Note: The following post is not an endorsement of any sort on any mechanism. Repeat. I’m not advocating for any mechanism in particular. I’m posting as a Zcasher that has a lot of questions and not as Developer Relations Engineer.
This post is titled “So What’cha Want?” And lays out some options or possible paths/solutions forward
I understand we are presented some sub-optimal paths here because @joshs is telling us that there’s an urgency on ECC’s side and also because it’s a commitment he made with the Board and also with the Zcash community.
I don’t like to focus on solutions before knowing what we want to achieve. So I decided contributing with more questions than certainties here, my apologies.
Both community and coin holders have voiced out that they want some form of funding coming out of the protocol itself when the lockbox was polled and voted.
How should that be? Depends of how Zcashers want decision power to be distributed and how disagreements to be settled.
A whale zodler said that there’s too much noise. Another posted a signed message saying that until Coin Holders didn’t decide on funding the funds shouldn’t be spent. We don’t know much else about Coin Holders and what they want. We can assume they want to continue to hodl ZEC because they are Coin Holders. And not much else.
Deciding what’s funded, is an exercise of both direct and indirect power. But that’s what has been happening so far. There’s nothing new there, except for Coin Holders having a more prominent voice for the case of Coin Holder Voting (CHV).
Currently, “The Governance” mostly happens off-chain. There are discussions until there’s a reach to consensus to actually launch an “NU” with a new version of the consensus protocol that is a univocally forking to a new version. I don’t see how Coin Holder Voting as it is in the immediate term will change that.
In terms of immediate technical feasibility, except for the case of not doing anything at all or extending things as they are some period of time, I don’t see a winning candidate clearly from the presented options on this post or in the forums. I have the impression that the zBloc is technically far away and its composing parts are not a high priority of any of the development teams. Except for the coin holder voting CLI and servers, the rest of the tech bits to make zBloc feasible like easy to use Frost wallets, voting front ends, auditing mechanisms, etc are an expression of desire.
The CHV mechanism is “closer” but not definitively 100% ready to used at scale. There’s a lot of trust involved in the polls as they are now. The 2.0 version that Hanh has announced dev complete days ago will need more work to be fully functional as people would probably expect it to be. It needs to be fully audited and to provide the infrastructure that can allow people to run polls and others to audit the results properly. There’s a lot that will have to happen manually to run CHV. It’s not that zec-whales will digit everything that happens with polls from deep under water.
It has to be noted that when one asks a question, one should be prepared to face the answers.
I feel that while some zcashers have the certainty that these coin holders will back their claims and calm their disscontempt, anxieties, wash out all their pain and bring a soothing breeze of air, while others are afraid that some Zetacean plutocracy will erupt from deep waters and dictate terrible things. I estimate that probably neither of those two things will happen.
But we do have to be careful of something that is implied here in this post from another thread
It could be possible that someone will a lot of capital can borrow a lot of ZEC and cast itself as an ephemeral-evil-Zec-whale and cast an election with that brings great distress to the ecosystem and win it over. Could it be possible? It could.
But I also want to think about that under a different perspective and I think I’ve have talked about something like this with @nuttycom.
Currently nothing stops anyone from forking Zcashd or Zebra and start a campaign for their fork to be adopted by miners. It’s not that we are risk-free in terms of “palace politics” moves. I guess that coin-holder voting makes it more visible, at the end of the day, code will have to be written, deployed, ran and PoW will have to be produced. Coin-holder voting will not change those mechanics. Am I putting this correctly @nuttycom?
What happens if coin holders vote on something that has no implementors willing to do it?
Is that soothing the “less governance noise” that some zec-whale wished for? I don’t know. Do miners actually care to be “up to date” with Zcash ecosystem nuances to decide which Zebra fork is better if several versions with different features compete to be “the real zcash”? I’m not sure.
To wrap up all of this rhetorical questions, I want to us to focus on things we do know. I think both the zec-whales and Zeals want a funding mechanism that allows:
- Some great extent of the development to be funded from the protocol
- that accommodates big development orgs like ECC, ZF or QEDIT and smaller contributors like small dev shops, individual contributors and non-engineering community projects
- Accountability for those who carry those projects out.
- A mechanism to voice whale and zeal opinions/concerns/proposals
- ZEC to thrive and succeed at its mission.
Am I missing something? what are your thoughts? what is the best mechanism to achieve those goals?