust them for plenty of things, I would trust them for this. It’s the same situation you did not understand previously. They can lie, but it comes at a cost, which in this case would definitely be wiping away whatever trust they have from the community.
At minimum, they could (definitely should) tell us how they intend to interpret the vote. So basic.
It’s no different than similar polling mechanisms in the past. The consensus rules don’t change unless there is clear community consensus that they do. For example, if a majority of respondents in the community poll are in favor of proposal A and not in favor of proposal B, but the majority of coin holders are for proposal B but not proposal A, then from ECC’s position, there is not clear consensus. In the case where results are ambiguous, we may ask for a follow-on poll as was done for the two lockbox options last year.
So, you’re not going to define what’s clear and what’s not. That’s not acceptable @joshs, that’s giving you a discretionary power you should not have.
I know you are in a corner. The governance model you’ve selected to use doesn’t work, it doesn’t scale, it’s not Sybil resistant, and it doesn’t resemble any proven governance model.
I reject the assertion that we will not act with integrity. And I in no way feel like I’m in a corner.
Prior to the action that I took last year to dissolve the trademark agreement, consensus was solely determined by ECC and ZF - really the two leaders of the respective orgs. The ECC’s determination of community consensus was arbitrary. The ZF’s determination was based on the ZCAP vote. When I left ECC in 2023, I wrote a long post about the governance model and why it needed to change. When I agreed to come back as ECC’s CEO later that year, I did so with the board’s understanding that I would push for significant changes in governance and push for decentralization. True to my word, I killed the trademark agreement with ZF, rejected direct funding (to ECC’s own detriment) and, as imperfect as the structure is today, here we are, working to improve it, using the model we have to get to a better one moving forward.
Eliminating the trademark agreement opened things up and decentralized decision-making. As there is no formal on-chain voting mechanism in place today, we are doing our best to reach the right conclusion about the community’s will. In my opinion, coin holder votes are a significant part of that.
Ultimately, my opinion only matters a little. If I were to try to push the core devs to implement a change in zcashd that did not have clear consensus, they would refuse. If they did not refuse and ECC implemented changes in zcashd that the community didn’t agree with, a couple of things would happen: we would undermine our credibility with the community, and someone would likely fork the repo and advocate for node operators to use that version instead of ECC’s.
ECC has a voice, but are not the decision-makers on what software is run or considered to be Zcash.
That’s what I expected, so I know lying isn’t an option for ECC and ZF. It’s an important piece of the puzzle.
That’s the thing. If you’re lucky, things are indisputably clear. Now, given you are not expressing any kind of number, be it percentage, threshold, or anything relevant to governance, you might be getting yourself in a bit of pickle should the community be divided. You say you could run other polls after to clarify things, but that doesn’t make that much sense either; there’s no structure, that’d be just riffing it.
I know. You’re saying it like it’s a bad thing; I’m literally looking forward to this outcome. Not the one where you undermine your credibility, the one where someone decides they have had enough of the non-sense and maintains a fork. I see it as a good thing.
True, yet you are in a position where how you, yourself, individually, interpret the vote will have an impact on the whole project. Evidently, I would prefer you to say that you will abide by the stakeholders decision. First, because we are heading straight for that anyway and you know it. Second, because it’s the right thing to do for this specific poll where we really do not need bias people to be able to vote twice. Third, because this is an unnecessary and unfair headache, a burden, put on you. It just doesn’t make any sense.
Just picture it:
*binding not as in on-chain governance, but as in ZF and ECC would pledge to respect it.
Nice and simple.
Disagreements may ensue, forks may happen. It’s all good, we got this.
I agree! Forking is the ultimate, and most honest “governance mechanism.”
I will make a prediction. My prediction is that the successful consensus fork of Zcash will be the one where the development teams with deep understanding of the protocol continue to be funded to work on that fork.
Every fork of Zcash that has not had the support of developers with deep knowledge of the protocol has failed - either outright failed to achieve meaningful market penetration, or has abandoned the privacy ethos and isn’t even really worth thinking about. There will probably be more.
Software is only complete when nobody is using it, and Zcash is far from complete. Therefore it needs development funding. One option for that funding is for developers to seek wealthy patrons, and hope that they don’t then use that leverage to attempt to abuse Zcash users’ trust. Another option for that funding is for it to come from block subsidies, just like miner rewards do. Developers and miners are on the same side of the inflation equation - only miners have never lifted a finger to move the technology of Zcash forward.
Sure; the relationship is symbiotic. Remember that even though we might not be whales, we also all hold and use ZEC as well; I can’t speak for others but how Zcash performs in the market pretty dramatically affects my personal net worth.
We absolutely need the community. In some sense though, your position is unclear, or at least confusing to me. As I understand it, you seem to want the coinholders, mostly the whales, to be setting priorities. My worry is that it’s incredibly difficult to make fully-informed choices about prioritization unless you deeply understand the costs of each decision. I have seen too many startups fail because management could not effectively chart a technical course that minimized wasted effort.
Developers need to understand what the market will reward. The problem is that the market isn’t a small number of wealthy individuals, it’s nine billion people. What do nine billion people want? In some sense, they don’t want cryptocurrency at all, they want food and shelter and time with their families, and games and movies and so on.
To be successful, Zcash needs to be invisible infrastructure, not a speculative investment. Lots of people have said “the internet of money” and I think that’s a great analogy - you and I are using and benefiting from the infrastructure of the internet in this conversation without thinking about it at all, the internet is now normal, it’s just how things work, it’s a public good emergent from the efforts of millions of independent actors that is the foundation of the most valuable companies in the world. That’s where Zcash should be going.
At present I assume that while there are many small holders of ZEC, a vast majority of those folks will be both unaware that this governance discussion is taking place, and would be incapable of safely voting with their funds even if they were aware. Large holders of ZEC, by contrast, are both more likely to be aware when governance decisions are being made, and have the resources to safely vote with their funds. This asymmetry means that even if the vast majority of ZEC is held by small holders (I don’t know whether this is the case or not) governance votes will likely be dominated by whales, and therefore will favor the interests of whales.
I think that you yourself have proposed the creation of private spaces for large holders of ZEC to discuss and agree upon direction for the project?
That’s interesting, my personal experience with failing startups is exactly the opposite: Building a product that is technically great but doesn’t fulfill a real purpose/need.
