(Speaking for myself, not ECC.)
It certainly isn’t a foregone conclusion that Pollard / Halo 2 will be deployed. The community could object. In order to do so, it would actually need to express those objections. So far I’ve only seen three categories of argument against Halo 2 deployment:
- performance (which actually is a misconception that we’ll be able to disprove);
- technical risk; this certainly is an important consideration but we think that the risk can be thoroughly mitigated;
- opportunity cost of potentially doing something else for the next upgrade instead (but note there are so far no proposed protocol changes that are being crowded out in favour of Halo 2).
I would frame how governance works for Zcash in a different way than Zooko; obviously the default behaviour of zcashd does carry a lot of weight. If people carry on running ECC’s zcashd releases then whatever is implemented in those releases will be the protocol.
IMHO this is a feature. If people disagree with the priorities set by the ECC/ZF governance process, they should need to fork the code themselves and have sufficient development resources to maintain that fork. A fork, in any block chain, that does not have sufficient development resources backing it, cannot succeed in the long term. This is why the development of zebrad will be a substantial step toward decentralisation of Zcash.
As for the timeline of Pollard / Halo 2 deployment, we have said that we’re aiming to have it ready for deployment in NU5, which is tentatively planned for mainnet activation in June 2021. It might not actually be deployed in that upgrade; we won’t risk deployment of something that is not ready.