Staked Poll on Zcash Dev Fund Debate

[daira]

(Speaking for myself.)

@zooko

Also the only way to make real users and coin-holders come out and exercise their voice. Which is what I believe happened last time and what I expect will happen this time. If I’m wrong and instead a wild adversary appears who risks losing millions of dollars of their money just to interfere in the Zcash governance process or in order to prove a point, that would be a fascinating event to learn from! But even if there is such an attack, I think that the sincere Zcash coin-holders are much, much more numerous both in terms of number of individuals and in terms of total stake.

These seem like weak arguments:

• Is now, given the importance of polling on ZIP 1014 to Zcash’s future, a good point at which to be doing unproven experiments?
• Even if sincere coin-holders collectively own much more ZEC than an attacker, this doesn’t address Ian’s argument that the amount of ZEC that actually turned out last time is too low for any semblance of security (and its holders would not know, until the coin-weighted poll is over, that they needed to turn out in order to counteract an attack).

For the record, I think @secparam’ and @boxalex’s arguments against a coin-weighted poll are compelling, as are @tromer’s arguments stated here, and I will not be participating.