Announcing Ycash, The First "Friendly Fork" of the Zcash Blockchain

[boxalex]

Read the 2 posts twice so i didn’t miss something important. A lot of questions arise on my end thinking about this friendly-fork:

@hloo

Ycash is a chain fork of Zcash

Why a chain fork and not just a project just built/improved/patched/whatever on the Zcash code?

@hloo

We are launching Ycash to restore a goal—mining on commodity hardware—that appears to have been largely abandoned on the Zcash blockchain

That’s allright and makes sense, but why a fork?

@hloo

We are also launching Ycash to uphold a promise—that the Zcash Founders Reward would be forever capped at 2.1 million coins—that we fear will come under increasing pressure between now and the expiration of the Founders Reward in October 2020.

This heavyly suggests that it’s allready internally decided that the Zcash founders reward will be extended. Just sounding like that in my opinion.

@hloo

fair distribution of coins. In turn, we believe that a fair distribution of coins is essential to ultimately achieving widespread adoption.

I personally have always huge problems when i read “fair distribution” and “fork” in one sentence. I absolutly fail to see where the fair distribution lies after ECC company, ZEC Foundation, ZEC investors automaticly will be the main holders of Ycash?
Sure, the mining begins, but the initial fair distribution is allready compromised, not?

@hloo

Ycash will change its Proof of Work algorithm to an algorithm more conducive to mining on commodity hardware (like CPUs or GPUs). (Approaches like RandomX, ProgPOW, and various flavors of Equihash are currently being evaluated.)

Just a reminder that only the top coin of a given algo is 51% attack-secure. IF Ycash “joins” an algo with another top coin on it than there is a security threat!

@hloo

With 1.4 million ZEC out of the 2.1 million ZEC Founders Reward already vested, that means that the Ycash Development Fund will have a cap of 700,000 YEC, exactly one-third of the total Zcash Founders Reward.

This somehow sounds like indirect funding Zcash but i may miss something of course…

@hloo

We hope that this gives the Zcash Founders Reward recipients a vested interest in the future success of both Ycash and Zcash.

Hope? Could be, but there are as well scenarios where it works the other way. Large holders have in generally influence on a given project, just logically. I would go as far as while trying to being independend with a soft fork there is a huge dependece involved. Again one of the reasons i don’t understand why a soft fork and not a “copy-paste” project based on ZEC which would garantee way more independence at all.

@hloo

We will be working hard the next few months to prepare for launch

Who is we? Mind sharing the other people behind this project? Any shifting/support from ECC company or ZEC foundation?

@hloo

Finally, although the ECC has not itself proposed extending the Founders Reward beyond the original 2.1 million coin cap, it also has not publicly reaffirmed its commitment to the cap in the face of calls from the community to remove it, thus creating uncertainty about whether the cap will be honored on the Zcash blockchain.

Absolutly agree with this one. Time for some clear statements by the foundation and ECC to see what there stand is on this one. This is as well important to choose which chain ultimatly to support.
IF there are any changes to the ZEC founders reward than the whole mining distribution will be changed, allocating way more funds to ZEC devs, mostly the foundation too and way less to miners… It’s just about time to get a final answer here… Just my opinion of course.