“Skin in the game” is subjective, yes. The amount of coins someone has is not though.
So the main argument is that “skin in the game” in a monetary system can only be (privately) assessed by the amount of coins a person or entity has. Everything else are subjective factors that cannot be evaluated quantitatively or qualitatively by the code. So as of now this approach is probably the fairest system.
To me it seems quite impossible to incorporate factors such as % of net worth, qualification, regional background etc. in a governance/voting system. I understand the criticism regarding plutocracy but so far nobody presented a better solution.
Yes I completely agree. That’s why I point out that every tool we should use it for what it is good at and not divert energy in trying to use it everywhere just because.
Money has to be moral. The 20% tax has been one of the most longstanding attack vectors at Zcash. I’ve ardently argued that this was necessary to build out zk tech. But with voting technology, it makes sense to move ZCG to voted elections as it makes selling Zcash as money easier.
An opt in money system that votes on taxes (taxation with representation) is a more moral proposition than an unelected bureaucratic entity.
I agree with the core of this. Elected representation is more legitimate than an unelected body deciding how 20% of emissions get spent. “Taxation with representation” is a strong frame.
But “money has to be moral” is where I disagree. Money has to be neutral. The moment money needs to be moral, someone has to define what moral means. That’s how you get frozen accounts and CBDC-style controls.
The strength of protocol money is that it doesn’t care. Same rules for everyone. No discretion. That’s not amoral. It’s the most fair thing we know how to build.
Your argument actually lands harder without the moral framing. Accountability and legitimacy are things you can build into a protocol. Morality is something someone gets to interpret.
Another way to frame this might be “Neutral money is moral money” - this is why fungibility / neutrality / cryptography feel related. An elected board from (largely from shielded holder voting) feels closer to neutral & moral than a board / ex Heisman voter type system. Both from a legal and cypherpunk frame.
Bitcoin was born with a political statement but that genesis block is very far away from the chain tip today. Bitcoiners bought the “neutrality” scam and now are completely owned by Saylor and other employees of those who profited from the subprime bubble and stole working people’s homes.
I don’t think that Zcash is neutral in any sense. The protocol authors are very meticulous with terms they use and the privacy properties they want to guarantee and protect. That’s far from “neutral” and the reason why Zcash will succeed and Bitcoin will fail (if it hasn’t already).
@pacu the Bitcoin point is sharp. “Neutrality” became the excuse for doing nothing while institutional interests captured the narrative. Fair.
But you’re conflating two layers.
Zcash is opinionated at the protocol level. The authors chose privacy properties, cryptographic guarantees, tradeoffs. That’s not neutral. You’re right. And it’s why Zcash works.
ZEC itself is neutral. Same rules for everyone. It doesn’t care who you are or what you’re doing. That’s not a lack of values. That’s the point.
Bitcoin claimed to be both. It delivered neutrality at the base layer but let the social layer get captured because it had no convictions worth defending.
Zcash is opinionated about how money should work and neutral about who uses it and what for. Those aren’t in tension. The first enables the second. That’s why money doesn’t need to be “moral.” The values are already in the code.
One of the primary objections to this proposal last year was that the voting tech was unstable and not widely accessible.
Now that the voting tech is more developed and stable, distributed in at least 3 major Zcash wallets (ZODL, Zkool, Vizor), and 66% of eligible ZEC has participated in the NU7 vote, it is a good time to revisit this proposal.
The members of ZCG are doing great work, and the Coinholders might have even elected the very same people to run it. But it is time to switch the elections from ZCAP to Coinholders.
I remain worried that this could lead to an “overtake” through actions similar to what LobbyFi used to do; with Zcash now a top-10 token by value, there’s a high chance that threat actors could purchase tokens to influence the platform’s development.
As the Zcash treasury continues to grow, this problem will only worsen. Democracy is not defined by wealth.
I wouldn’t be opposed to having it as an additional vote next to the ZCAP; maybe a 1-10% rate of active votes could be an interesting initial mentality.
LobbyFi / DeFi coins are a bad example because those were not strong monetary assets and majority of them were expected to go to zero and be grifts. The holders were not long term aligned.
Also remember that many of the DeFi experiments involved voting on issuing brand new supply, which is a very different dynamic that allocating a fixed treasury.
As the price of Zcash goes up, the cost of a mercenary buying their way into the voting majority becomes absolutely massive. It dwarfes the available treasury.
Given the cost to achieve majority, an attacker now has to contend with the possibility that the market sees their corruption and dumps on them, therefore devaluing all the asset they acquired to corrupt the vote. The economics here are not in favor of attackers.
Zcash is not a Democracy, is is Nakamoto consensus, straight from Bitcoin. Better than Democracy due to exit choice.
The default is “no dev reward”. The default with dev reward, given the dev reward comes from coinholders, is coinholder voted. Anything else is a bonus
ZCAP is not actually a part of Zcash consensus and their operations are at the pleasure of real consensus: miners running code and coinholders using the network. So ZCAP actually needs to justify it’s existence to the network.
My guy, what? Bitcoin is one of the only chains which still allows user-activated soft forks, where users can force large miners to shift, and at the same time, allows miner-activated soft forks (such as Taproot). THAT is democracy. Zcash does not have that, does it? Network Upgrades are mandatory and forced.
The voting quorum for the last coinholder vote was 2.1M ZEC. Greyscale alone holds ~0.5 million ZEC in their trust, and the document explicitly reads that their stakeholders retain voting rights in benefit of the trust by borrowing against their shares of the trust, even if the trust assets themselves are not rehypothecable. And the Greyscale ETF launched like 2 months ago.
User activated forks and miner activated forks are NOT democracy. Factually is not and was never intended to be.
Zcash works exactly the same way. Network upgrades are run by miners and users. The coinholder votes are the expression of the user preference of consensus and the code run by miners is their choice.
Your comment about Greyscale makes no point. They have a regulated financial duty to manage the assets prudently, so attempting to grift causing damages to ZEC would cause them to be sued to 0 by their shareholders.
If not Greyscale, then there are many institutions which can buy a huge chunk of ZEC at the current rate and hold it long enough till the point it gets in favour of them to manipulate the decision making because of token holding power. Can’t this happen?
I understand your point
but when market sees their corruption and start leaving zcash what will be the future of the work and effort that’s been put into it right now?
I am not opposed to this proposal but want to understand in such scenarios what would be guardrails.
