If only. Disputes are part of governance, it’s part of the course. But those can be beautiful, passionate and respectful. They can bring people to the ecosystem because they hear about a contentious one and are curious about the debate around it. Also because it’s a way to define what ZEC holders are really about, who they are. We won’t know their names, but we’ll know what they as a whole, stand for; and this matters critically.
What we have had so far is not a dispute though, it’s a hijack. ECC and ZF have used their position of power and trust given to them at the beginning of the project, and have abused it by continuing to draw from a fund that was supposed to last four years. They have done so without asking ZEC holders at large.
Now, as much as I am upset at them, I also know they were never motivated by personal gain, so I am not going to hold it against them forever. But it’s certainly time ZF wakes up in the same way @joshs did, and start being respectful towards ZEC holders.
I cannot speak for the whole of ZEC holders obviously, but at least personally, once the dev fund will finally be under our control (on-chain), I will be looking forward to collaborating with ZCG and leveraging their expertise and experience to help steer it.
I want to push back a bit with this inaccurate characterisation of what actually happened.
The debate of if the original dev fund (aka founders reward) was to end or continue in some form was fraught with months of heated debates, live streamed discussions, polling members of the community, and even miner signalling. Literally anyone could put forward a proposal, including the one that said “100% to miners, 0% to ECC/ZF”. At one point a complete impasse occurred due to disagreement between the ECC and ZF regarding the Zcash TM. Getting to ZIP 1012, and later ZIP 1014 was not a simple task.
Granted, there was not a “good” mechanism for coin holder polling in place at that time so your point is valid in that regard, but what occurred is far removed from ECC and ZF “asserting their power” by unilaterally “hijacking” a share of the block rewards for themselves:
There was a coin holder polling! The results are in the ECC post you linked. The only difference was that it was a very primitive polling mechanism using transparent addresses.
And amusingly it basically agreed with the other polls, in the same way that in the last dev fund polls the coin holder votes agreed with the other polls. So if there is some coin-holder-exclusive mythical insight about Zcash, we have yet to witness it.
I too, can poll my friends token holders, and ask you years later why you didn’t participate. How many people holding bitcoin are closely following the Bitcoin development channels? Same would apply to any cryptos. If you want to reach users, just ask on the wallets. But you didn’t. Besides, I don’t see any proof of those polls, can they be audited today?
This is fair. The history of Zcash is more nuanced than I have highlighted. Overall I stand by my point, but indeed ZF and ECC always were motivated by making Zcash succeed. Only their vision had a major governance flaw, where we are still stuck today.
I’m not king of Zcash, also I am not talking on behalf of ZF. But regardless as far as I know ZF wasn’t involved with that first coin holder polling at all. I suspect it can be audited since it used transparent addresses. There’s a topic in this forum about it somewhere but I haven’t able to find it in a quick search.
Thank you @Shawn for finding the relevant threads backing @conradoplg argument.
I’m counting 119642.6359 ZEC participated in the poll. That can’t be it, is it?
If it is, I don’t need to tell you how this looks. This along with the fact that anyway as a voter mentioned: “This is a terrible idea, easily gamed, and I’m risking my own privacy and security to say I think the community should completely disregard the results of this poll. I vote NO to this poll.”
Most importantly for me, I thank you for recovering this important part of our history. Already at that point, ECC was attempting to listen to ZEC holders. The method was flawed, as much as the result seems irrelevant, but the attempt was sincere.
ZF on the other end? Nothing has changed it seems.
Hey btw, I’m curious. If we fork Zcash, what do you do with your trademark? Do you follow the longest chain as Satoshi envisioned?
As a side node, @hanh, I believe you said in your “Coin Voting 2.0” presentation that there is not much demand for a memo field in voting.
If correct, I would like to tell you that I saw great value in reading the comments of the voters on the stake poll above. Votes are mostly binary, so having that comment field enables token holders to add nuance and understanding to their voting decision. It’s precious during the vote, and just as much historically.
Yes. Coin voting has pros and cons like every other forms of governance. But in no way it is a miracle solution.
If you take Cosmos for example, they have coin voting implemented and they don’t seem to fare any better (pricewise at least since it seems it’s the metric chosen by most to judge the success of a project nowadays). Same goes for Polkadot.
As you have said above, governance is not a miracle solution. The price of a token is not going to go up solely on the prowess of its governance; above all it needs to be something the market wants.
I don’t hear much about Cosmos these days, but there’s a lot of very interesting stuff happening on Polkadot. And keep in mind, it’s always messy when the token governance gets started; always. The more we wait, the less we are leaders, the more we are laggards. Nobody wants to be around laggards.
Take a look at this recent review, I think it covers the current state of the Polkadot governance and its challenges reasonably well. If we ever get to that stage, we’ll have successfully navigated some rough waters ourselves:
Interesting read but I don’t find it very convincing:
“Currently, deep contradictions within Polkadot’s governance system are becoming apparent. The over-concentration of DOT staking weight has led to imbalanced resource allocation, while ecosystem diversity loses vitality under capital dominance. The current response mechanism is relatively inefficient, with the treasury lacking strategic objectives and unclear funding purposes, creating a vicious cycle between developer loss and fund misallocation. Community consensus lacks cohesion, and various issues seem to hinder the treasury’s further development.”
People find Zcash current governance model noisy (I agree), but Polkadot’s seems even noisier.
You’ve quoted a very relevant part, and definitely there is some struggle over there. But let’s not miss the forest for the trees and include the conclusion then:
However, Polkadot is exploring more revolutionary solutions. We can see many new experiments in the treasury, such as bounties for specific directions. While some bounties haven’t performed particularly well, new proposals emerge to replace them. Although the current OpenGov still has many shortcomings, this continuous trial-and-error process will help refine OpenGov to become more robust.
When Polkadot’s governance system can resist capital monopoly and incentivize innovation, it may bridge the gap between ideal and reality, establishing a self-evolving digital constitution for Web3. While Polkadot’s exploration may not achieve immediate success and outcomes remain uncertain, its governance experiments deserve our attention and witness as they potentially shine in Web3 history.
That’s the same vision that inspires me for Zcash.
Now @gigantes & @dismad, I’m not here to convince you that we should do it. The only reason why I came on this forum is to say to those currently in de-facto control of the dev fund to stop to stealing what is the wealth of ZEC holders. If you feel like ZEC holders shouldn’t be in charge of the dev fund, I don’t blame you for it. But shut it down then.
