To return the coins to the voter, could a new, unused address be provided via a certain signed message, and that’s where the coins would return to post vote? This way there’s no chain of transactions and the voting preference cannot be linked to the individual.
With Lelantis, the vote should be sent from a burn so that there is no transaction history from the voter going to the vote, and then the coin should be sent back through a burn as well. This way full voter anonymity is maintained.
Miners and znodes together should be able to vote allocation of funds for new initiatives (for both Dev and Community proposed initiatives)
This setup can/will encourage decentralized sovereignty.
10-60-30 reward split seems reasonable
if funds are not fully allocated they should go back into the mix for miners and znodes.
My two cents. Full disclaimer, I fully support the Zcoin project, the devs, the community and the vision for the future. However, I am late to the game and am only now fully learning about Zcoin. So, I say that to point out I haven’t been around Zcoin for years like some.
My recommendation:
10% Dev/Community Fund (no lower than 5% if this must be adjusted)
70% Miners
**20% Znodes
I like what the dev team is doing, and their transparency. I do think it is important to a project to have a “leadership” team who is rewarded for their efforts. Their job is not to dictate as some may fear, but to steer the ship. I know we all have this view where a project is 100% community driven, but I don’t think that will work (at least not for years to come). Grin has taken a major hit, despite all the excitement around the project, in part because there are serious questions being raised about funding the Dev team.
While I’m at it, a few more thoughts:
I like the idea of a Zerocoin spend as a way to vote plus the aforementioned ideas on creating disincentives to break up a znode to sway the vote. I would like to add for instances of, if only a couple of ideas, out of let’s say five can go through then I suggest a use of Range voting so we aren’t limited to an “All or Nothing” outcome. I would like to add a vote of Yes, No, and Abstain as options when it comes to proposals.
I agree that a rebranding would probably be for the best. ZCoin makes sense because of Zerocoin, but now that the privacy protocol is being upgraded/brand-new, it is no longer actually using ZeroCoin, so ZCoin will kind of be a bit out of date as a name.
Lelantus itself is a very cool name, but I’m not sure if it would be good as a coin name.
To me it seems that the shorter and flashier names do the best.
It’s not a bad allocation. 20% seems too low.
60 to miners
30 to znode
10 to treasury
10 doesn’t solely go to developers. The amount of that 10% is voted to be salary for developers.
The community could also use that 10% for other activities. But developers should get voted first or get priority over other proposals.
I have started looking at quadratic voting (QV).
Instead of pure yes/no votes or simple majority voting which has many flaws such as tyranny of the majority, quadratic voting allows voters to express the weightage of preference. Also putting in a strong vote for one outcome increases the cost of voting.
The main challenge with implementing quadratic voting in Zcoin is the requirement to separate out ‘identities’. With a privacy focus, this is very difficult unless we enable KYC which I think goes against the spirit of Zcoin.
See how Eximchain implements it, which won’t work for us cause of the KYC requirement.
So perhaps not adopting QV fully but there are some interesting things to consider:
What are some thoughts on structures like these?
So they have Dash Core Group (DCG), is a c-corporation, business etc. So it’s for profit.
Then they have a Dash DAO Irrevocable Trust
The Trust is in favour of the Dash masternode holders.
Dash Trust owns 100% of DCG and therefore controls its board of directors.
So basically the Trust represents the masternode holders and can change management of the DCG while retaining its talent, coders etc
The more I read and research, the stronger I feel against on-chain governance.
The following will be controversial so I hope community members can weigh in on this. This is more of a brain blurb rather than a concrete proposal but wanted to put it down here.
If masternodes vote, it will be whales dictating how funds are allocated, making it fake governance though arguably they are the ones that will act the most rational given their large stakes and more likely to be long term holders.
Miners in an ASIC resistant type of algorithm, are fickle and do not have any loyalty since there is no incentive locking them in. This is the cost of commodity hardware mining.
Zcoin holders you would think would make sense but then again as they can both buy and sell coins in the short term, they can be minded to vote in short term pump strategies that hurt us in the long run.
As much ‘democracy’ is seen as a ‘universal good’, it really isn’t and as we are seeing increasingly in this world today, is often turns to mob rule and governments winning due to populist policies (even if not the best way to do things).
The video below illustrates this.
I also am not sure how prudent it is to leave every decision to the community and more in favour of having an executive being voted in and out of fixed terms similarly to a company structure so that if an executive doesn’t carry out his duties well, he will be held accountable and removed. Transparency reports of course have to be given and some checks and balances in place.
One of Poramin’s concerns is the risk of having a more ‘executive structure’ is that it forms a target to shut down or to be forced to insert backdoors. This is partially off set by the fact that all our work is open sourced but it is a valid risk if we believe Zcoin to become a leading cryptocurrency. This is also why we don’t really have a CEO due to Poramin’s views on this.
Yet the crypto community has often idealism in having decentralized funding when in reality, this type of funding model often opens itself to outside influence or will result in poor incentives for it to be worked on. For e.g. how decentralized is Bitcoin’s development? What do you think of Grin’s pure model that lead to it being contingent on donations?
I’m still in favour of funding development from the block reward since I think it is honest and aligns incentives in the right way as long as there is accountability. How to achieve this accountability with governance is the true question and whether it will be done on-chain or through other structures such as having an independently appointed foundation separate from the development and executive portions.
I’ll be the devils advocate here and argue for master node voting. Similar to Dash.
They have a lot of zcoin invested, therefore they have the most to lose if bad decisions are made. Yes, “whales” will be the decision makers, but they have invested their own hard earned money into this project, so they have earned the right to vote in my opinion.
I would be okay if this if not for the founders having kept many of their rewards (which is good) but bad for masternode governance.
Note that they got their founder’s wallet for a lot less for their seed investment.
Hi Reuben:
I’m glad you’re struggling with the governance issue … that means you’re taking it seriously.
It’s a very complex situation and needs to be resolved properly … and it’s not clear to most of us how it should be setup.
Personally I think decisions need to be made by a team that is either appointed and/or voted into their positions - and they need to be accountable for their decisions,
but at the same time have public voting on all major issues with full disclosure of voting results, and an explanation of the decisions the team makes based on the votes.
In theory, the team can know much more about some issues than anyone else, and may decide to go with less-than-popular options on some issues, because of strategic or security concerns that may influence decisions and may not be able to come to light until after implementation of some features
(the great handling of the ‘coins-from-thin-air’ hack is one good example - quick resolution - then public announcement later).
If people are not happy with decisions being made by the team, then there would need to be a process in place to vote on who is on the team, and they can be voted out at an appropriate time.
It’s still not clear to me how to setup the voting process for the team or the major issues - it wouldn’t necessarily need to be block-chain based.
While Quadratic Voting looks very intriguing, it could end up being too complex, and could let bigger fish have even more influence on a vote than using other methods.
Registering to vote likely wouldn’t sit too well for people owning a privacy coin (including myself) so another method needs to be found.
Using voting tokens may be possible (like an air-drop) - but that may get complex and messy - and doesn’t fix the big fish issues.
Maybe something like one-wallet-one-vote (with wallets needing a minimum balance of - say - 500 xzc to be eligible to vote)
I think the best way may be one-Zcoin-one-vote. Each person who owns Zcoin in a wallet casts a vote pro-rated based on their percentage of the total circulating supply.
Say - 1000 xzc which would be 1000/7,640,000 = 0.01309% of the total vote - but again - the big fish issues aren’t solved (and maybe can’t or maybe shouldn’t be?) … not sure.
If there are concerns about the founder’s rewards being in a different class (and maybe they shouldn’t be allowed to vote?) what can be done to make it fair to the rest of us who have worked hard either mining our coins or buying or trading other coins for Zcoins?
Can the wallets of the founders be excluded from voting (or given a different weight in the vote), or do they just transfer their coins to new wallets to get around the voting issues?
… again … not sure…
If the final say goes to the team (who will be held accountable) maybe the voting doesn’t need to be as strict, and a one-Zcoin-one-vote approach would work well enough
Just some thoughts … hope it helps …
Really nice post Zed!
So speaking to a lawyer and the recent classification of securities there are some major issues that we need to consider.Giving voting rights to zcoin holders to allocate funds can be deemed as creating a ‘common enterprise’ and centralizing the efforts to increase the value of Zcoin and be deemed a security. It is effectively directing capital to rely on the effort of others. This gives a problem to projects like Dash or Decred and in fact Decred was taken off Poloniex’s US site.
I’m still trying to think of how we can get around this.
Is there a legal distinction between voting and polling? … I’d be fine with the team asking for input with just a poll, and then being held accountable for the decisions they make.
yes polling is merely indication of interest while voting has binding consequences.
If we give a % of rewards to the developers. Are you guys also going to be responsible for everything in development of zcoin?
I’m talking about not just marketing and developer salary. For example dash community has their news team, Venezuela team, YouTube team. All done by the community based on proposals and votes of course. I think dev team will have their hands tied with developing and marketing. We need more community involvement and involvements needs to be funded.
Maybe we can dedicate a % to dev fund but also a voting mechanism for other developments. If voting per se is bad for legal reasons, then let’s pick another way to obtain consensus like polling. Or sending a small amount of zcoin to polling address.
Zcoin is not a nation so don’t really need a over complex governing system.
That’s an excellent point. I think one way is to have a community fund where we contribute some of our spare dev fund to a public address and people can apply to utilize it for grants.
On a side note, I was thinking if we were to have a development fund of 10% of block reward (which should be less than what we get now since it’s 6% of pre halving figure), until Dec 2021 while we decide the best way to do this.
55/30/15. No dev funds means no future
It sounds good, but the state is ahead of you) This is a tax, though in your explanation there are mostly pluses, but there are none in the tax at all …