Staked Poll on Zcash Dev Fund Debate

Governance via forums and committees doesn’t scale, especially for a living network like ZCash. Stake-polls/coin-votes have the advantage of weighting voices proportionally to the amount of skin-in-the-game one has. It is a very liquid form of voting that resist entrenchment of power.

Let me elaborate,

ZCash is a young community, but as time goes by, people will leave and go, or sell some of their ZEC. The project will mature and have more impact, for more people, etc. if we “hard-code” power into organizational structures based on early involvement and not current exposure, then we will do a great disservice to future generations of coin holders.

Coin vote reflects in real-time who is the most exposed to bad or good governance and weights their will accordingly. This is excellent for a network of money.

There are many protocol and cultural mechanisms that can defuse most of the concerns expressed in this thread. The most recurring concern is about “plutocracy” but even that one can be defended against by making the protection of minority rights (including property) a strong positive cultural norm that we all organize around.

If designed well, coin-votes and stake-polling are excellent tools for governance.

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That’s a too idealistic view. I see where you are coming from but:
how much skin in the game does an exchange have that could use users funds to vote?
how much skin in the game does someone have that could just for 1 day obtain/borrow/exchange a huge amount of ZEC to influence/manipulate the coin weighted polling/voting?
Or does a coin holder with let’s say 10.000 ZEC has (10.000x) more skin in the game like a Zcash developer that holds 1 ZEC but contributed to the Zcash code 10.000 work hours?

As you said, IF. As this is currently not the case the attempt to introduce a more than flawed by design and doomed to fail coin-weightend mechanism out of nowhere in the middle of a voting process is just doing harm and no good. Easy and simple as that.

I’am all for having in future a coin weightened mechanism as part of future polling/votings/elections IF the major flaws have been dealt with, after it’s reliable and manipulation proof and of course, introduced in time and people are upfront aware of it. As none of this currently applies it doesn’t make sense to make an attempt to somehow add this mechanism right now beside the helios voting.

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Further personal comment: I’m in my usual spot of agreeing with everybody. This mechanism of polling? Terrible, for reasons that have been elaborated at length by @acityinohio @daira @tromer @secparam and others. And I’m the one who initially suggested it! Like, wow, we designed a staked poll that still isn’t Sybil resistant? We get fakers and overly influential whales? Great, lmao.

On the other hand… @zooko and @amiller and the person who wrote “I’m not fake I have sentiments” are right. It matters for there to be a permissionless, anonymous way for people to express their preferences and be heard by the Zcash community at large, but especially stakeholders with power. If Zcash didn’t enable this kind of thing by nature, Zcash wouldn’t be the exciting protocol / project / product that we all know and love. Anonymity hell yeah :smiley:

Zooko is also right that there are always pragmatic tradeoffs. Someone can reasonably decide to bet that no one will bother to surveil their participation. Whether that is true is unknowable, and coming down on either side has an inherent tradeoff. We must all make our own decisions about risk, opportunity cost, and potential payoff.

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If only… It’s neither “designed” (because, for one, no one here can explain how the results are to be interpreted), nor “staked” (because voters risk nothing if they only need to own/borrow the coins for a minute), nor a “poll” (because @amiller says it’s actually a petition, though I’m not sure what’s the difference).

If you just want people to speak up, the solution is very easy: vanilla z2z/zboard encrypted memos, for 0.0001 ZEC each. Whence coin-weighting and all of the problems and make-believe it creates?

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From way upthread:

Right now, we just have the one — coin-weighted. I suggest that this be regarded as an opinion poll, rather than a vote. The stake used is metadata w/r/t the opinion being broadcast.

See above!

Well okay, but how should that metadata be interpreted? It’s very tempting to just interpret it as coin-weighted voting, and ECC has been doing exactly that. Including presenting the coin-weighted results in the same graphs as other the other signals, which were proper votes. @zooko did not retract or qualify this in any way, even in his latest post, despite explicit questions by several members of this forum. So presumably ECC will keep using this coin-weighted interpretation given the metadata, and will continue advocating for it in its highly visible communications.

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I agree that precommitment on interpretation is important.

Petitioning governance is a vulnerable act unless it is protected. I love that we have a system that can give coin holders a voice that is resistant to retaliation and/or censorship.

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In a nutshell, petitions are unofficial & bottom up, elections/votes are official and top down.

Elections, votes, and to some extent polls, are initiated by the same entity that wishes to incorporate these into its decision making. The July 2018 zfnd board election and the community governance panel are like this. Precommitting to the interpretation, process, and action to take based on the outcome, makes sense and is what makes them official.

Petitions generally take the form of a request for some entity to take an action, but are initiated by outside that entity. https://change.org/ is a well known website that hosts petitions. The petitions are often asking the US white house or congress to respond in some way. A petition is inherently unofficial, and by its nature the relevant entity can’t commit in advance to how it will be interpreted or whether to react to it at all. The idea is that a petition self-asserts that it should be taken seriously… if it’s signed by hundreds of thousands of people, the whitehouse often responds… so it can matter even though it’s unofficial.

You’ve asked to clarify how I’d like to see the coinholders petition interpreted. I think the best outcome is that the petition is acknowledged in public writing, i.e. signal boosted. The Obama administration had this thing where they precommitted to at least responding in public to petitions that reached a threshold. We the People (petitioning system) - Wikipedia That’s still pretty modest and unstructured… but it’s still precommitting to something. On the other hand, it’s a lower bound (we’ll at least respond in public), whereas what I think you’re advocating for is committing to an upper bound (we will deem it unreliable and consider it only with appropriately low weight).

I wonder if the intended audience of a petition could include the community advisory panel members. Maybe some folks on the panel find these as persuasive as pseudonymous tweets or posts?

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WHY DIDN’T THIS CLOWN STAKE WITH 420.69 ZEC :triumph:

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I’m just curious, but does anybody else want to reside in a country where their effective voice was proportional to the amount of wealth they had at a particular point in time? Perhaps I’m being dense but I simply don’t understand a large chunk of this conversation. As @tromer said just use standard encrypted memos for 0.0001 ZEC.

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Thanks for the very helpful framing. I see the difference and why it makes commitment to interpretation problematic in case of a petition. With this in mind, I’d like to raise a few points:

What’s petitioned for? In legacy governance, petitions are typically in support of a single position, elucidated in the associated text. What we have here is in support of… what? A list of ballots accompanied by ZEC weights that needs to be interpreted by some rules. So what you really have here is a vote packaged within a petition. So back to square one: we still need to to agree on what that inner vote means, in order to even interpret what the petition is petitioning for.

Well you could try to skirt the issue by just saying we actually have multiple disjoint petitions bundled into one. But that doesn’t get you off the hook, because:

How much weight does it carry? In legacy governance, there is usually some loose consensus on how much weight a petition should carry, e.g., based on how many signatories it has, and expectations that reasonable means exist to mitigate fraud. But in our case, people are simultaenously advocating for grossly inconsistent weightings approaches (coin-weighted vs. small-voices-heard) that are moreover known to be undetectably fakeable. No one even explained why not just petition using an explicitly non-weighted free-for-all bulletin board.

Does it feed into an official process? Some legacy governance systems do have rules requiring action when a petition passing some criteria is submitted, in which case the main difference from voting is the grassroots initiation and collection of the signatures/ballots, rather their interpretation. And our case feels close to that, at least from ECC’s side where the “petition” was presented at the same normative footing as Community Governance Panel and structured forum polls.

Why go through the chimney? In legacy governance, petitions (especially the informal kind) are usually the fallback when normal processes and politics have failed. As a way to transmit a signal to decisionmakers, petitions are expensive to everyone; and thus ideally the governance system would proactively recognize and act on the embodied information, making the petition redundant and unnecessary. Thus, a petition is an indictment of the governance process. But wait, in this case… why not try to fix the governance process? This could be the perfect time for that! Take the rules used for interpreting the aforementioned implicit vote, and elevate them as a first-class citizen of ZF sentiment collection process! And if you can’t figure out these rules, well then that’s the real problem, and let’s focus on that first.

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Excellent points.

I have as well readed a bit about petitions and in my opinion it could be added that petitions should not be anonymously. At least here in my country ( i guess in whole europe) petitions need to be signed with the name, passport or id number and a signature and most important 1 signature counts as 1 voice.

Even petition sounds good i don’t think the coin-weighted mechanism we currently have/talk about has the character of a petition.

The nearest i found that could apply to this coin weighted mechanism is simply: Weighted voting

Here a collection of the definition and explaination of weighted voting which nearly perfectly describes the situtation:

weighted voting exists in an electoral system in which not all voters have the same amount of influence over the outcome of an election. Instead, votes of different voters are given different weight during the election. This type of electoral system is used in shareholder meetings, where votes are weighted by the number of shares that each shareholder owns…

The mathematics of weighted voting

A weighted voting system is characterized by three things — the players, the weights and the quota. The voters are the players ( P 1, P 2, . . ., P N). N denotes the total number of players. A player’s weight ( w ) is the number of votes he controls. The quota ( q ) is the minimum number of votes required to pass a motion. Any integer is a possible choice for the quota as long as it is more than 50% of the total number of votes but is no more than 100% of the total number of votes

The notion of power

… Thus, the mathematics of weighted voting systems looks at the notion of power: who has it and how much do they have? A player’s power is defined as that player’s ability to influence decisions.

…Now let us look at the weighted voting system [10: 11, 6, 3]. With 11 votes, P 1 is called a dictator. A player is typically considered a dictator if their weight is equal to or greater than the quota. The difference between a dictator and a player with veto power is that a motion is guaranteed to pass if the dictator votes in favor of it.

A dummy is any player, regardless of their weight, who has no say in the outcome of the election. A player without any say in the outcome is a player without power. Consider the weighted voting system [8: 4, 4, 2, 1]. In this voting system, the voter with weight 2 seems like he has more power than the voter with weight 1, however the reality is that both voters have no power whatsoever (neither can affect the passing of a motion). Dummies always appear in weighted voting systems that have a dictator but also occur in other weighted voting systems.

I think the above just perfectly fits it up. The coin-weighted mechanism we have does not deserve the label of a petition but should be just called “weighted voting”.

Thinking more about weighted voting i think the ECC could test and use weighted voting perfectly internally. The ECC has shareholders and giving each shareholder x decision power for the shares they hold they can poll internally a lot of things.
For example if the ECC should transform to a non profit organization. A perfect internal use case within the ECC for weighted voting by it shareholders using weighted voting.

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A lot of the discussion so far has been based on the premise that, while the process for this coin-weighted poll may be deeply flawed, it will nonetheless tell us something about the positions of coin holders.

Well, no. I strongly dispute that we can have any confidence that the outcome will reflect the positions of coin holders. Partly this is because only a tiny fraction of coin-share is voting. By itself, that would render the result no more indicative than a lottery. But it’s actually worse: some of us, motivated by deep concern about the integrity of governance processes (*), have been actively telling people not to vote. The problem of poor turnout affects many elections, but is at least mitigated to some extent by all or most factions attempting to “get out the vote”. And here’s the kicker: in this poll, objections to use of poor-quality governance processes are very likely to be correlated with opinions about the substantive issues being voted on.

[Edit: (*) I do not mean to imply that others who disagree do not also have deep concern for the integrity of governance processes. I worded this poorly in my original comment.]

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  1. Introduce a voting methodology with the possibility of voting of each holder.
  2. Clarify how voting results will be taken into account
  3. Exclude the possibility of falsification of votes.
    If at least these points are not feasible, then you cannot apply the process in practice, it is much more efficient and more correct to use the voting form on the forum, indicating whether you are the holder or not, because all votes are not checked for the actual ownership of the amount of which they vote.
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A lot of the discussion is also predicated on the idea that the way that it’s happening is the way that it has to be and I know the arguments above, it’s a tough nut to crack huh? But something like this that works has no precedent so maybe the problem lies in assuming it’s going to resemble anything that we already know at all

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Thank you for being open-minded by supporting the idea of «Coin-Holders Petition».
I would love to vote as a coin holder if I hadn’t to give up my privacy by putting my coins on a t-address.

I hope that, one day, we (the crypto community, but by preference Zcash) will find a way to develop this feature :wink:

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Here we go. Just mentioned this in another topic that this is a burden many are not willing to accept.

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I’m replying to a few comments in the other thread, so as not to continue cluttering up that thread with discussion about stake polling

These threads have been long, but I don’t think any of the criticisms have been dismissed, instead they’ve all been acknowledged as valid criticism. If there is really something that hasn’t been responded to yet, I promise I’ll answer. The answer may be “I don’t know”.

I’ve tried to be careful not to say this has been an experiment, because it hasn’t been designed as such. I consider it a personal project and proof of concept, and at this point also a kind of permissionlessness activism.

For what it’s worth, the discussion that has had the most resonance with me is that we should not present bar charts that include the weighted stake from this petition directly alongside the indicators like community advisory panel vote that have been more carefully designed.

So, I would be happy to join in calling for ECC not to present the output of this current stake poll mechanism as strong evidence of community sentiment.

I presented about this idea in June and the thread describing its current form is from August. I don’t understand the claims that this is sudden.

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There’s a lot unanswered, but here’s a thought. Instead of this high-latency back and forth, how about allocating time for an interactive discussion among the interested community members, on the community chat or by video call?

Agenda: design, implementation and use of coin-weighted voting in future Zcash governance.

Desired outcome: requirements and implementation approach for an improved mechanism.

Out of scope: gripes about how the current mechanism is advocated for.

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