Dev Fund Polling Results: Discussion and Next Steps

Governance
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We’re on the cusp of a new era for Zcash! Today, polling results revealed that the Zcash community wants change and will move from its legacy direct-funding model to a new, more open option, fostering greater decentralization.

Two proposals were either the winner or runner-up in all the polls. They both specify that dev funds will accrue to a “lockbox” to be held while a new mechanism for distribution is finalized in the coming months.

Proposal 1 would last for up to one year and specifies that Zcash Community Grants would be guaranteed funding during that period. [Edit for more info: 12% of the block rewards would be placed in the lockbox, 8% to the ZCG]

Proposal 2 would last for up to two years and specifies that all dev funding would go to the lockbox.

The ZF ZCAP poll winner is Proposal 2

The ZecHub, Zcash Espanol, and Zcash Brazil poll winner is Proposal 2.

The ECC ZAC poll winner is Proposal 1.

The Coinholder polls winner is Proposal 1.

The ZURE poll winner is Proposal 2.

The Zcash ZIP editors will meet tomorrow to discuss this, but it seems like the best course of action is a final runoff poll between these two proposals. Since they are so similar but with a couple of variables, we should have enough time for this final weigh-in.

Once a final selection has been made, we’ll get to work on building a robust and healthy distribution mechanism.

While this process was sometimes heated and messy, we are incredibly close to a clear consensus among the community. It’s a thing of beauty!

Thank you to all the poll creators, including @aquietinvestor , @peacemonger , @gordonesTV , @skyl , @hanh , @Dodger , and @nuttycom .

Thank you to all the proposal creators including @noamchom , peacemonger and aquietinvestor, skyl, Dodger, nuttycom and @GGuy .

Thank you to all who have weighed and made your preferences known through all these polls! And thank you to the Zcash ZIP editors who have guided us through the process.

These things are always contentious, and seeing so much unity across the Zcash ecosystem is fantastic. Bright days are ahead for Zcash.

In this thread, let’s discuss the relative merits of each of these two options as we march toward a final decision.

Onward.

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is this whole process over now??? cause i am here rarely —i promise im not the biggest whale and im not zookos friend either— but on zcash with tweets pretty often, did i miss out on any chances to give my vote to the project? tbh all of the lockbox ZIPs look good so glad to see thats where were headed next. godspeed Josh and all the rest of u builders

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We continue!

I think the results are interesting and will undoubtedly lead to new steps and new votes:

:fire: Who will be the ones who will have the keys to the lockbox?

:fire: Will the voting systems be unified so that there will not be so many polls and avoid overlapping or redundant data?

The active participation of the global community, information, dissemination, translation into other languages so that more members of the community are informed, continues to be important.

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Funnily enough, prior to going to the polls I had discussions about the necessity to perform final runoff voting as a way to increase fairness and certainty. I’d like to express my support for a final runoff, between 2 options, both now and especially for any future block issuance changes.

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How exactly is a lock box different? We are still taking the rewards from miners to distribute as someone wants.

Who decides where the lockbox rewards go to?
Does the community have a say in who the lockbox owners will be?
What will be the criteria for distributing funding?

It just seems like this is all the same except we added a middle man “lockbox”.

Is there a way to modify these options to say we will review them on a quarterly basis to see if it makes sense. A year seems too long for something that may or may not work.

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There will be no keys.

Funds that are directed into the lockbox will remain there until a distribution mechanism is introduced in a future network upgrade.

The answers to all these questions will need to be approved by the community (by going through a similar process to the one we’re going through right now) and the mechanism for distributing funds from the lockbox will be implemented in a future network upgrade.

Until then, there will be no way for anyone to access the funds held in the lockbox.

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Am I reading this correctly that the community is essentially saying put the funds into a safe keeping location that no one can access until sometime in the future when agreement is reached on what to do with them?

(Sorry for the simplistic statement, but that sounds like what we’re doing)

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Yes.

It is an implicit decision by the community to (a) suspend the current “direct funding” Dev Fund model pending design, consensus and deployment of an alternative model, and (b) store any funds (that are not directed to ZCG) in a lockbox (instead of distributing them to miners).

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This is almost equivalent to

  1. giving 100% of block rewards to miners, i.e. terminating the 20% dev fee

  2. at some point in the future, creating a big but limited pot of ZCash out of thin air and deciding how to distribute it.

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This isn’t quite correct, or at least it’s somewhat misleading. The total issuance of 21M coins remains unchanged, so it’s not really “creating a big pot of Zcash”. Also, the hope is that a distribution mechanism will be able to be agreed upon and implemented in relatively short order, so while there will be a temporary dip in the issuance curve until that’s done (and a bump once it is), overall the issuance curve remains the same.

I also want to note that the purpose of the block subsidy is largely to ensure economic security via rollback prevention. The question of how much the chain should be paying for security is highly relevant; we obviously don’t want to pay too little, and make 51% attacks feasible, but every coin that we overpay for security could instead be used to further the development of network infrastructure, education, and so forth. By further decentralizing how development funding is awarded, the hope is that we’ll be able to create greater competition for those resources and in doing so drive better outcomes for the ecosystem. I’m personally in favor of a system of retroactive grants funding where the community pays for results, instead of paying organizations, to replace the current system of grants (some embedded in the protocol rules, but they’re all grants) that pay in advance.

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That link doesn’t make it clear, were these the coin weighted poll results from before or after Zooko’s whale friend showed up to vote?

Which coin weighted poll results matter the most (?)

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Poll 1 is before whale and Poll 2 is after whale.

Fortunately the results are somewhat similar, with the same two top choices, with Poll 2 showing a clearer preference for the Hybrid Deferred Dev Fund.

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To be frank, they seem artificially similar, as if the whale intended something. (By supporting the two ECC related proposals only)

And secondly, this is how wealth based direct-democracy works so this shouldn’t be shocking for anyone in the audience who didn’t participate in the coin voting (I didn’t).

Thirdly, I’m not disparaging the ECC proposals. I think they’re sufficient, albeit the 1-year concept has some obvious logical flaws. With all of these results aggregated, it appears that Nutty’s 20% lockbox proposal is the winner (yes ?).

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In point of fact, neither of these proposals are “ECC related”. While I do work for ECC, I did not consult with anyone at ECC before posting my suggestion, which I felt reflected the views I had seen expressed by others in the community (I perceived that there was an appetite for deferring the choice on how to distribute a 20% dev fund; while I supported @skyl’s proposal I felt that at 50% deferral it could not obtain majority support) and @peacemonger/@aquietinvestor’s proposal had no input from ECC either was not devised by ECC, though as @joshs corrects me downthread ECC did provide feedback on early versions of the proposal; suffice it to say that I wasn’t aware of that exchange.

I consolidated these proposals into a single ZIP with multiple alternatives expressly in order to make it easier to see the differences between them, by eliminating the redundant verbiage that were shared by the various options, and in consultation with their authors. But I also did that on my own time, and not in consultation with anyone at ECC.

In terms of a “winner”, as Josh point out in the OP of this thread, we need a runoff to determine which option to implement; the results from each polling group show that there is majority support for both of these proposals, but which one is most preferred overall is unclear.

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Thanks for the answer!

I have not seen if, in case of definitely winning this option, the procedure is already raised.

Is it in the ZIP? We certainly need to pay attention to the details that come next after the final round.

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The lockbox itself is defined in Draft nuttycom-lockbox-streams: Lockbox Funding Streams (it’s very dry, it just specifies in technical terms what has been explained above)

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Thanks a lot!

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It’s good to have in mind though that ECC did oficially endorse the Hybrid Deferred Dev Fund and the 50% Lockbox (before the 20% option was proposed).

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well that’s a little harsh :slight_smile:

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:joy: Sorry! It’s well written! It just might not be a good resource for understanding the Lockbox in layman’s terms

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