In that case, how is ECC viewing unreliable signals? It seems we both agree that the coin pollvoteprocess is not reliable, for all the reasons discussed here and elsewhere. Unless there’s something I’m not grokking here, it seems pretty reasonable to take the position that something whose results are unreliable should not be, you know, relied on for making a big decision with few formal decision-makers.
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You have me utterly confused here. The “coin-weighted vote” aka “stake-weighted petition”, that was previously reported by ECC in the form of weighted totals, is not about weight?
Well if ECC stands by this, it would really simplify things!
In your shoes I would make this crisp statement:
“We will consider the messages sent via this mechanism the same way we could consider anonymous tweets or forum posts: as an indication that someone somewhere has this opinion. We will disregard the ZEC amount associated with addresses that sent messages, as well as the number of times that anonymous messages were sent, since we recognize that such indications cannot be arithmetically aggregated meaningfully when submitted through this mechanism.”
I believe this would completely resolve the governance and security concerns, while fully achieving the stated goal of giving voice to all coin-holder holders large and small.
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To get to a reasonable answer to your question, we must first define what is a "reliable signal.” And I think to get a firm and common definition among all people maybe impossible.
I do think it is possible for you to make your own assessment of what is an “acceptable signal.” And I personally believe many/most in the community have already signaled acceptance for the current process the foundation is stewarding.
The Zcash community is control, not ECC. You get to make the call on what is acceptable!
Please see: https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/community-sentiment-polling-results-nu4-and-draft-zip-1014/35560/452
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Are you saying that ECC will wait until the signal process is done to assess the reliability of the signals? That seems totally backwards.
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This doesn’t make the arguments for stake-weighted voting more or less valid, but this particular property
also applies to the current voting format.
Further, the current voting format excludes people who missed a tight time frame from voting, which is unusual and I’m not aware of any valid arguments for doing so.
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Do the other signals being considered avoid Sybil problems? That’s one issue being raised with the coin-based process.
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This doesn’t make any sense. If it’s about voice than why add weight to each voice? I totally fail to see IF it’s not about weight why not a 0.0001 ZEC is used anybody can participate and heared his voice equally with all others and without weight?
Actually it’s reverse. The “others” would like to make it NOT about weight, it’s the ECC, Zooko & co that defend the “weight”. It’s not us who oppose the weight voting, it’s the ECC that give these votes weight by the amount of ZEC used (see the last publiched coin-weight results by the ECC!).
Can you as well make such record that no ECC funds have/will be used in the last and this coin-weighted poll, that non other directly affilated to the ECC member use(d) their coins? I doubt!
see:
The current format, the community governance panel, is not perfect but it’s way superior to everything else we have so far as it eleminates many issues the coin weigted poll has:
- every voice has the same weight
- no one can double vote
- the voters/members are known which makes it very secure to an attack.
- it can not be manipulated as the current coin-weighted poll can.
- it is a good mix (could be better of course) of developers, coin holders, ECC members, ZF members, active forum members, known ZEC enthusiasts).
- it has big support from all, community, ZF and ECC which should make it a reliable mechanism that can be used.
- It’s planned and announced for months and not out of a sudden just an instrument/mechanism for insiders.
- It’s been used allready twice (2018 & 2019) and shown it’s an instrument/mechanism that can be used, no matter it can be further improved. Meanwhile the coin-weight mechanism has proofed absolutly nothing other than it’s easy to manipulate and that small voices will NOT be heared.
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It seems to me that Zooko and Andrew Miller intended the coin polling to be more of a “this is a pretty cool way to get some feedback about the process” but it was not intended it to be a strong weight on how the ECC or Foundation will proceed (as indicated by @joshs and @acityinohio ) .
Everyone is picking it apart (and rightfully so due to the flaws in the current implementation) so if the ECC/Zooko really wants to make it a valid part of the governance process then it should become a ZIP and implemented into the protocol at a future date. Where in the ZIP process everyone can extoll the vices and virtues of such a process and Zcash will be better off for it when/if it gets implemented. The two issues of “should this be a part of the Zcash governance process” and “how will the results be used” should be considered separately.
In my opinion the ECC/Foundation/Community should take it for what it is: an experiment in how Zcash governace could improve in the future and for now the results should be taken with a grain of salt.
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Anyone with a forum account older than March 2019 is eligible to vote in the following poll…
That’s the only constraint, right?
If so, it makes at least this points invalid.
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Actually it is cool and some kind of fun tool currently, that’s ok. If the ECC would like to test it, so it be, test if for voting on a mascott, homepage color, or whatever ECC internally, but don’t introduce it a sudden out of nowhere in an ongoing voting process where a multi million budget is decided.
While i agree to the foundation part i absolutly doubt the ECC part, even less as we do not get a clear statment that the results will not be taken into account. Here it doesn’t matter if you call it strong weight, some weight as a weight is a weight and this more than suspect coin-weight voting should NOT get any weight.
I see this totally different. IF such results are taken into account or even considered to be taken into account it’s just normal that a huge part of the community and outside the community points the finger on us all that we let a mostly manipulated vote occur. The whole coin-weighted mechanism, the way it got introduced a sudden and unreliable is doing more harm than good allready, leave alone if such resluts are taken somehow into account, considered and even noticed.
Have in mind that the last attempt by the ECC to count “abstain” votes as “yes” votes can be considered allready as a manipulation attempt!
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I’m all for experiments (it’s what I do for a living). They need to be constructed so that they don’t cause harm, with clear goals, and with follow-up analysis of what we’ve learned and what we can improve. For the many months since the staked-weighted petition was proposed and invoked, there has been no substantial discussion of any of the above by the petition’s advocates, and not for lack of trying — questions and critique have been consistently ignored or dismissed. So at what point do we just declare this experimental approach a failure?
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Agree, which is why if it’s going to be considered it needs to be a ZIP and implemented correctly.
For now there is no way to “stop” the users from voting in the coin-holder poll by declaring it a failure, that ship has sailed. The only thing the ECC and Foundation can do is not take the results as a serious indication of community sentiment.
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@mika, i agree with you that the current eligibility for community advisory panel is not satisfying at all and could have been handled way better, no doubt here. I have made serveral posts about it months ago and asked to make it somehow better and not invite only, unfortunatly it got not enough support to be heared.
It is as well not satisfying that miners are not represented anywhere and i would go as far as calling this the biggest defict on the whole voting process.
But to be fair, i understand where the ZF is coming from in setting this time line to be eligable to vote. It’s preventening from pure outsiders/trolls/manipulaters/whatever to get a vote on such important decision making vote. Does it hurt reliable members that joined after this date? Of course it does and that’s a trade off for having a secure voting mechanism.
As said in my last post, the community advisory panel is not perfect, has a lot of space for improvements but it’s absolutly superior to the coin weight-voting in every aspect and more important, it’s the only reliable mechanism we have at the moment.
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I think you missed my point - so I try to make it clearer.
- The current voting format allows double voting.
- The current voting format excludes people from voting - in particular it also excludes people with an forum account older than March 2019 from voting.
- This forum, it’s software and it’s infrastructure is controlled by the ZFND who is one of the candidates. This is usually absolutely not acceptable - since it makes it relatively easy for an candidate to manipulate the elections.
The properties given above seriously threaten the legitimacy of the election result and what’s even more worrying they might do so anytime in the future.
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Mika, Zcash governance doesn’t rely on the community advisory panel and Helios being perfect. It relies on the Zcash Foundation and the Electric Coin Company to either both agree on a legitimate way forward, or in case they disagree, on one of them having evidence of support from the community. (That’s why there was that unfortunate delay with the trademark agreement, was we had to get a provision in there that protected the community in case one of the two organizations went rogue.)
It’s part of Zcash’s checks and balances that ECC serves as an independent agent of the community, not just as a rubber stamp on whatever the Foundation decides.
You’re right that there are substantial risks and limitations of the current polling process, that could be attacked and that mean it will need to be strengthened and improved a lot in coming years if we’re going to continue using it. The thing that bothers me the most is that it excludes a lot of critical stakeholders whose continued support Zcash needs.
But, I have seen no evidence of attack, no evidence of malfeasance or irresponsibility on the part of the Foundation in the way they’ve organised it, and I know a lot of the names on the Community Advisory Panel, and all of them are excellent members of the cybercoins industry — thoughtful, well-informed, values-driven people. It’s an amazingly high-quality group.
So even though it is imperfect — as everything is — I currently feel like it is a very high-quality and legitimate group and process.
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Came across a relevant prior statement in the other thread:
@joshs does that answer your question?
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Thank you for the response Sonya.
I don’t believe that it answers the question. More specifically:
For question 2 [in the helios poll], if the vote is split between 2 or more of the 4 funding choices, or none of the choices receives the majority of sentiment, what is the Foundation’s intended approach to resolving the ambiguity? There is a similar conundrum for question 5.
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Voting rate is not 100% yet — community please vote and voice your opinion because it can change the outcome literally!
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Thanks for the clarification. I updated our polling post to be more explicit about what the Foundation would do in that event:
([Edit/Update, January 24] In the event that the poll results do not constitute a clear community consensus, the Foundation will engage in a run-off poll (with the same constituency on Helios) to measure sentiment between leading options. This should only be an issue for Questions 2 or 5; if a single option doesn’t get 50%, the Foundation will pick the two options with the highest votes to appear in the run-off.
@sonya is correct that the Foundation will continue to use the combined forum participant + community advisory panel constituency as the basis for evaluating community sentiment.
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I think question 2 will get a single option over 50% as the 5th answer/question should/can be added to each of the 4 other options, means result from question/answer 1,2,3 or 4 + Any of the above distributions is acceptable.
There would be no majority if each of the 5 possible answers gets an equal (near equal amount) of votes, like
Answer 1: 20%
Answer 2: 20%
Answer 3: 20%
Answer 4: 20%
Fine with any option: 20%
I see another potential/theoretical problem in the outcome. What happens with all the question if question 1 the majority does not support Zip 1014, [edited] but the following questions have a winner as well?
[Edited] added the later part to make it more clear what i have in mind.
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