What a an excellent post! I agree, and for the simple special case of coin-weighted voting, I recently likewise pointed out that it degenerates to pay-to-vote in the presence of lending markets. (Appended this link above, now.)
With Zcash governance, we’ve painted ourselves into a particularly difficult corner:
- The ethos of privacy/anonymity makes identity-based and permissioned approaches unsavory to this community.
- A big goal of the current Dev Fund discussion is to transcend the dependence on the established governance players (ECC and Zfnd). We can’t do governance by permissionless voting, for all of the above reasons, and we can’t use permissioned voting, because (by definition) the existing governance is not supposed to make the requisite discretionary calls. So there are many proposals that instead prescribe the creation of independent new governance committees to preside on or along the existing ones. But how shall those be populated? Well, you guessed it, election by coin-weighted voting is a popular suggestion…
Thus far, things have gravitated towards non-binding “sentiment collection”, which is interpreted by human beings (the Zcash Foundation and ECC) at their best discretion and under the watchful eyes of the community.