I know I’m slightly after the deadline; that’s because I was on holiday until today, and somewhat successfully resisting the temptation to do Zcash work instead of enjoying Paris with my friends.
I believe question 2 should be split into two questions:
2a. What is your general sentiment toward the following aspects of the Network Sustainability Mechanism: the ability to explicitly remove funds from circulation (ZIP 233), and smoothing of the future issuance curve leading to the eventual reissuance of these removed funds (ZIP 234)?
2b. What is your general sentiment toward the following aspect of the Network Sustainability Mechanism: requiring 60% of transaction fees to be removed from circulation?
This reflects the fact that in the ZIP Editors’ initial viability assessment of NU7 proposals, we were significantly more negative toward ZIP 235 than toward ZIPs 233 and 234. For the former we were “Inclined toward no; based on a combination of Safety and Usefulness issues, there is insufficient reason in our opinion to make this change in an otherwise heavy upgrade.” due primarily to limited benefit: “The amount involved is very low (as calculated in the ZIP), and so the rationale points given in the ZIP imply limited benefit in the short-term.”
Question 5 frames the effect of disabling v4 transactions in an entirely negative way. The point of it is to reduce attack surface and complexity. Also, typical users will not be able to spend Sprout funds in any case, because the only wallet that can do so is the zcashd internal wallet which will cease to function at NU7. That is, it should be written as something like:
- What is your general sentiment toward reducing the complexity and attack surface of the Zcash protocol by disallowing v4 transactions? (This would disable the ability to spend Sprout funds, for which there will be no wallet support in any case after the prior deprecation of zcashd.)
Question 6 seems to serve no purpose in the context of NU7 sentiment polling, since Tachyon will not be ready for NU7, and development of it will proceed anyway. (If, on the other hand, the scope is intended to be wider and include features not proposed for NU7, it is odd to include Tachyon but not Crosslink.)
I believe the fee market proposal mentioned in question 8 has not had time for adequate analysis.
Question 9 doesn’t include the main benefit of consensus accounts. I would suggest the following change:
- What is your general sentiment toward adding protocol support for consensus accounts, which generalize the functionality of the dev fund lockbox and reduce the operational expense of collecting ZCG funds and miner rewards?
Re: Question 10, I would argue that quantum recoverability (which for transparency, is primarily my proposal) is a necessity for the long-term security of the protocol. I think we are likely to do it anyway on the next note plaintext format change. (Either memo bundles or ZSAs require a note plaintext format change.) It’s a low-risk change because it doesn’t change the circuit (whether or not ZSAs are deployed at the same time) and is designed not to pose any significant risk of a regression of pre-quantum / discrete-log-dependent security. Whether and when to include it is the kind of highly technical decision that in my opinion should be left to protocol experts, not voted on.
Also note that the name has changed from “Quantum Resilience” to “Quantum Recoverability”, as reflected in ZIP 2005.
In any case, if we must vote on it, I would suggest the following wording change:
- What is your general sentiment toward the “Orchard quantum recoverability” proposal, which aims to ensure that if the security of elliptic curve-based cryptography came into doubt (due to the emergence of a cryptographically relevant quantum computer or otherwise), then new Orchard funds could remain recoverable by a later protocol — as opposed to having to be burnt in order to avoid an unbounded balance violation?
I would also like to point out that although the poll asks independent questions about each feature, actually there are some dependencies as shown in this diagram. I will be updating the diagram tomorrow to include the new proposals that are being voted on.