I already have accepted that this, or any, election system can’t be perfect, nor will constituent participation rates be.
It seems that coin voting needs more and more attention because it will presumably become a participating key-holder(s) in the too be designed NDFM, which will affect how all future block subsidies get disbursed.
Best to try and think around to tough questions sooner than later.
I think it would be nice for this capability to be inclusive of other shielded pools or transparent addresses. However, making this Orchard only creates an incentive for moving to and using the Orchard pool and helps grow the anonymity set we all benefit from. If we enable support outside of Orchard (or the current standard pool), we remove that incentive.
I think more focus should be put on solidifying the design, auditing it, and making it adoptable by other wallets (including hardware wallets!). I say this as someone who has transparent ZEC in a hardware wallet that couldn’t participate in the poll (I am not willing to move them).
What do you expect to happen with all the ZEC that is held by centralized exchanges as customer deposits, or by groups like Grayscale? Those entities will have massive voting power that may not be answerable to the actual owners of the coins. Your ideal here requires ubiquitous self-custody, which seems a long way off for all cryptocurrencies, not just ZEC.
self-custody is the 
, but we have a long road ahead of us. Crazy we might even lose access to it if some have their way.
I also couldn’t participate because I let a US-regulated CEX custody my coins, and so moving them away and then back would’ve triggered a slew of “funds origination” flags, etc - that in some cases risk a user’s account being frozen or even closed.
It isn’t inconceivable for CEXs to support a ZEC voting implementation, in the same manner that they parse down individual user funds and pay yield, as needed.
Not a simple task, probably something that is only a dream. But it is worth considering as a part of the discussion of ideals/ principles.
Yes and I pushed back at the Arborist call in your first link, including making several of the arguments I’m making now. Why would you assume that this disagreement would necessarily be resolved? (I note that Jon or Qedit did not substantively answer my arguments or questions, either then or since.)
There have been previous cases where features were abandoned entirely due to security objections, e.g. “Harmony mining” proposed for Blossom. My position since the launch of Zcash has consistently been that proposed changes to the protocol must not be made unless security objections to those changes are resolved (regardless of how nice the intended feature would be), and that there is never any guarantee that this is possible.
Daira: But just on the technical question of tying the verifiable encryption to the, umm, compliance feature, let’s call it that, I don’t think that’s necessary.
Jon: OK I was actually planning on asking you for a 1-on-1 to get your full view and to go deeper there.
Daira: OK, let’s do that.
Look, I made assumptions that conversations were taking place to discuss and address concerns and potentially come up with a better design as part of the outcome of this funding decision. This is something that could have been clarified by the committee. You’ve made your points crystal clear here. The grant is now cancelled. As @joshs likes to say, onward.
I don’t currently have time to keep track of all grant applications, nor is that an efficient use of my time or other node engineers’ time. I had made my objections clear on several occasions, but did not know about the potential USD 600,000 grant.
Where were the ZCG Committee on these Arborist calls? Why didn’t any of them pipe up to say “oh yes, we’re considering a huge grant for that thing you just had a heated half-hour discussion about”?
It should be routine to explicitly consult node implementor teams about grants of this amount and potential impact to core protocol security properties, especially in a case where some of them have already registered serious objections to the idea behind the grant, and where the controversy is obvious.
No-one on the ZCG Committee asked me about the outcome of this 1-on-1. If they had, I’d have said that my position was unchanged and that Jon did not address the objections to my satisfaction. The 1-on-1 was helpful in clarifying the differences in our positions but did not resolve them.
(Also, I believe the 1-on-1 happened after the grant was approved, so couldn’t have been an input to that decision. But it did not have any different outcome than I had expected.)
Since you asked, most likely working my day job. Thursdays are often terrible for me, when arborist calls usually take place. I’m sorry I can’t make them very often. I know a lot of the other members already work exceedingly over their agreed commitment as well, and I appreciate them for that.
Nonetheless, this will hopefully be addressed.
Ah ok. I think that is the first time that was stated in this thread? [Edit: I had missed The Cambrian Interface Explosion - #60 by aquietinvestor which got lost in the talk about voting.]
Thanks for taking into account the feedback.
The thread has gotten long. Jason announced it a few hours ago. The Cambrian Interface Explosion - #60 by aquietinvestor
@daira that’s exactly the work. researching the impact, the changes needed to the proposal, revising, consulting again, formalizing into ZIP. we’ve actually started some of it on our own, before the grant, but the conversations with you were meant explicitly to iterate on the protocol until it’s sound.
at the end of our heated discussion (which btw i appreciate those discussions with you public and private because you do listen and it’s always on substance), you mentioned “btw if a secure version of this moves forward it would need to be quantum secure” .
i’ve seen many times how cryptographers find solutions to the most complicated stuff, finding the exact work point thats an acceptable tradeoff. that feature in the grant was set to explore that.
(edit: yes this is cancelled now)
@ZcashGrants:Thank you for the retrospective, recognizing the misunderstanding and for taking action to remedy it by listening to the community’s feedback. It’s a hard decision to make. I understand @_jon’s frustration as well. I imagine QEDIT had forecasted and allocated resources to this grant and that it is an inconvenience that it is cancelled. Although, to add a somewhat positive note, what it just occurred is not ideal, but it is objectively far better than persisting on something that in the end would have been pushed back and rejected once built. This happened so many times in the history of software engineering that halting everything at the “whiteboard” stage is indeed a positive thing if you look it that way.
It called my attention that so many actors that are very well versed into protocol and cryptography aspects within the community oversaw what was later pushed back. It leads me to believe that in fact there was definitely a lack of detail or clarity in the definition and the effects of the proposal funded. We can’t attribute it only to “lack of grant review time”.
This aspect would be important to review and analyze, not to point fingers, but to improve the grant definition and review processes so that we identify what went wrong and how it should be done onwards so that these processes serve better ZCG’s and the community’s purposes as a whole. Let me refer you to @earthrise’s Zcon4 talk about how other security-critical disciplines learn from mistakes.
As I stated before on other threads, in my humble opinion, QEDIT should continue to work on ZSAs as they were originally designed to completion. This means to complete the remaining work and/or contributing to work to get rid of the blockers that may not be letting them deploy ZSAs into the protocol, in a way that they are not an “abstract” capability, but a functional and accessible tool for all the Zcash users. We will learn more by deploying, minting and burning “vanilla ZSAs” on a testnet and then on mainnet than with a thousand ZIPs.
QEDIT is a very valuable team within the crypto industry and great contributor to the Zcash ecosystem in particular. If they wish to, they’ll find a lot of important development and research tasks to continue to advance innovation in the Zcash protocol and its applications, I’m sure the community will be supportive of their work regardless of this “hiccup”.
If I may propose something. It would be very interesting that Vanilla ZSAs are added to the “main testnet” the very block after NU6 is deployed so users and developers can start working on the user facing side of the story.
End of “new post”
Note: I had written a post to reply this to dodger and when I came back 40 extra posts had been added. this proves the point of the original reply of mine you will see below.
I agree with you in terms of the theory of how the process should be. Empirically things are quite far from ideal. Because of how resource constraint teams are.
Let’s say we sinthesize core engineers work in this four tasks (there are many more). how would you prioritize them, given a standard 160 working hours month? How would you vertically distribute these 4 “cells” from “most prioritary” to “least prioritary”.
| code to develop | Assess and merge code developed that needs review | Grants (future code to be) to review | Engaging with the community in Forums and other forms of async messaging |
gotchas:
Now do all the other, non-coin-based polling that was used for this decision.
I think the difference here is “does an individual have a path to influence in the outcome of the decision-making process.” Depending upon how much weight coin-weighted polling is given in the overall decision-making, an individual may be entirely excluded, by having no path to acquiring or influencing the disposition of the the millions of dollars worth of coins needed to meaningfully affect the outcome of a vote. The alternative paths to influence, such as working on protocol development or becoming a member of ZCAP or ZAC or one of the other polling bodies, are available to any motivated individual.
impossible imo. since many coins are also on CEXes.
hardware wallets shielded support also has made big amounts of ZEC to stay in transparent pool. and i totally understand it.
the coin voting is super beta. its cool we had a first test that seemed to kinda work.
we also cant know exactly if that 400k was 1 whale. as there might have been many others who voted in 2nd poll. but it doesnt matter that much as that is the point of coin vote?
this thread is getting bit OT now.
If I understand your question, I’d just draw one circle lol.
I’m of the opinion that globally, Zcash has over the past year-two had about 250-300 engaged people. So in a broad sense, polling outcomes/ venn diagrams speculating about who voted where… are all largely the same.
Non-coin voting is important because it is wealth indifferent. I think some magical balance of wealth based and wealth-indifferent sentiment gathering is important.
Would you have told Zooko that trustless ZKP was impossible 7 years ago 
i didnt mean we should only have coin voting. agree we also need some usual voting.
*impossible at current moment, not forever.
if we can get stuff fixed and smooth its very possible to have more in orchard pool and people are more comfortable.
also if coin voting gets open sourced and audited etc it will be better.
thx to everyone who saved Zcash once again 
Ah! This answers a question that I had in my mind when I read your post up-thread saying that the 400K ZEC that participated in the coin-weighted petition was a small fraction of the total 15M ZEC that have ever been created. (That means 2.7% of all ZEC coins ever created participated in this petition.)
I was really surprised that you wrote that, and I figured that you were just weren’t thinking it through and applying the same analysis to the non-coin-based polls, since I believe the non-coin-based polls represent an even smaller percentage of the Zcash community than the coin-based petitions do.
But now I see that what’s really going on is that you and I have very different guesses about the size of the Zcash community.
I’m guessing that the number of people who know and care about Zcash, support its mission, think it is important, care about its future, and use, hold, or support it is somewhere between 100,000 and 10,000,000 people world-wide. If the truth is anywhere near there, then the number of people who participated in this round of non-coin-based polls (which was around 150 to 300 people) are between 0.3% and 0.0015% of the worldwide Zcash community.
It’s awfully hard to get solid quantitative data about the size of the Zcash community. Tatyana and I spent a lot of effort when we worked together at ECC trying to get quantitative data and we couldn’t figure out how to do it at a reasonable cost.
To come up with my own rough estimate, I’ve tried to look at all the quantitative data I can find — transactions on-chain, t-addresses, statistics disclosed by CEXes and wallet-makers, wallet downloads, view counts on media, posts on social media, etc, and I also try to pay attention to qualitative data.
Some of the qualitative data that comes to me (but probably not to the readers of the public discussion on this forum) is the constant stream of Zcashers coming out of the woodwork to talk to me, online and off, publicly and privately, about Zcash.
They usually have detailed stories about their personal journey to Zcash, and their hopes and fears for it. Many of them told me about how they used Zcash, and how they worked to support it.
Usually, of course, these people who I meet are part of the cryptocurrency industry, since that’s where I spend most of my time. They come up to me in person at a cryptocurrency conference or direct message me on Twitter. But not infrequently I meet Zcashers that have no connection to the cryptocurrency industry!
Sometimes when I’m socially chatting with a friend of a friend, or a stranger at a non-cryptocurrency-industry party, and I mention Zcash, their eyes light up. For example, recently I was having lunch with a friend (not part of the cryptocurrency industry), and she brought her husband (also not part of the cryptocurrency industry), and he didn’t know anything about who I was, but eventually the topic of Zcash came up, and her husband was like…
“Oh yeah, Zcash! My dad is all about Zcash! Several years ago he asked me about this ‘Bitcoin’ thing, and I mentioned to him that Zcash is the private version of Bitcoin and he was like ‘That. That’s the one.’ and he’s never looked back.”
I’ve probably met hundreds of people like that over the last few years. I figure, for me to meet hundreds of them, there must be a lot more out there that I’ve never had a chance to meet.
And there’s another fact that seems meaningful to me: out of all the hundreds of Zcashers I’ve talked to, fewer than ten of them have ever posted on this forum.
