It may be that you are correct, but we need to acknowledge that these are assumptions and all of the polls are highly polarized. The net is that we have clear consensus on some things, but not others.
We can digest the results, plan accordingly, and then re-poll on contentious items. We should have a new polling mechanism soon, which will allow for even greater coin-holder participation and more frequent polling.
Just a nitpick: the polls on the STARK TZE are not highly polarized. (ZCAP 56.8%, Zcash Eng. Caucus 42.4%, ZecHub 59.1%, Coinholder 16.4%, Zcash Brasil+España+Türkiye combined 70%).
The results answer the question I raised last week. Different groups, same process, divergent signals.
ZCAP supported ZSAs at 69%. Coinholders opposed at 98.6%. Both are valid constituencies in the same framework.
The divergence is not uniform. Tachyon had near-unanimous support across every group. The disagreement is proposal-specific, not structural.
@daira’s analysis that coinholder results are highly polarized with concentration in a small number of ballots is a serious observation. @ebfull’s point that operational security barriers created real participation bias is equally serious. Both observations matter. Neither alone resolves how outcomes translate into protocol direction.
@joshs is right that we can digest, plan, and re-poll with better infrastructure. That framing moves this forward.
But the underlying question remains open: when groups diverge at this scale on a specific proposal, what weight does each group carry/ what constitutes broad agreement? That standard needs to be explicit before the next cycle.
I am a ZSA supporter and I hold a significant number of coins. I didn’t vote them, for reasons I’ve explained ad nauseam by now. I’m not going to tell you what difference it would have made to the vote, because that would allow you to calculate my holding, and I don’t hold them in a private cryptocurrency for show. I will say that my vote by itself wouldn’t have influenced the outcome much. But I suspect that there are probably a lot of people like me, and that we might have seen significantly different results if coin-weighted voting were a safe, first-class feature in Zodl and other wallets. (I still would not support the outcome of such polls having more than one-third influence over protocol evolution.)
Absolutely not: the point of ZSAs is that people want to trade a variety of assets privately. I expect most holdings on the Zcash chain would still focus on ZEC — and if the pie increases enough in value, then likely so will ZEC’s share of it. The success of NEAR swaps in Zashi/Zodl has proven that there is a huge appetite for cross-asset functionality on Zcash, and that the resulting interest benefits the ZEC price. ZSAs can make that usage more private.
[Edit: I expanded significantly on this argument here.]
Disagree. ZSA opens doors, bridges and moar. ZEC at the base.
I highly recommend everyone talk to people outside of this forum. Do podcasts, write long form articles, bring your vision out and educate the benefits. This is how you will build following for your thesis.
Information is now heaving consumed by consumers via AI agents. So reaching to current Zcashers and potential Zcashers mean going out of this forum. You can get feedback and tune your project from the small group here.
Zcash is still far from success. There is lot of work to be done to increase # of ZEC wallets, shielded pool growth, increase # of transactions, increase # of wallets across various platforms, shielded multisig wallets, quantum resistance & recoverability, scaling etc. Let’s work on them!
As a small & passionate community, there are only few things we can work on and win. We are not as big as Bitcoin to have people split into Bitcoin Cash.
Who knows what holds for Zcash mission in the future. Right now, there is lot to do. Because Zcash is in the spotlight. It can reach millions of people. It can become top cryptocurrency. Seamless mobile transactions are possible. You can buy shielded Zcash without centralized exchange. You can store shielded Zcash on a hardware wallet. You get impeccable privacy and security in the shielded pool. New developers building for Zcash. Something we’ve not experienced in the past.
Bitcoin is losing solely because of Quantum threat. We can’t afford to spend our time on things that are non-unanimous while we have ton of things to work on and get adoption.
“ZSA blurs the focus of Zcash” is nonsense. It’s like saying that a good car audio system blurs the focus of what a car is designed for.
Or another impossible bad thesis: “People will start using Zcash to shield their transparent assets.” If even 1% of Bitcoiners start using Zcash to shield BTC, it would be a huge victory. What’s stopping a Bitcoiners from buying ZEC right now? Only the conviction that the BTC chart is better than the ZEC chart in the long term. Bitcoin users are obsessed with price. They don’t care about shielding. They definitely won’t buy ZEC for one reason alone. Only a long-term upward trend. That’s all they care about. If any of them use the Zcash network, it will be the first step in gaining a lot of experience with Zcash, and this will increase the overall chances that they will be interested in ZEC in the future, provided that the price chart is good for several years in a row.
To model human behavior, all you need to do is understand their incentives and motivations. Imagine yourself as a Bitcoin user who doesn’t know about Zcash yet. Imagine yourself as a Bitcoin user who knows about Zcash. Ask yourself why you still haven’t bought it. What would have to change for you to start buying it? A change from origami snakes to origami sphinxes? No, I don’t think so.
You are most likely interested first and foremost in the balance between the risk of losing money and the potential for profit, and then everything else. ZSA could serve as a transitional bridge to understanding why Zcash is superior to Bitcoin Cash, for example. Why should you suddenly switch horses? They do not yet comprehend this. Many of them have no issues with shielding. Many of them use Bitcoin simply as collateral for their trading, which generates their monthly income. It sits right on Binance/another platform, and they don’t care whether it’s shielded or not, for that matter.
Very reasonable. I don’t see you calling for forks or anything besides pointing out the terrible voting system, and that was more of what I was referring to. I would love to redo the vote with a good system. I just don’t think it makes sense to have any more votes if regardless of the outcome there will be a new fork for every solution. I guess thats decentralized but I mean, realistically, its going to completely crater the price. Would be better to band together behind the most supported thing, and then like ranked choice voting, devs slowly make their way down to the others.
If you are filthy rich you are not that worried about risking, for example, 1% of your money even if that is much more than someone else who is not willing to risk, for example, 50% of their money
I know many longtime, dyed-in-the-wool Zcash holders, both on ZCAP and not, who did not vote in the coin-weighted poll because the mechanism was too difficult or security too fraught to do so.
You can also look at it as, ZCAPers thought their sentiment would be taken into account because they specifically were being polled, and coin-weighted polling was for a more ‘general’ audience (I would argue it certainly wasn’t due to availability/security/UX, and instead for a particular segment, which is why the outcome was more or less predictable). But it would seem they were wrong to have thought that by a lot of reactions not giving any weight to their and other polls’ results.
Instead, we’re seeing the results of this one, non-binding sentiment poll, above from the handful of others, elevated to a unitary status. It was neither granted veto power. If ‘governance is clear’, where was it that we established coin-weighted voting as a formal and singular governance mechanism for protocol features?
If we want to enshrine coin-weighted voting, then it needs that treatment, formally, as a ZIP. Or some other explicit governance method needs a ZIP that accounts for factoring it in objectively in some fashion.
And in that formal discussion, I would argue it doesn’t rise to a sacrosanct, unitary mechanism, not just for its UX state but for the fact that being a coinholder doesn’t especially qualify you for decisions on technical protocol changes. This is not simply over ZSAs, but very real questions of imposing technical debt by not disallowing V4 transactions, etc.
Coinholders’ preferences should be taken into account, yes. But governance to be governance needs to be formalised, and I am very careful not to imply that ‘coinholders have spoken’ – an unknown number of holders of unknown duration* have expressed a weighted sentiment. The conversation should start from there, but the conversation on explicit governance mechanisms needs to start sooner. It’s also good for all to consider that NU7 is not the last network upgrade.
Much respect. 
* A sidenote: to vote, one need only register Orchard coins for as many minutes/hours as were needed to accumulate them prior to the end of the registration window. You could dump them after that.
To be regarded with much more weight, there ought to be some lockup mechanism to ensure a zodler is a zodler. (Length of stake with Crosslink? 
)
This argument is so dated. It’s been used countless time to prevent stakeholders to be in charge of the direction of their project.
Thanks for flagging this @daira. The table has been updated accordingly.
This is an important improvement point for CHV. I don’t think there’s enough Zcash liquidity to borrow a sum that can tilt an election and much less to do it being unnoticed given that all lending platforms use T-ZEC.
I did not participate in this past vote. On the previous one I just moved coins as little time as possible.
This means that if I could do that manually, with enough dedication and motives someone could just make a trading bot that borrows a lot of ZEC, funds certain accounts and then gives them back. Yes, it will have operative cost. But whales from other cryptocurrencies could just implement this rent-a-whale strategy to interfere with an election or just to delegitimate the governance mechanism and break havoc in the ecosystem.
For what is worth, I also did not participate in the vote for reasons that people above have explained.
For What It’s Worth, I agree with @conradoplg that coin-weighted voting is a poor metric for skin in the game. I agree with @BostonZcash that there’s nothing compelling about coin-weighted voting that should make it have primacy over other voting mechanisms.
I think the weaknesses of coin-weighted voting compliment the weaknesses of ZCAP voting, at least to some degree.
I think that it’s remarkable that there’s overwhelming and unambiguous agreement on Tachyon and Post Quantum Recoverability.
I’m not sure how one should analyze overall community cohesiveness, or what constitutes a healthy diversity of opinions, etc. but I think it’s clear that As Far As We Can Tell there’s unanimous agreement on those two priorities.
Per disagreements over ZSAs.. I’m not certain this is the thread for that conversation.. is it?
Isn’t the mechanism by which Zcash privacy features are accessed by holders of other tokens fundamentally different in the two approaches, DEX vs ZSAs?
In particular I am curious about the properties of zUSD, a ZSA token that wraps USD as the shielded asset.
the obvious weakness of coin voting is that only a slice above ~1 million coins voted, in spite of >16.4 million coins being in existence.
coin voting is a really horrible sentiment estimating mechanism because its easily controllable by just a few whales. as we already know from past votes, Zooko’s friend individually controls more than 300,000 of the ZEC which have been regularly voting “““shrugs””” in opposition to private oligarchy.
those opinions aside i do want to be sure and applaud everyone involved in all of these different sentiment gathering mechanisms and all who participate in them. we do best by having a maximum amount of ways to collect and plan around community sentiment. more features, more voting mechanisms, more funding entities, all together makes zcash more resilient
