Let’s Give ZEC Holders a Voice - feedback requested

I second this, the Zcash community needs to find patterns of incompatible behavior. In any other blockchain project, members would raise eyebrows when contributors are not getting along and moving the mission in forward direction.

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Hi Zooko,
My point, precisely, was these concerns will be raised and we will not have good answers.
The entire point of cryptography is reasoning about security. And one of the things you have to do there is model adversarial behavior. Whats the worst case? And in this case, the worst case is the person designing, proposing, or advancing a cryptographic system (i.e., the coin holder vote) is out to get you.

I’m genuinely sorry if that made you feel hurt, but the details of the adversarial model are necessary in this case. Especially to make the point that others will ask these questions. It’s not just a hypothetical, it’s a legitimacy concern. And, given the way cryptocurrency reacts to things, the people who ask will not feel bad if they smear you, me, or anyone else in the process.

This thread has gotten really long and we’ve lost site of the question: how is this secure? how do we convince people it’s secure. And I’d like to thank @tromer and @daira for pointing out that all of these questions have been asked before, for nearly two years, every time this kind of vote is proposed and we don’t have answers on how to show this proposed vote is legitimate. And in fact, we have even more security questions that I thought about privacy, security of funds, etc.

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Hi @elenita, my feedback is that well before the poll occurs the ECC needs to predefine and commit to specific goalposts about minimum participation levels and how certain vote percentages will be interpreted. Otherwise, there is no way for an outside observer to tell whether the poll results are being relied upon (or ignored) in a biased way. Specifically:

  1. What minimum level of participation (in terms of number of coins) is required for the vote to be considered a legitimate expression of coinholder sentiment? Obviously, if only 100 coins vote, the result should be thrown out. But what minimum number of coins is required? Once that number is defined well in advance, the ECC should commit to rejecting the results of the poll if the minimum number is not met and also commit to recognizing the results as legitimate if the minimum number is indeed met.

  2. Assuming the minimum participation threshold is met, what voting percentage is required to conclude that support for a given proposal is strong? For example, let’s say the poll question is:

    Do you support Zcash transitioning to full or partial Proof of Stake?

    Let’s say the results are 55% YES and 45% NO. In advance of the poll, the ECC should commit to the rules for how this particular outcome will be interpreted. For example, a potential predefined rule might be:

    • 60% or more YES shall be interpreted as STRONG support.

    • Between 40% and 60% YES shall be interpreted as an AMBIVALENT result.

    • 40% or less YES shall be interpreted as WEAK support.

    The ECC can choose whatever percentage thresholds it likes, but those thresholds should be published well in advance of the poll.

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I’m speaking for myself here, and not in any way should my position be seen to reflect the opinion of the ECC.

I think that you could publish whatever goal posts you wish, and the resulting system would still be manipulable by adversaries who are willing to launch sybil attacks or borrow coins to attempt to influence the outcome of the poll. Given that, I see this polling as more of a curiosity or experiment than something that can produce real actionable information. I felt the same way about the recent ZCAP poll, for different reasons.

That being said, I think that it’s not an entirely useless experiment: it can tell us what number of coins an engaged subset of the community are willing to take the effort to reveal in order to make their voices heard. That’s an interesting baseline statistic to gather. Unfortunately I don’t think that this poll can reliably determine much more than that, but the idea of coin-weighted governance is one that is being broadly explored in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, and I think it’s worthwhile to keep doing periodic experiments on this front within the Zcash community.

Along those lines, I do think that in the slightly-more-distant future, coin-weighted polling could be improved to the point of usefulness. In particular, if Zcash switches over to a proof-of-stake consensus model, something that’s very interesting to me is having the weight factor be a function of both amount and the duration for which that amount has been staked, as this could address some threat models (for example, that could make borrowing coins to vote a relatively difficult/expensive attack strategy).

Finally, I’d like to point to a form of coin-weighted voting that the Zcash community could choose to invest in more heavily, which is the Gitcoin quadratic funding model. Those folks are doing serious work on sybil resistance, and have already done a fair amount of work to integrate Zcash into their funding stack. I really hope that ZOMG in particular chooses in the future to disburse some of their funding via grants. For the purpose of helping inform the direction chosen by ECC and the ZF, perhaps an approach we could try is to use a Gitcoin grant round to raise funds for a charitable cause - say a donation to Coin Center or something of the sort - where the different options that people could “vote” on with their donations are the different options that would otherwise be presented in a poll like the one we’re discussing here.

Coin-weighted voting using Zcash is interesting and something we should continue to explore, but that doesn’t mean we have to implement it all ourselves, and we should be very circumspect in the authority we ascribe to the result of one of these polls until many of the issues are able to be addressed. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do them, of course - just that we should interpret the results in full recognition of the obvious limitations of the current method. And as the tools we have improve, maybe we can make it good enough so that we can, as a community, take whatever results we get more seriously.

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Are there similar up-front goal posts for other feedback gathering that’s happening?

In particular, did the ZCAP poll have up-front goal posts like percentage participation, or what decision would be made in the face of different thresholds? (I didn’t notice but could have easily missed this.)

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Applying widely accepted norms of parliamentary procedure, the required quorum for a ZCAP vote is a majority of eligible voters. (Under Robert’s Rules of Order, absent a predefined quorum requirement, the default quorum requirement is a majority of eligible voters.)

Once quorum is met, for questions with two options plus an option to abstain (as was the case with the “Do you support the re-appointment of Andrew Miller, Peter Van Valkenburgh, and Matthew Green to the Zcash Foundation board?” question), the clearly implied goalpost is a plurality of votes cast.

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Hi everyone - thank you for your thoughtful replies so far. You can expect a post summarizing this feedback + next steps towards the end of the week. Instructions for how to participate in the poll may come next week or early the following.

Does anyone have feedback on the questions themselves? How they are worded, what other questions could be included? For example, I received feedback to rephrase the first two questions using a STAR voting concept. Any feedback on the polling questions is greatly appreciated.

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Yes, I’d like to poll the sentiment regarding the slice distribution of the devfund amongst the 3 recipients, eg should a rebalance is desired or not.

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A quorum rule sounds important for a binding voting process to ensure that the voting process leads to the established results. For advisory polling, however, the results are just data presented to inform decision making.

As I understand the Zcash Community Advisory Panel overview page and how it was introduced, it is an advisory group created by the Zfnd to vote on non-binding polls.

I don’t understand how a quorum rule has meaning for advisory polls. For example, how does the result of a ZCAP poll change if there is a quorum or not a quorum? What if there is one less voter than quorum or one more than quorum? How would that difference impact the advisory nature of the feedback? If there were not a quorum should the results not be published? Should they be published while Zfnd somehow promises to ignore the results? If they are published, people will certainly consider and talk about the results (including the low turnout). In my opinion, the results should be published and discussed regardless. If there were one less voter than a quorum rule or one more, I would consider those outcomes as very similar feedback.

For the purposes of this coin-weighted polling, I see this as a polling mechanism, similar to a twitter poll or a forum poll: it may provide interesting or useful information, but it is not binding in anyway. ECC intends to use the results of this poll as one of the eight kinds of input described in ZSAs: ECC progress and next steps, and the outcome of that is to provide recommendations to the community.

However, this is different from a twitter, forum, or ZCAP poll in one very important dimension: participation requires ZEC and only ZEC, not forum accounts, ZCAP invites, or twitter followers. This source of feedback to the community is invaluable for making decisions about Zcash, since ZEC users are the fundamental constituents of Zcash.

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Let’s say only 50,000 ZEC vote and 90% vote against a move to full or partial Proof of Stake. Is the ECC going to show a bar chart that shows 90% of the Coin Holder poll went against Proof of Stake (similar to how results have been presented in the past, see graphic below)? If not, why?

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Are you suggesting that a voter “turnout” metric should be included to give the viewer of the results a more holistic picture of coin-based voting? I think this is helpful information, but at the end of the day, people who show up to the polls in any election are the ones that determine the outcome. Just because 80% of a population didn’t vote, doesn’t mean their lack of a vote counts as something. Turnout helps gauge the legitimacy of an election, but doesn’t really change the fact the winners are going to take the results and run with them.

We may need to get fivethirtyeight.com and some major news outlets to start covering the Zcash governance process soon; we are starting to give major country’s elections a run for their money :smile: (to be clear this is a joke, and the rigor/enthusiasm of the Zcash governance process is powerful to see).

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After reading the above discussion, one general reflection I had is that many of the subjects brought up regarding governance and anything happening in the short term are agreed upon in principle by most people. These seem to be ZSA’s and an improvement to ZOMG. Haven’t heard many arguments against ZSAs and haven’t heard many arguments against improving the support for ZOMG to operate more robustly.

Seems like ZSAs can be done in parallel to research for proof of stake, so it doesn’t seem to me like polling should make these seem mutually exclusive and therefore much more contentious. Deploying ZSA capability will likely bring more people into the fold of Zcash, which is what most people seem to want. And switching to proof of stake will likely take a long time so why not start with most low hanging fruit for next NU. Scalability is also not a very political issue and engineers at ECC seem confident in the options there are to deploy it when it becomes more of a limiting factor.

Coin based voting seems like a very political issue that has become a flashpoint for discussion in what is an otherwise seemingly harmonious view of the features people want Zcash to have. I don’t mean to downweight any side of the coin based voting argument, but just to point out it is a contentious issue among a lot of other equally important and less contentious issues.

I’m a pretty avid follower of politics. One thing I always think is that if people could work on the things they agree upon first, before letting the more contentious issues dominate the stage, we could get a lot more done. Of course, this is assuming there is no conflict of interest in maintaining a non-optimized status quo.

So, in short, let’s find ways to improve ZOMG, identify the most desired protocol changes, support the engineers at ECC/ZF/community, make room for discussion without mud-slinging, and keep moving forward!

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Hey, Howard, I’ve always appreciated your input — including your fairly-argued criticisms of things that ECC or the Zcash community have done, such as your principled objection to the Dev Fund. So thanks for asking us about this.

If I understand what you’re getting at, the question is about how we intend to display and describe the Coin-Petitioning results, and whether we will precommit to how we intend to do so before we see the results.

My answer is threefold:

  1. I’m making Josh Swihart, Nate Wilcox, and some folks in Josh’s team at ECC primarily responsible for how to express the questions, and operate the process, as well as how to interpret the results and how to summarize or describe the results.

  2. I’m not requiring my team to precommit to how to interpret the results or how to display the results. As far as I’m concerned, they can learn what the results are, and learn from other data sources such as Jason McGee’s forum poll, the ongoing “Product Validation” conversations with companies that might consider using new Zcash features, etc. before deciding how to interpret the results. (If I recall correctly there are at least half a dozen sources of data that we described as critical inputs to the user-focused product strategy. Coin-weighted petitions are one of those.)

If this were a binding vote, I would want to go the opposite direction and precommit to interpretation more, but since it is just more data for our user-focused product strategy, which Josh and Nate and I (among others) are responsible for deciding anyway, then I think it’s appropriate to go the other direction and gather data first before committing to interpretation.

  1. But this doesn’t say anything about other people’s interpretation! A great thing about coin-petitioning is that it is permissionless all around. Nobody can prevent coin-holders from raising their voices in this way, and nobody can prevent others such as you from observing and judging the results according to your own standards.

I would be very interested, Howard, in how you would interpret these results, either ex post facto or — for added force — a priori. Do you consider the questions and the process to be a reasonable approach? Is there some hard or soft cutoff of how many ZEC coins participate that would make you think of the results as substantially meaningful vs merely experimental?

I sincerely thank you for both asking the direct questions of us and also — if you choose to do so — for offering your own evaluation of these issues.

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Will You vote with your coins to assess the community’s opinion?

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Friends, I’m sure we all want the same thing, but we should rally and take care of each other, so as not to create a nervous atmosphere in the community, otherwise we will lose players.

I will write openly about what I think and hope that we are all open.

It seems to me that we now started with the wrong. I have always welcomed democratic messages, but sometimes we need to listen to truly expert opinion.

If for technical reasons we cannot go along the route: B-A-C, because it will either lead to an extension of the route or to the technical impossibility to follow from A to C without going back to B, then you should not ask me about this. You just need to explain why A-B-C is the most logical and fastest route and act.

Now we often give allegories to hear each other, so here’s another one for you. The aircraft is built: the first it is fuselage, then the wing is the second, and only then the engines are attached. It is impossible to do otherwise. But we are now figuring out whether to mount the engines first or second.

Thanks!

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My feedback is motivated by my immediate reaction to this blog post back in December 2019:

The blog post did contain the following caveat:

The Coin-Holder’s Petition was controversial, and these results are not included in the Zcash Foundation’s official data, but we believe the voices of coin holders are valuable and should be heard.

Immediately following that caveat, the following assertion was made:

As illustrated in the graph below, the Zcash Community overwhelmingly rejected all of the proposals that defund core support functions. All of the remaining proposals propose to allocate 20% of future issuance to core support and 80% to miners.

My two immediate reactions to the assertion and accompanying graphic were:

  1. If I would have known that the Coin Holder Poll was going to be relied upon in this way, I would have participated (and I would have been the only “Yes” votes for Proposal 1 that gave 100% to miners.)

  2. I thought to myself, “If the results of the Coin Holder Poll were the exact opposite (the majority of coins voted against having a new dev fund), would the ECC still have presented the results of Coin Holder Poll in this manner?” By “this manner”, I mean presenting the Coin Holder Poll as on par with the ZCAP vote, which is what the graphic does. I think this is a fair question.

I think the problem stemmed from the fact that @amiller’s coin holder poll was presented as a highly experimental, unofficial way to collect feedback, but then the graphic subsequently displayed the results alongside the more “official” ZCAP poll.

This upcoming poll doesn’t have the same problem, because it is clear at the outset that it is an “official” (albeit non-binding) poll being run by the ECC to collect feedback. Because of this clarity, I think the results will be more credible this time around. Along those same lines, I think providing further clarity at the outset about how the results will be presented and interpreted will further enhance the credibility of the poll.

Specifically with respect to minimum participation level, I don’t think there’s any magic number, which is I why I didn’t suggest a number and why I said above that I thought the ECC could credibly choose any number it wanted so long as it was chosen in advance. By choosing a number in advance, it insulates the ECC from the potential critique that more weight is being given to the results primarily because the results ended up supporting a particular viewpoint.

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Imho a coin-weighted vote does “give ZEC holders a voice”, but for certain questions/polls it does seem like a self-fulfilling prophecy, so the results shouldn’t be impetus for action.

For example, stake-based vote … to change to a stake-based reward system… while likely excluding a chunk of ecosystem participants (eg. current miners, financial backers of miners, pool operators, etc) seems like a rigged vote with a foregone conclusion.

Might as well swap out question one for: “Would you like yield on your current Zcash position without doing anything?” Most holders will likely answer yes to that; but those who would likely vote against it have been silenced inherently (if they don’t have stake).

That said, stake-based voting makes a lot of sense for some other things on the ballot like programmability and ZSAs. That’s like saying you hold Zcash, and what other functionality should be prioritized first to give your position and experience with Zcash more value.

So, a non-binding poll seems fine, but if there is spin on the poll results to suggest that voting holders represent the whole Zcash community and ecosystem, then that seems a bit disingenuous and intellectually dishonest imho.

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I hadn’t seen this thread that @nuttycom started on STAR voting. Adding it here to keep feedback in one place.

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Here’s an interesting discussion with Vitalik Buterin on coinholder voting posted a couple days ago on the Bankless Podcast. It’s pretty long, but definitely worth a listen.

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I’ve decided that I’m going to participate anonymously in the coin-based petition, using only a small fraction of my ZEC coins. This way I will get the experience of what it is like as a user, and I’ll get to my express my opinion as a ZECer anonymously and separately from my thoughts as the CEO of ECC, but without noticeably biasing what the results would have been if I stayed on the sidelines.

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