Dev Fund Component: The Mysterious Third Entity

This is an attempt to define what the ‘third-entity’ could be, which may be of interest to some of the proposals.

I’ll attempt to ZIP it if there’s enough interest, although its current form might spark other ideas which is the whole point of posting it here.

The ‘Third Entity’ should be the ‘community’ which is comprised of several different groups.

  • Its only purpose is to break 2-of-2 deadlocks
  • It is not an organisation or group
  • Its inputs are the results from polling the ecosystem
  • It receives no funds, there are no paid positions
  • It resolves issues that have been stuck in 2-of-2 deadlock for more one NU milestone (3 months?)
  • It activates in sync with NU milestones

The ‘Third Entity’ decides by polling/surveying ecosystem components through vaious means :-

  • Holders (based on the stake-holders poll for choosing the NU4 name)
  • Miners (survey the three largest pools)
  • Exchanges (survey the three largest by ZEC volume)
  • Forum Poll (use Discourse voting feature for regular members)
  • Advisory Panel (use the Helios survey - could merge with the Forum Poll)

Each ecosystem component should have equal weight, so with five components each one gets ‘20 points’, the other two entities get 100 points each, making a unanimous result from the ‘third entity’ equal to one of the others.

Each component should work to improve its polling method, ie: holders being able to keep funds shielded, miners to include farms & not just pools, etc.

Advantages :-

  • very difficult to ‘game’ an entity with diverse components
  • issues do not stay unresolved (ie: trademark)
  • pressures the other entities (ZF/ECC) to cooperate & resolve issues within the NU cycle.
  • new components could be added if there’s a way to measure them (developers, individual miners, etc)
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Hi mistfpga! Thanks for working on this! My only comment is that any unfunded position should be thought of as potentially a vulnerability. Depending on someone to do something well, and to do it on behalf of the community, without providing resources and compensation, means making that role vulnerable to bad actors who would later want to compromise it.

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Almost…it was me, not mistfgpa :slight_smile:

What I was trying to come up with was a way to generate something that can act as an ‘entity’ purely from surveying the ecosystem - guess that wasn’t very clear.

Collecting & publishing polls/surveys etc will have costs (someones time, maybe some infrastructure) - so appropriate for those costs to be divided equally by ECC & ZF.

Edit: This function could also operate in a similar fashion to ZIP Editors, with one ECC & one ZF person assigned to work as a team to collect info & publish results.

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I agree w/ Zooko. It’s an invitation to either incompetence or corruption…

One possibility for grappling with this would be that the third entity is governed by charter docs that include a mechanism to make sure its board of directors, officers, etc. have very meaningful skin in the game (active heavy miners who must resign if they stop mining, major ZEC holders who must resign if they reduce their stakes, etc.). Then they might not be “paid” for working for the third entity, but they have a strong financial incentive to make good decisions.

Another possibility (which perhaps could be mixed with the first rather than being mutually exclusive of it) would be to hire some sort of third party auditor/overseer. Many law firms have active receivership-style practices where the law firm presides over a bankrupt company, for example, since no one inside the company can be fully trusted…Perhaps a similar arrangement could be reached for the third entity.

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Just to be clear - what I’m proposing is a ‘process that acts as an entity’, not an additional party.

Ideally it would be a team of two people, one from ECC & the other from ZFND, working together to get survey/polling info (and checking each others work) then publishing the results as ‘the third entity’ to break 2-of-2 deadlocks.

The precedent here is ZIP editing where daira & gtank team up, its effective and works well.

Lol — apologies to both of you.

Okay, this is interesting…Hrm. The problem I see w/ this is continuity. You may trust the initial two individuals qua individuals, but what about when new ones are needed?

Shouldn’t the individuals commit/be bound in some way to represent certain interests rather than acting at their discretion? Otherwise, what does having a ‘third entity’ really accomplish other than introducing complexity?

I think continuity isn’t a major concern, the issues it resolves would originate from ECC/ZFND so the process has no inputs of its own. I imagine ECC/ZF would select a person that best represented their view.

Agree it lacks the richness/diversity that a new entity (with their own interests) would bring, but balance that with being able to get decisions made within a timescale.

As an aside - having established the mechanisms for polling the ecosystem the same could be used for generic surveys, ie: non-binding polls, which generate inputs for ECC/ZF plans & thinking.

We should ensure that people who hold funds in shielded z-addresses won’t need to compromise their privacy to participate, and that people who use cold wallets won’t need to risk the security of their funds to participate. See this related discussion.

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