Staked Poll on Zcash Dev Fund Debate

Its not about religion, the religious quote is just a really effective antithesis for the 6k Zec
Whoever did this is actually really smart

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Whoever it was holds lots of ZEC & has faith in something
 faith in number go up :wink:

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Mama said theres only so much money a man really needs and the rest is just for showing off is, apparently, true
9000 zec, vote doesn’t count, no oblique parable?

Well we dont have to worry about that any more because our first large staker did infact cast a vote.

6000.1921
-5999.9998
=0.1923

I suspect if we subtract the fees this will add up to 0.1921 exactly.

The vote is 1N2N3N4N5N6N7A8N9Y10N11N12N13N

No because you dont have to be poor to go into heaven you have to be pure to go into heaven.

This is correct.

And I dont find the message ominous at all. There are far more ominous passages in the Bible one can choose from. Infact I even find the message uplifting and encouraging.

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By now there are as well 10,000, 17.000 and 30,000 ZEC votes, lol. Reminds me somehow to “pay to win”


Yep, it has to be if you are trying to gather sentiment of large holders


As far as the 6k stake I would say the person has around 12k and decided to split his stash and use half to send a message and the other half to cast a vote.

A very effective way to send a message.

image

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Sorry for being off topic, but does anyone remember when Eligius pool (named after this guy - Saint Eligius - Wikipedia)

Caused massive drama back in the day for filling their coinbase transactions with bible quotes, people got really upset about “blockchain bloat” and Christianity -This reminded me of that and brought back some nostalgia so I thought I would share.

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So, Andrew and Sonya. Are these the final results?

Can the Zcashers who risked their money and their privacy (*) to make their voices heard in this way go ahead and move their ZEC again without nullifying their votes?

(*) Hopefully none of them actually suffered any loss of their money or their privacy. I haven’t seen any evidence that any of them did.

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Thank you everyone who has participated so far in this informal stakeholders poll! It’s been a treat to sit in the front row and be splashed by the whales :stuck_out_tongue: :whale:
Seaworld_Splash_Zone_at_Orlando_Florida_Summer_2012_the_crowd_gets_soaked_by_Whales

I’m tentatively considering this petition closed as of the time of this post, at block 647905.

This means that I’m no longer updating my spreadsheet, so from this point on, you may move your coins from the t-address to somewhere else (ideally to the shielded pool), and it wont affect the tally shown here. Of course since this petition is a permissionless process, anyone who would like to keep the poll open longer is welcome to do so without my permission. You could even keep using the same stakepoll address and make your own petition.

I also can’t tell you what to do with your own coins, but if you’ve participated and enjoyed the service so far and would like to do me a favor, then consider :whale: Please move your coins from the t-address into the shielded pool!! :whale: Then I’d be able to rest easier knowing this initiative had some positive impact on shielded adoption at the end, despite the privacy/robustness hazards in the process itself. I’ll work on adding a gadget to the spreadsheet to indicate how well the return into the shielded pool is going.

For reproducibility, here’s some additional info about my process so far:

  • I’ve archived the spreadsheet view at wayback machine (note: this archive link doesn’t seem to work consistently, maybe it needs time to settle?)
  • View-only link to the google doc spreadsheet to facilitate folks making their own charts or making a copy
  • Here is the gist for the code I used for populating this spreadsheet
    Basically I ran this script from a viewing-key only node every few minutes then uploaded the resulting csv to a webserver
  • Note that this code above used the zchain API in addition to the full node API. A drawback of this approach is that the Zchain API doesn’t seem to support “query account balance as of a certain block height”. The next thing I plan to do is provide some alternative code that uses “importaddress” on each of the participating addresses, and “z_getbalance” API calls to query the balance as of a certain height.

Edit: I reviewed the log to look for accidental sends to the poll address. I found that tx:86eed3c2
 from t1avGfG
 actually sent about 9 ZEC to the polling address, along with the memo â€œĂ¶â€. Maybe it was intended as a donation, maybe was a failed attempt to vote, in any case I returned it to sender.

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Its been interesting, some great lessons learnt, plus a sense of perspective on what a whale really is and the faith they have in the project.

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Hmmm
 “plutocracy”.

You keep using that word


From Plutocracy - Wikipedia

‘A plutocracy (Greek: Ï€Î»ÎżáżŠÏ„ÎżÏ‚, ploutos , ‘wealth’ + ÎșÏÎŹÏ„ÎżÏ‚, kratos , ‘power’) or plutarchy is a society that is ruled or controlled by people of great wealth or income.’

Plutocracy has historically been applied to the rule of “societies” in the sense of political authority. While policies governing the regulation of cryptocurrencies have interesting, and sometimes poorly understood relationships to historical political regulation
 they are not the same thing. Exapting a specific term, which has A: Always been associated with political governance, and B: Has almost always been used pejoratively, is not bringing clarity to the important arguments we as a community are engaged in to discover new insights.

I strongly believe that we argue, not to best each other socially, but to enhance our own understanding and those of observers.

The term “plutocracy” is sufficiently related to concepts we need to understand, and sufficiently both different from the actual concept and pejorative, to impose a cost on our efforts to obtain new understandings.

I vote we all reconsider what we mean when we use the word, and try to use it sparingly and consciously.

I have a similar opinion about the term “whale” which I believe is extremely common in forums I try not to visit too often.

In general I think terms that derive a significant component of their salience from their pejorative resonance, are less likely to be useful for expanding understanding than alternatives.

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Please see my reply to @vbuterin in this thread.

I think the use of the term “whale” to marginalize a group of people
 in this case people who have staked a large amount of wealth in zcash, but also in more general parlance, is troubling.

In general I am a big fan of diversity, and in general, I believe marginalization is a process whereby outliers are suppressed, in favor of norms.

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While on the subject of semantic critique, I’d like to question the term “stake” in the current context. As in “staked voting/polling”, or “staked a large amount of wealth in zcash” as @zancas wrote above.

For the kind of vote we had here, where the ZEC position only needed to be held for a few minutes at an (ideally
) pre-specified time, there’s nothing really at stake. The voters are free to convert other assets to ZEC for those few minutes, and then convert back. They are also free to loan ZEC for a brief period, and indeed for traditional company stocks, there are efficient markets for doing just this around stock-weighted votes.

So you can call it “coin-holding-weighted voting”. Given an efficient market, you’d recognize it as “pay-to-vote”. But please don’t call it “staked voting” or “stake-weighted voting”, these are just incorrect and misleading.

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Thank you for making this point. I used to feel this way too about the use of “whale” in cryptocurrency, but recently I’ve come to think it doesn’t have the same pejorative meaning in this world as it does in others like gambling or mobile games. There the idea is that whales are profitable repeat customers. Here it’s because of their potential effect on the overall market.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/10/24/a-quick-overview-of-cryptocurrency-whales-bears-and-bulls/amp/

By definition, a cryptocurrency whale is a term used to refer to individuals, or entities, that hold large amounts of digital currencies. Both feared and marvelled upon in equal measure, much like the marine mammals with whom they share a namesake, Bitcoin whales move around the cryptocurrency space causing waves at every turn.

So I think “whale” isn’t pejorative at all, quite the opposite. If anything I think it’s exaggerating the turnout here. But everyone who participated in this experiment (despite the hazards and inconvenience) is a whale in my book :slightly_smiling_face:

I’m curious now what it would have cost to borrow 1.39% of the ZEC for a few days, assuming that’s how you would pay-to-vote. Would that cost more or less than renting 1.39% of the mining hashpower?

Anyway, I don’t understand the distinction you’re making between “stake-weighted” and “coin-holder-weighted”? You could borrow some stake to vote with, but it’s still stake even if it’s borrowed

Going rates for crypto loans are 5-10% annualized, which is less than ZEC inflation so probably cheaper than mining. I don’t really know how deep is the ZEC loan market, but loans on the order of 1,000 ZEC are readily available on retail platforms, so I would guess that OTCs/institutionals would be a couple of orders of magnitude higher, which reaches what you ask for.

Anyway, this isn’t about what’s readily available now, it’s about what we expect to become available given demand and efficient markets.

Anyway, I don’t understand the distinction you’re making between “stake-weighted” and “coin-holder-weighted”? You could borrow some stake to vote with, but it’s still stake even if it’s borrowed

It doesn’t matter here whether the ZEC is borrowed or bought and then sold (though costs would be different). The point is that because it’s held for a very short duration, then the risk of a drop in value is very low (and thus also cheap to hedge, given efficient markets). So the “stake” narrative, i.e., “they put they money at risk so their opinion is worthy of weight”, doesn’t work.

As for dollar amounts: taking Binance’s ZEC margin loan rate of %0.02/day, and under the grossly simplifying assumption that you can get a similar rate for those 111,344 ZEC, and at current ZEC prices:

It would cost about $600 per day to loan all the ZEC that participated in the above poll.

That’s not a lot, for a poll that that affect who gets tens of millions of dollars (hmm maybe you can tilt it towards your friend?), that affects the future of Zcash (hmm I can imagine some that would consider this a very cheap way to anonymously sabotage financial privacy), and that can even be monetized (hmm why not vote for “crash and burn”, then keep the loan a while longer and use it to short ZEC?).

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Interesting questions. I took the time with my morning tea to calculate these costs and took a random date, 25th November for the calculations:

1.36% hashpower would cost about $2.559 per day at Nicehash for rent.

Calculation: 4787Msol x 1.36% = 66.5393 Msol x 0.0054BTC per MSol/day = 0.3593BTC = 2587 US$ at a BTC price of ~$7121

1.36% of lending at Binance would cost $296 per day

Calculation: 1.36% of 7,990,056 ZEC = 108,664 ZEC x $28 = $3,042,592 x 3.5% interest per year = $106,490 per year / 360 days = $296 per day

Explaination: 3.5% anual interest is the Binance rate for 60,000 ZEC. There might be other expenses for transfering the US$ amount to a lending platform and back.

BTC to ZEC and ZEC to BTC exchange would cost about $6084 for an undefinded time period.

Calculation: 108,664 ZEC = $3.042.592 @ $28 per ZEC, 0.1% exchange fee = $3.042 x 2 = $6084

Comment on these 3 approaches:

Renting mining hashpower for a given period:

While renting the hashpower would cost $2,559 the person as well gets mined ZEC for this period (24 hours) which would be worth around $2,370 means the effective rent/expense he paid would be around $200 per day.

Lending ZEC:

While lending costs only $296 per day it could be an higher expense or even a profit due volatility.

Exchanging BTC to ZEC and ZEC to BTC:

This seems the most expensive way on first view but could be even the most profitable if done/used by a good trader as such would buy ZEC at a low price and wait for a higher price pike to sell back. Than again, it’s as well the most risky one in my opinon as buying ZEC worth of 3M US$ would for sure cause some volatility despite ZEC’s low real volume.

Added and edit after i saw the below post just when i finished mine:

I guess your binance calculation is more correct as mine was based on the interest rate someone gets without the binance profit/fee.

I agree though with everything you wrote that with the possibility of just holding ZEC for a short time someone is able to manipulate whatever he wants for a very low price.

Bitfinex lending rate is 4% per year. I think you cant take the ZEC out of their address though. I think you can only use it for margin trading or shorting ZEC. The cost of borrowing ZEC for one day when DEFI kicks in will be negligable so this kind of staking will make no sense then.
EDIT I ran some numbers.

The lending rate currently is 0.0007% per day for ETH. So the multiplier would be 0.000007. One would have to take care not to move the lending market but a week should be sufficient to do it.

Literally $7 represents $1 million at 0.0007% per day. This represents the cost of doing this. One would get 90% ETH of his stable coin staked in the contract. So one would still need a 1.11 million dollars to stake for the day to rig a million dollar vote.

Mind you rates are so low because nobody wants to short. There is not much use for borrowing crypto other than shorting it these days.

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Hmmm
 OK
 I’m still wary of “whale”
 but maybe it’s the best term, or at least a useful term.

I think “plutocracy” is less ambiguously pejorative, and therefore confusing
 and maybe that’s the larger point (not that this is a carefully constructed argument, mind you), pejoratives tend to be confusing
 or distracting
 or obfuscating
 or some such


I have to admit that “whale” seems quite apt in many ways.