# Staked Poll on Zcash Dev Fund Debate **URL:** \ **Category:** protocol\ **Created:** [August 31, 2019, 7:03pm UTC](https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/staked-poll-on-zcash-dev-fund-debate/34846 "2019-08-31T19:03:07Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 51
**Author:** ![tromer](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/zcash/user_avatar/forum.zcashcommunity.com/tromer/32/14860_2.png) [@tromer](https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/u/tromer)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2019, 10:27pm UTC](https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/staked-poll-on-zcash-dev-fund-debate/34846/51 "2019-11-25T22:27:32Z")
Some of the above calls for the impossible, so let’s recognize inherent constraints. **Your voting/polling scheme can be coin-weighted, permissionless, or whale-resistant: choose two**. (Here, “whale” means someone who holds a very large amounts of coins, or assets they are willing to covert to coins. “Coin-weighted” may be by coin holding at a given time, or over a given duration, weighted by amount and holding period. “Permissionless” means participation is not subject to someone’s approval. The trilemma doesn’t seem to depend on the nuances.) - _You can’t achieve all three_, because if it’s coin-weighted and permissionless, then it cannot be whale-resistant, i.e., whales’ voting power cannot be capped to any less than their proportional coin weight. This is due to possibility of Sybil attacks: whatever is supposed to be done by a thousand small coin holders, a whale with the same total amount of coins can technically do the same thing by splitting its coins across a thousand wallets. The observable effects are indistinguishable. But you can achieve any two: - _Whale-resistant_ (but not permissionless): do a permissioned poll tied to people’s persistent identities, such as legal names or reputable forum accounts. Then you can make it one-person-one-vote, or _coin-weighted-but-capped_ (in which case you need to use a proper cryptographic scheme to avoid linking weights to identities). - _Coin-weighted and permissionless_ (but not whale-resistant): can be achieved in a privacy-preserving way by simple variants of the Zerocash or Zcash protocols (may require a network upgrade). Also, approximated by the protocol in this thread, with some privacy caveats. - _Anonymous and whale-resistant_ (but not coin-weighted): do a permissionless straw-poll where anyone can cast unlimited votes. So please find a loophole, or choose two. (See also my [general objections to coin-holding-time-weighted voting](https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/voting-on-how-zcash-should-be-governed-is-a-trivially-easy-problem/35418/2).) --- _[View the full topic](https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/staked-poll-on-zcash-dev-fund-debate/34846)._