Staked Poll on Zcash Dev Fund Debate

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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Please mark some of the following (your username will be public) to indicate you’d like to join the above discussion on design, implementation and use of coin-weighted voting in future Zcash governance via…

  • Conference call
  • Dedicated community chat channel (starting at an announced time)
  • Dedicated forum topic

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I’am well aware that the tool/mechanism/idea is from June and that’s not what i had in mind with a sudden.

Trying to eleaborate why i call it now a sudden and out of nothing.

  • Since end of the 1st dev fund polling nobody mentioned it will be used again in the 2nd dev fund round.
  • Since end of the 1st dev fund polling nobody made it public that i will be used for signalling/polling in the 2nd dev fund polling until a “sudden” zooko announed it in a solo run as it seems.
  • It’s introduced a “sudden” in the middle of an ongoing voting process, without any preparation, without coin holders being aware (expect some insiders), any improvement, any anything.
  • ECC until today (3 days left for polling) doesn’t even have/made an official/public announcement that such polling excists. That’s why i call it “out of nowhere”.

Maybe i miss something, but in my book that’s exactly a “sudden” and “out of nowhere”… In case the points above are wrong or i missed something i excuse myself for my wording…

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Fwiw I agree with @boxalex, I had actually forgotten that I even proposed the idea because I wrote it off after early commenters hammered home the downsides.

I don’t think this is worth much. To use an absurd and extreme example, if I tell you that I want to drive my motorcycle over a cliff, and you say, “But you’ll die,” and I say, “I acknowledge that your criticism is valid,” and then still drive over the cliff, have we accomplished anything? Maybe something, but it wasn’t very useful.

Likewise, if I said, “No I won’t, because I’ll sprout wings!” — well, the mere fact of having offered an explanation doesn’t make it convincing. It feels like being gaslit to push back and have the counterparty act puzzled. “But I told you that I’m going to sprout wings!” Yeah, tell me that however many times you want, I’m not gonna believe it simply because you said so.

Explain a mechanism that makes sense. Provide your reasoning. There is no substitute for convincingly demonstrating good judgment. Like, there just isn’t. Persuasion is really important, and how attempts at persuasion are conducted tells you a lot.

I’m not even against using coinholder voting as a signal (perhaps obvious from OP in this thread). My position on the staked poll at this point in time is “it’s your damn motorcycle, go ahead if you insist” but I hate being brushed off by people who pretend they aren’t brushing you off.

How many times did @sarang ask a direct, straightforward question and get vague non-answers? He had to ask how many times, with others echoing the question, before getting a straight answer?

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I may have triggered it :sweat_smile:

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I’m really skeptical about participating in any such call if the presumption is that coin-weighted voting is desirable at all. The problems with it aren’t limited to the current implementation.

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I agree that the first order of business is to define requirements from the voting scheme that make it plausibly desirable and possible (implementation details aside). @zooko seems to have strong ideas about this, but so far has not explained them in a form that anyone can understand. So I’m hoping he would join an interactive discussion.

If no one joins who thinks that coin-weighted voting is desirable and possible, then I agree there’s no use having such a call…

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It’s fundamentally impossible to solve the voting trilemma (or maybe it’s not, y’all are the cryptographers).

Let’s stipulate one-person-one-vote because we don’t like plutocracy. You can have anonymity with respect to who voted what and maintain sybil-resistance, but you can’t have anonymity with respect to who voted at all and maintain sybil-resistance. Right? Otherwise you have to give up one-person-on-vote.

As I understand it, that’s the point of a staked vote, right? By design, it’s sybil-proof in all but appearance. (E.g., you get the same number of votes if you split ZEC, but you may want to appear to be more individuals than you are.) And that’s the tradeoff in exchange for plutocracy / governance by financial skin in the game.

Well, @secparam changed my mind by pointing out that if the staked result isn’t binding, why are you accepting that tradeoff at all, you’re just asking for sybil attacks of the “appearing to be many” sort. If what you want is additional information rather than a deciding result, doing a staked poll is a gift to those who wish to deceive you.

Open to pushback here, I assume @zooko has a different perspective for example. And I still believe what I commented several days ago.

Edit: For transparency… maybe I’ve changed my mind about the quote below? Still muddling through…

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Decred voting system is largely thought to be the best on-chain system (PoS) out there. Perhaps there is a way to add some of this functionality to Zcash?

https://docs.decred.org/governance/consensus-rule-voting/overview/

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