~ personal perspective not ZF perspective ~
How will ECC handle it if, for example, results from the coinholder survey diverge sharply from the Foundation’s sentiment collection?
Frankly, I do not trust this. Not because I think ECC is full of liars or whatever — not at all — but because humans are phenomenally good at deceiving themselves, and incentives matter. Incentives shape the reality that each of us perceives and thus inhabits. If it’s good for you to do XYZ, you will rationalize it as being good for everyone if XYZ happens. That is a general human tendency, or at least I believe it is.
I do not trust any person or entity to not express biases in that way, including myself. Cui bono? It’s always relevant.
ZF staff are the same — also human — which is why we pre-committed to specific signals from a specific process! When you don’t pre-commit, you implicitly maintain optionality. It’s understandable for community members, including myself, to feel nervous about ECC maintaining optionality in this way. Especially since it feels like ECC is refusing to acknowledge that it gives y’all the opportunity to convince yourselves that whatever you want to do is what the community asked for.
Again, I am not proposing that ECC staff will sit around scheming about how to screw everyone. Rather, I am proposing that humans tend to think, to believe in their hearts, whatever is advantageous to them personally. That’s how the species got this far; our survival instincts go all the way up and down the stack, profoundly affecting cognition and reasoning as well as everything else.
On top of that, ECC has a history of baffling vote interpretations. How you got from “abstain” to “I’m okay with this,” I will never understand. You can’t do things like that and simultaneously expect me — or anyone else — to trust your judgment unilaterally. Because that is crazy, okay? Conflating abstention with approval is bananas, and it does not engender blanket trust.
I trust your good intentions. I trust that everyone wants a good outcome, and that everyone is earnestly and sincerely advocating for what they think is best. Including me! But that’s not good enough. It’s never been good enough! The whole reason why cryptocurrency exists is that trust is insufficient. Trust can fail and when it fails it fails hard.