The Last-Minute Shielded Petition!

[zooko]

Hi folks!

We’re organising another Shielded Petition so that more Zcashers can participate! The deadline to register your coins to vote is about 19 hours from now! Block 2,574,200, which is 5:00pm UTC Saturday, July 13.

Here’s the documentation of the two petitions eligibility windows from hanh. See the instructions below for how to register your coins to vote!

How this came about is a very interesting and cool story! But first a little bit of backstory:

If you don’t know, I stepped down from the Bootstrap Board of Directors a little more than a week ago. Here’s their farewell to me and my farewell to them. This means that I don’t have any legal, financial, or organizational ties to Zcash Foundation, Electric Coin Co/Bootstrap, or Zcash Community Grants.

I’m excited to be independent! I’m very happy about Josh’s leadership at Electric Coin Co, and I love the Dev Fund – I think it is Zcash’s number one most important competitive advantage long term – but I’m excited to be in a position where I can contribute to Zcash independently, because I think the most resilient kind of development is having multiple independent, cooperating players. For that reason, I intend to contribute to Zcash going forward without directly or indirectly receiving any Dev Fund money myself.

Also, now that I have no legal ties to any of those organizations, I can speak my mind about things that I used have to avoid mentioning for legal/regulatory/government-relations reasons. As you’ll see below.

So, the story is that a few days ago some very wealthy Zcashers that I’ve known for a long time contacted me and said that they were super excited to participate in the coin-weighted petition, but that they had just heard about it and their coins were outside the eligibility window. One of them explained that he had old ZEC coins that were before the eligibility window, and that he was in the process of accumulating more ZEC even as we spoke, but that his new ZEC was after the eligibility window, so he couldn’t express his opinions in the Shielded Petition with either of them.

He said he just cared a lot about the future of the project and that he thought this governance decision was critically important. He said “I just want to see this project work. It’s the cypherpunk system. Its token distribution is extremely fair. Eight year brutal inflation curve – no one can complain about unfairness of the onboard system. It’s the only serious system for private money. It has the correct ideology.”.

Then he told me that he thought his accumulating ZEC for the last few days was the cause of this price trend!

I think this is so good for the Zcash mission – wealthy people buying into ZEC because they feel like their opinions are valued by the Shielded Coin-Petition, and them buying in benefiting all ZEC holders and the mission of Zcash.

The ZEC coin – the financial asset itself, not just the network or the technology – is the source of our future improvements and future adoption, both through the Dev Fund, and through people and companies benefiting from holding ZEC so that they can afford to contribute back and so that they can effectively onboard other people and companies.

Also, I think the ZEC holders deserve some relief and reward! Long-term ZEC holders (like me) have suffered from a brutal price decline for many years, and have demonstrated incredible grit and determination. And if this works and Zcash fulfills its mission of protecting all people from surveillance and tyranny, it will be partially due to the grit and determination of the ZEC holders.

hanh agreed to create a second eligibility window so that people whose coins missed the first one can raise their voice in a Shielded Petition! If you have any ZEC (or if you buy any new ZEC when you read this!) all you have to do is send it to your (self-custody, Shielded By Default) Ywallet. I’ll post a follow-up with screenshots showing how to get it into the Orchard shielded pool once you have it your Ywallet.

You have to get it into the Orchard Shielded Pool in your Ywallet by this by the deadline of 5:00pm UTC Saturday, July 13 (Block 2,574,200). So get cracking, and let’s do some major Shielded Petitioning as a show of strength for Zcash!

[zooko]

P.S. This is me coming out of the closet as a ZEC maximalist and disclosing my personal financial incentive-alignment to all of you. I don’t hold or buy any other digital assets other than ZEC (except I have a few other tokens from small investments and advising services in past years, in an amount that isn’t substantial to me). I buy and hold as much ZEC as I can afford, have for years now, and intend to continue doing for the foreseeable future. I’m disclosing this so that you know what my incentive-alignment is. I personally benefit from price appreciation of ZEC, and I personally do not benefit from price appreciation of BTC, ETH, SOL, or anything else.

[zooko]

Rare footage of one of those wealthy Zcashers who contacted me this week and asked to add their coins to the Shielded Petition.

[conradoplg]

Considering that people can vote on both polls, how are we supposed to interpret them?

[zooko]

Good point! Yeah, there are definitely people who have coins that are eligible for the second shielded petition but not the first (including the Zcash Bull Whale), and I’ll bet some people who petitioned in the first won’t do so in the second for whatever reason, and I’ll bet some people will petition in both. I myself will petition in both.

I guess it is analogous to how some people vote in Zcash Ad-hoc Council and some people vote in the Brazilian community and some people vote in both. (Looking at Alternative Dev Fund Sentiment Polls - #37 by aquietinvestor .)

How are we to interpret them? I don’t know, I just figure they will show us interesting data about what people will call for then can do so anonymously on-chain but they have to use their ZEC to do so…

[zooko]

Thinking some more about your question, Conrado… I think this may be another difference between a vote and a petition. Andrew Miller told me long ago about the difference between a vote and a petition:

• A vote is binding. It is the sole legitimate determination of the result.

• A petition is non-binding. People are free to listen to a petition or to ignore it.

• A vote is controlled top-down. The vote organiser gets to decide when it happens, what the questions are, and what the rules are for who is eligible, how the votes will be counted to determine the winner, etc. All this gives the vote organiser a tremendous amount of influence over the result!

• A petition is bottom-up. Anyone can petition, at any time. You can write an open letter to your local paper, you can walk up and down the street with a sign calling for something. You can call your legislator’s office. And, you can anonymously post a proof of your ZEC holdings to the Zcash blockchain along with a call for something. (Note, in the current petition, you need hanh’s help to run the server, but this is just an artifact of how this is the first beta test of the new protocol. In the future, anyone will be able to do this at any time.)

So, in light of that, I was reflecting on your question of “How should we interpret the results of the shielded petitions?”. In a vote, I think it is pretty important that the organizer commit in advance to how they are going to interpret the results and then follow through on that without changing it. That’s to mitigate the vast amount of influence that the organizer already has over a vote.

But if someone petitions for something, it isn’t necessary for someone else to pre-commit to how they are going to interpret it. In fact, it might even be harmful to do so!

If you’re circulating a petition asking all your neighbors to sign on to a letter saying you want something done differently in your town, does it help for the Mayor of the town to make an announcement about how they are going to interpret the results? “I’m only going to pay attention to signatures from people in this area, but not to people from that area.” Or “I’ll listen to requests to increase the budget by X% unless X is greater than 20% in which case I won’t.” Or something.

I don’t know. Maybe that would make sense, but it seems like it gives the Mayor more opportunities to influence the outcome by gerrymandering-type strategies or even just by discouraging people who otherwise would have signed up or started picketing or whatever, but they decide not to bother since the Mayor already said their opinions didn’t count.

Anyway, I’m not the Mayor of Zcashville, thank God, and neither is anybody else. So I guess my answer is that it is up to you, Conrado, how you interpret the results, since you are just as much the Mayor of Zcashville as anyone.

P.S. Basically you need permission from the organizer to vote. You don’t need permission to petition.

[zooko]

Okay, here’s the step-by-step instructions for how to put your ZEC into Ywallet, and shield it into the Orchard pool, so that you’ll later be able to cast your Shielded Petition. Remember, the deadline to register your coins is about 17 hours from now! Block 2,574,200, which is 5:00pm UTC Saturday, July 13.

Once you’ve registered your coins, and the registration deadline has passed, only then can you take the next step which is to cast your petition. I’ll post step-by-step instructions on that later.

Okay:

Step 1: Install Ywallet. Go to your friendly neighborhood App Store, and search for Ywallet!

Step 2: Launch it and deal with backing up the seed words and then you should see something like this:

See that QR code and that little “copy me” button that I circled in red? Those are how you access your Zcash address (the one shown here is a Unified Address). Send some ZEC to that address from another wallet, or an exchange or whatever.

Side Quest: what If, when you give that address to the wallet or exchange or whatever, you get some kind of error message like “Error: invalid – that is not a valid Zcash address”? Well, that means that the wallet or exchange that you’re using hasn’t upgraded to parse the current standard – Unified Addresses – in order to make things simpler and easier for their users. Open your TODO list and add a note for after the Shielded Petition to politely request that they add Unified Address support:

Then go back to your Ywallet, and swipe right on the address a few times until you see this:

That’s your transparent address. Go ahead and send ZEC to that.

Step 3: See how much ZEC you have in each of the three pools.

Ywallet has a user interface to see which pools your ZEC is in. Touch the “three dots/More” in the lower right-hand corner:

Then choose “Pools”:

You should see something like this:

First, just look at the buttons named “Transparent”, “Sapling”, and “Orchard” under the label “From Pool”. When you touch each of those buttons, it shows how much ZEC you have in that pool. I currently have 0.361 ZEC in Transparent:

0.000 ZEC in Sapling:

And 100.000 ZEC in Orchard:

Step 4: Move all your ZEC to the Orchard pool.

Only ZEC which is in the Orchard pool at the moment of the registration cutoff is eligible to cast your petition with.

I have 0.361 ZEC in the Transparent pool. The way to move it is to touch the Transparent Pool in the “From Pool” bar and touch the Orchard pool in the “To Pool” bar, like this:

Now I want to fill in the amount of ZEC to move and click the check-mark in the upper-right-hand corner, like this:

And then it will show this “Transaction Plan” and you click the arrow in the upper-right-hand corner:

(By the way, don’t worry about that big orange “PRIVACY: LOW” warning. That probably doesn’t apply to you here.)

Okay, once you’ve done that then you need to give it a minute or three for the transaction to wend its way through the aether, and then eventually when you view the pools it will look like this:

That’s it! You’ve successfully moved your ZEC into the Orchard shielded pool in Ywallet! Now leave it there until the registration deadline passes (which was 17 hours from when I started writing this tutorial, but this took an hour so it is 16 hours from now).

[Autotunafish]

My money is tied up. I can’t participate in these things

[Rand0m9]

I also can’t participate in the petition because I keep my coins in a hardware wallet that is at home and I’m out of my country…

[hanh]

Devfund

[jelly5649]

Is this for real? Imma cry.

itshappening.gif

[artkor]

[BostonZcash]

Thanks for the instructions! Migrated a chunk of zats (as much as I’ll trust to a software wallet) in order to vote. Standing by.

[zooko]

Okay, the registration period for the last-minute shielded petition is closed! See hanh’s visualization of the timelines of the first shielded petition/vote, and second — last-minute — shielded petition/vote here: Devfund - YWallet

Voting is now open for the second (last-minute) shielded petition, using any coins that you had in ywallet in the orchard shielded pool at the end of the registration window. Watch hanh’s video tutorial on how to vote:

Coin Voting with Wallet

[BostonZcash]

In the accompanying video, the URL for the vote does not load anything (https://vote.zcash-infra.com/devfund).

The URL that appears on the page (https://vote.zcash-infra.com/devfund-proposals) is for the snapshot height of 2,557,150.

I guess I’m confused as to the URL for the poll whose snapshot height is instead 2,574,200

Edit: I now see the second poll is https://vote.zcash-infra.com/devfund-props

[hanh]

The url from the video is for the test poll (closed now).

The latest info is at Devfund - YWallet (linked by Zooko in his first post)
.
The 2nd poll is opened.

[therise]

the url we should us now is?

[zooko]

(Copied from BostonZcash’s post above) — the URL for the new (last minute) Shielded Petition is https://vote.zcash-infra.com/devfund-props.

[Autotunafish]

Similarly with the other coinvote, not really sure what they’re intention is (besides maybe running alpha test, in which case that’s cool, obviously buggy), but the last minute was 11 days ago for the zip deadline. How will these results apply? Are the votes associated with the existing zips?
(OiC nevermind, way at the top)

[ceb9ceb4ceb9cf89cf84]

all my zec are in Orchard, but I did this in the past, a few months ago. Even so, because I already have the coins in Orchard, before this zooko post, am I already enabled?