Shielded Dialogues #2: Coinholder Voting

I’m worried that the more used coinholder voting becomes, the more incentive there becomes for people holding lots of zec to attempt some sort 51% attack.

The biggest takeaway I have from this is that I strongly agree with Zooko when he said “The big thing that I want out of it currently is diversity of governance. I don’t necessarily think it’s better than ZAC and ZCAP, but it’s at least different, and I’d rather have two different things with different strengths and weaknesses”.

I think a coinholder vote is a fantastic metric, my concerns with it arise when it would be used as the only source of decision-making.

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I’m willing to pay attention to your point, but please elaborate as I personally don’t think this is a problem at all. If 51% of the network believes something should happen, that something should certainly happen. If that leads to a fork, then what’s the big deal?

It’s important to understand that it will never be the only source of decision making. Talking of forks, people get scared of those but the reality is that they are a governance mechanism that can essentially bypass any stakeholders decision. Less dramatic but no less effective, developers have a large amount of power into what gets implemented.

I remain a lot more concerned about the centralization of trust around the governance of the dev fund, specifically. People receiving money from it have no place voting for how or even whether, it should continue. It’s obvious, yet, it’s happening today.

But I do share some of your concern. I think we, stakeholders, are winning. The future protocol change (PoS) is going to give us the upper hand and the current vote is highly likely to to give us power we did not have before.

I urge you to do your research on how much trust the project currently relies on, versus how much it really needs. On my side, because of that shared concern, I am starting to look into not just how to get stakeholders to vote, but also how to make sure they have the right, unbias, executive summaries they need to make the highest quality decisions. What I see happening on ZCAP right now doesn’t exactly give me confidence they are going to be that useful going forward for that purpose.

Coin Weighting is Soo 2025Q2

People debate pro-vs-con “Coin Weighted Voting”.. but CWV is not an atomic mechanism, and any binary argument will miss critical nuance.

Pro Hybrid Governance

I’m in favor of “Hybrid Governance” as well, because I think it’s best to experiment and make choices informed by the resulting outcomes.

Focused on Zonboarding

I spend a lot of my time and effort onboarding people into Zcash. I’m pretty good at it, many readers of this post learned about ZEC directly, or indirectly from me. I’m always interested in making that “Zonboarding Role” easier for myself.

I hear a lot of concern about the concentration of vote privilege with whales.

If I Understand Correctly, implementing and using a coin-weighted voting system immediately adds utility to ZEC.

If that’s true, then isn’t there an argument to be made for the receipt of ZEC, also being the receipt of a voice (voting right)?

If that’s the case, then isn’t true that someone who goes:

from 0 → non-0 ZEC

receives more utility than some who goes:

from non-0 → non-0+SOME_ZEC

Can I say to a new friend who has 0 Zcash:

If I send you x ZEC, then you also can vote.”

?

I think it would be cool to hack on a system that allowed me to say that.