Staked Poll on Zcash Dev Fund Debate

Zecwallet Lite doesn’t support (and has never supported) the from field.

Zecwallet Fullnode has support for the ‘from’ field, so the instructions work with Zecwallet FullNode, which allows you to send memos from a ‘t’ address.

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@zooko, thanks for elucidating your rationale on the merits of coin-weighted voting even if imperfect, as well as your recommendations on how to participate in imperfect coin-weighted voting.

Unfortunately, I disagree with many of your points.

Learning from the imperfect?

We’ve already learned a great deal from the first Coin Holders Petition.

We used it last time around, and it was a success.

Actually, what did we really learn? As far as I can tell, all we learned is that some people amassed ~1% of the ZEC supply and managed to follow the instructions. That’s it.

We don’t know if it’s one person or many. We don’t know if they had any economical stake in this ZEC, or just loaned or custodied it. We don’t know if they voted according to their preferences, or tried to fake a crowd, or just wanted to make some weird point. We don’t know what technical or financial hurdles they surpassed, or how many others did not surpass those. We don’t know whether they compromised their privacy when voting.

So, why do you judge this a success, and what valuable lessons were learned?

Voices large and small?

Coin Holders, large and small, are treasured parts of the Zcash community. […] We should encourage Coin Holders of all sizes to know that their voice matters.

If your goal is to have voices heard regardless of their ZEC holdings, then why are you weighting them by ZEC holding?

Yes, all raw ballots are available, but you’re calling for people to interpret them by ZEC weighting, and doing that yourself. You even explicity advised risk-averge voters to

use a fraction (like 1%) of your coins in your petition [which] means your vote only weighs 1/100 as much as if you voted all your coins [but still] show that you exist and raises your voice

This doesn’t make any sense to me. A voice diluted a hundredfold, and lost in a crowd of Sybils, is hardly heard.

So if you insist that small ZEC-holder matter, then go ahead and explicitly disregard ZEC weights. Just do a plain z2z bulletin board where a ballot costs 0.0001 ZEC. Yes, you’d have to acknowledge the fact that such votes can be trivially faked and Sybilled, and that maybe the real vote result was the insights we gained by along the way by reading the encrypted memos?

But you can’t have it both way. A vote must have a clear pre-commitment to how it will be interpreted, but you’re juggling two inconsistent interpretations, neither of which is very good, and speaking as if the vote magically assumes the best aspects of each.

Throwing caution to the crowd

What you wrote about how to mitigate fund and privacy risk created by participating in the poll is truly horrifying to my ears. You’re expecting users to practice extreme levels of technical sophistication, at their own peril, to paper over the fact the voting protocol is broken!

Choice quotes.

If you’re considering participating in a Coin Holders Petition, and you’re concerned about the risk of your coins being lost to accident or theft, then just use a fraction (like 1%) of your coins in your petition. […] Your call.
2. If you’re worried about the risk of your privacy being compromised by participating in a Coin Holders petition, I would say this. […many lines of technical explanation…]
3. […] One particular off-chain data leakage that you should be aware of is the network layer. […] Whether this is a problem for you in practice really depends on your situation. […] If you’re a real privacy ninja, you could mitigate this risk by using Tor in a particular way. […]
Think about the fact that a network observer can link your IP address with other transactions you make from the same IP address. The consequences of this are confusing to think about, but if you have concerns about your privacy even though you are using a z-address for long-term storage, then you need to think through this network-level privacy leakage.

From a protocol design perspective, this is completely unacceptable. Users should not be assumed to understand any of the above. And if you require participants to understand all of the above, then at please recognize that you’ve restricted participation to those who are either exceptionally cognizant or dangerously misinformed.

Incidentally, this is a point where ECC, ZF and others (including ZF grantees!) can take the lead and design better protocols that really do reduce these risks.

Process

As mentioned earlier and being discussed there, now is too late in the game to introduce new signals and expect them to materialize in time. Especially when even the (rudimentary) current protocol is not supported by GUI tooling.

The usual critique of coin-weighted voting

By now we have ample analysis showing that coin-weighted voting is way too easy to capture, and devolves into pay-to-vote or worse given efficient markets and even small incentives. This is discussed extensively earlier in this thread, but let me just copy some pointers that are buried in another thread:

So I get your wishes for decentralized permissionless voting, but if you’re going to stake anything of importance on it, then please first offer a rebuttal to the analysis saying that it’s bound to fail.

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Hi, Eran. It seems like we disagree about a bunch of details, and that’s okay. As I said previously, I believe it is critically important to Zcash’s long-term success that we include and empower coin-holders in Zcash’s governance, and that the benefits of doing it far outweigh its downsides. If you disagree, that’s fine. Reasonable people often disagree about such trade-offs.

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The Voices large and small? concern, above, is not about tradeoffs. It’s about what does such a poll even mean, how to interpret the results, and does this really match the idealized and apparently-contradictory goals you’ve set.

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Zcash — and all other cybercoins — are already relying on coin-holders, and we’re already vulnerable to their decisions. If all the coin-holders were to sell their ZEC and walk away because they disagreed with the direction of the project, that would destroy the price, which would have major, long-term consequences for the entire ecosystem. On the other hand, the more coin-holders come on board and become long-term holders, the greater the price.

Listening to what the coin-holders are saying, should they choose to post their petition to the blockchain, is not making Zcash vulnerable to coin-holders. It is finding out in advance what their opinions are, before they buy or sell because they agree or disagree with the direction of the project.

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Here’s a zboard-style spreadsheet view for stake polling alongside the governance panel vote.

I’m torn on this actually - on one hand, I don’t particularly want to attract more hype to the present stakepolling mechanism. We’ve learned we have a lot of clear ways to fix it already. On the other hand, if someone does want to send messages to vote here anyway, their voices do matter and I want to help boost them. Also it’s permissionless and not much effort to host, so :man_shrugging:. The channel is live and I’m monitoring it, zeal with it.

I’m grateful to everyone who participated in the first stakepoll. I don’t know whether y’all spent $600 to borrow zec then immediately close your position or what. What I do know is you made a deliberate speech act, using shielded memo technology! That’s neat, so,… thanks!

I think this is best called a “petition.” Petitions don’t have this quality, but still can happily run alongside official votes/elections/polls.

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I strongly agree with this idea, but haven’t seen an implementation whose results can be trusted meaningfully. The details matter a lot here – the coin is liquid and can be entered and exited easily for a vote.

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Is this your argument? Surely no one is under the illusion that their voice, large or small, is “heard” because they sold a few zatoshis, any more that they’re under the illusion that their voice about the value of gold is “heard” because they bought a $5 earring.

You’re explicitly saying that small ZEC holders should have a say, while advocating for a voting scheme that overwhelms their voice.

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These comments seem to conflate whether it’s desirable to determine coin-holders’ views and whether it’s possible to determine them in a representative way using this method.

Most commenters (including me) seem to think it’s desirable; however, it appears that because it could be so easy to game this particular approach, it’s not possible to know if the results are representative. I argue that means the approach is flawed, and the results cannot be relied upon.

(Edit to add) This also doesn’t address the other myriad issues with the approach, including its safety.

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Maybe if someone borrows or buys millions of dollars worth of ZEC, risking tremendous loss to themselves, in order to make a statement to the Zcash community using the world’s first uncensorable, private, publicly-verifiable blockchain, then that’s still meaningful?

I mean, maybe it partially depends on what the statement is? Last time around someone demonstrated ownership of a huge amount of ZEC and then instead of voting on the NU4 ZIP they just referenced a Bible verse. Was that “meaningful”? I thought so. :relaxed:

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Sure it’s meaningful: it suggests that someone found a way to monetize the process. For example, I don’t want to start a discussion of hypothetical market manipulations here, but suffices to say that a bad vote outcome could profitably dovetail with a short position, both facilitated by the same loan.

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@amiller, can you say more about this? What’s the difference, and how would we interpret and aggregate the raw ballots in such a “petition”? It seems that ECC interpreted them by just adding up the coin-weighted votes, which seems inconsistent with @zooko’s desired to have small ZEC holders be “heard”… Are there other algorithms/methodologies on the table?

Also, I’m frankly confused about this “signal” vs. “vote” vs. “poll” vs. “petition” terminology (with “elections” occasionally thrown into the mix), so sorry if I’m using it differently than what you intended. Is there any difference in how ZF would interpret the outcome, depending on what we call it?

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A ‘petition’ is simply a request, given strength by the number of people (in this case, coins) who join it, nothing to do with decision making. At least that’s my understanding of what a petition is.

Although… if a massive percentage of the money supply requested something it would make sense to listen. By some freak chance we’re doing exactly that to get a new constitution in Chile !

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To each of us as individuals, yeah absolutely. I certainly paid attention to the coin vote, and it influenced my thoughts on the entire debate. I just don’t think we should ordain any such method as official sentiment collection as it functions today.

Agreed. I love that polling / petitions are happening, regardless of their lack of official governance impact

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Except the only thing you can really learn from such a poll/petition is “an unknown number of entities, who are self-selected and may have unknown incentives, and who may or may not have borrowed their votes, think X”, right? I would be very hesitant to assign meaning to this.

Learning what people/organizations think about governance decisions is crucial. But I do not think this is the way to do it.

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Self-quoting myself earlier in the thread because I think it applies here.

The last time this was discussed the ZF board was extremely skeptical (except @amiller of course :slightly_smiling_face:) of the poll due to the many shortcomings. This time is no different; the Foundation will use the results of the combined forum participant + community advisory panel Helios poll as the basis for evaluating community sentiment on ZIP 1014.

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Excuse my extreme ignorance, but I do not know where to begin to stake and vote.

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Just gave the current coin-weight voting some more thoughts and some horrible scenarios would be possible in theory, just some examples:

  • An exchange could use the holdings (or a larger amount of it) to vote, including with the incentive of price manipulation. This as well would not represent the wish of the real ZEC holders which ZEC holdings would be used in such case by a third party, in this case exchanges.

  • Same, or very similar, with big/bigger venture capital funds. These would have access to a large amount of ZEC, but would such vote really represent the real coin owners wish? In my opinion the real coin holder/investor in venture capital funds/average joe is the real owner and the ventural capital fund just a temporary one. This is even very similar to a mining pool situation where the mining pool leads to greater centralization.

  • Coin-weight voting is discouraging for the average joi ZEC fan. Within the last vote i myself played with the intention to buy about 1000 ZEC and test the voting (due it’s low price), but when i saw the first whales votes incoming i realized it makes 0 sense. It would need 1000’s of small ZEC holders to vote to even have these votes noticed, leave alone have them changing something. This said, who the hell is voting if upfront it’s clear the whales behind the scenes decided the outcome allready?

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Somebody used their 155 ZEC to post saying that this petition is a terrible idea. :laughing:

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Regarding the question of coin-weighted ballots are supposed to be tallied/interpreted, there’s a fundamental question here, that affects future protocol design.

Ideally, should the voting mechanism expose only the final tally, or also the individual ballots?

I was under the impression that we’d only look at the final tally (as ECC did), and therefore ideally should expose no more: both to maximize privacy, and also because the finer-grained information can be faked anyway. And we can cryptographically achieve this.

But this would eliminate the visibility of the small coin holders. Which @zooko appears to believe is achieved by the present mechanism (despite the lack of clarity on how to interpret such voices, and why to believe their authenticity when Sybil attacks are trivial).

So what are we even trying to achieve here? @amiller, @zooko, it would really help move this discussion constructively if you’d stick your neck out by concretely defining your desired voting/polling/petition/signalling functionality, including what information should revealed and how it should be interpreted. (You can assume away all implementation issues, but not inherent ones like Sybil attacks.)

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