I would argue that short term effects are also positive. “All publicity is good publicity.” Simply arguing whether or not a fork is “friendly” or “unfriendly” (whatever tf those mean!) gathers attention and makes community engagement appealing.
Of course, you could know these same facts and be a step ahead of me, helping to create a little controversy. It worked on me.
I have written a review of the Ycash fork here.
Just some more thoughts:
1.) There is allready an ERC token available with the name Ycash, Total Supply 500,000,000. Couldn’t find more info and there is a good chance it’s an abondoned project.
2.) There is as well a financial payment service active with the name Ycash. Not sure if this could cause problems in future. http://www.ycash.com/
3.) There si allready a company registered with the name Y Cash Software Solutions Pvt Ltd. These create wallets and other software for mobile phones. http://www.ypaycash.com/
4.) Thinking about it, will there be eventually 2 hardforks? One away from the Zcash chain and temporary on equihash and the 2nd one to another gpu algo? Both could be really tough ones having in mind that equihash is an asic algo.
The first one will expose Ycash for sure to a 51% attack.
The 2nd change to a gpu friendly algo will cost a fortune at start to ensure hashpower. I remember the fork from Electroneum last year away from asics to a gpu algo, it has cost them a fortune to buy for weeks nicehash hashpower… Just something to think about as well…
So if you hold your zec in kraken, then after fork kraken should automatically add ycash? Or just transfer your funds to your wallet before fork?
An exchange “can” support a fork but it’s up to the exchange if they do. Best way on most cases is to have the amount of main currency the fork happens in a wallet you hold the privacy keys.
But as said, exchanges can support forks but it’s absolutly up to them. In the case of Zcash there is a good chance many of them will support as it’s a top currency.
This has to be the most accurate line you have ever written in your life
ZCash has a well-respected team and solid, if unexciting marketing effort
Then you completely drop the ball here–
Let’s look at what YCash is offering;
Okay What??? You say let’s look at what its offering then nothing… Y Cash is offering nothing? The next thing you write is in the block below and that has NOTHING to do with what YCash is attempting
to offer.
There is a crunch coming to ZCash when the Founder’s Reward comes to an end. Someone, somewhere, will have to pay for continued development but it more realistic to assume that someone will pay for a well-established team than a start-up.
@hloo Every single one of the above items could be a real issue
Were the people behind Ycash aware of the items mentioned by boxalex?
I had been thinking about it, but boxalex put pen to paper, YCash would have to fork twice in order to become GPU only. Once Ycash forks at Zcash block 570,000 at what block is Ycash going to fork to become ASIC resistant?
Is Ycash then prepared to fork every 3 to 6 months to remain ASIC resistant?
I just noticed even the “registered trademark” remark on the ycash.com website on top of it.
In my opinion this is calling for trouble soon or late …
Their business description clashes with Ycash as well. Only clean way forward is if they give permission to use the name.
ycash is a bad name for a cryptocurrency, imo. the fact the name’s already widely used should be a nonstarter. should at least own the ycash(.)com domain. would rebrand. also would get rid of transparent addresses to make the new coin more interesting.
totally agree this : get rid of T address and new coin needs more new interesting
By now i have my doubts that Ycash will lead to something real interesting and intriguing.
Having in mind that a Blockchain Project is a multi-million dolar business someone can only wonder about the approachso far.
Nobody even checked for allready used Ycash names and businesses, available domain name, whatever. Seriously, that’s a pure fail start allready.
Won’t even repeat all the other points i have mentioned so far …
All i hope is that this strange Ycash project won’t have a too negative impact for Zcash as i personally by now exclude a positive impact… Just my personal opinion of course.
I’m split on this one (no pun intended… maybe a little 
).
On one side, I’m a big fan of people working on and running the code they choose rather than being forced to accept decisions they fundamentally disagree with.
Open dialogue and community involvement with large changes, especially economic, is something Zcash needs to work on in regards to the ‘final say’. Ideally the Community Governance Panel would step into this role and vote on changes before they are finalized.
On the other hand, I disagree for the current need for Ycash. Are the differences in opinion so large that we can’t compromise? This move further dilutes the Zcash community, if only a little, and digs up the ASIC vs GPU debate. Forks tend to centralize each side of the split. IMO, that’s a step in the wrong direction.
Ycash Security Concerns:
If Ycash’s price increases to a certain level, it will need to continually change the PoW to remain ASIC resistant. Monero (and now Ycash) will be forever outrunning secret ASICs as a function of the price. PoW changes will need to happen more frequently as manufacturers become more and more sophisticated. An ASIC can be developed in as little as one to three months at this time. That’s a powerful and potentially dangerous foe. Further, smaller GPU-mined coins are at the mercy of rented hashrate that could 51% attack, given a specific price.
Ycash’s Ongoing Development Concerns
Zcash has an incredible development team. If Ycash is to become something serious it will need to recruit developers with a similar vision and beliefs. This is hard and takes time.
Overall, I have a great deal of respect for @hloo and wish him well.
What’s the rationale for the block height of launch?
I believe your wallet also has to support the split. I could be wrong but if I am not, it would be informative to have a list of wallets that will accept the Y cash coin.
I’m not redirecting any ZEC. I have no power to do that. And I am very much against any proposal to do that. When in July 2018 Eric Meltzer proposed redirecting ZEC from the Founders Award recipients, I argued strongly against it.
I never made any promises to anyone about Zcash; I was not involved in its launch. But I am involved in the launch of Ycash, and last week I made several promises about Ycash that I intend to keep. This is a fresh set of promises that were born last week. One of them—that 90% of the Ycash monetary supply will be allocated via the mining process—is similar to a promise made by the ECC regarding Zcash before its launch. The similarity between the two distinct promises may be of interest to people (like myself) that invested in Zcash in part based on the ECC’s promise.
Just to be clear, I do have a multi-person team. I haven’t written C++ code in 20 years. If I was making the source code changes myself, God help us all.
The 21 million coin cap on Ycash will NEVER be violated. If a future group of Ycash users want to increase the money supply, they are welcome to launch their own chain fork and do so, but their fork won’t be able to use the trademarked Ycash name owned by the Ycash Foundation. If I figure out a way to legally bind the Ycash Foundation to honoring in perpetuity the 21 million coin cap, I will do so.
I agree that popular will should be able override some types of past promises. If a stake-based poll showed that a simple (stake-weighted) majority of ZEC holders favored a new ZEC development fund (managed by the Zcash Foundation) even though it would violate the “90% of the Zcash monetary base goes to the miners” promise made by the ECC, I would not take issue with the ECC supporting such a fund.
I am a huge supporter of the draft ZIP that you proposed. I have previously argued that stake-based polling could serve as an important community-organizing tool, especially in a community where privacy concerns might impeded collective action.
Thank you for your helpful criticism. I have now added sub-headings to show that my comments beginning “There is” refer to the benefits claimed by YCash and listed in the opening paragraphs. I am sure that this will be of benefit to future readers - James
Sharing my personal opinion, not speaking on behalf of the Zcash Foundation.
I largely agree with what @acityinohio wrote, but I’m less concerned than he is about a number of factors, most notably the treatment of the Founders’ Reward. (More on the other factors later.)
Here’s the relevant passage from Josh’s post:
Josh’s point is subtle and somewhat difficult to express. My understanding of it: If user demand shifts from ZEC to YEC, either entirely or in part, that will reduce the value of ZEC. The effect would be to divert currently unmined Founders’ Reward value from its original recipients to the Ycash Foundation instead. Adding Ycash to the mix won’t change the distribution of ZEC, but it could change the distribution of underlying value.
My view: It’s reasonable to assume that all of the Founders’ Reward recipients knew from the start that Zcash was forkable — both the codebase and the blockchain. (Even if they didn’t realize that, which seems highly unlikely to me, it was their responsibility to educate themselves.) FR recipients also knew that the value of their ZEC holdings would be contingent on future events, the details of which were inherently unknown. That holds true today as well.
I see those risk factors as being bundled with the Founders’ Reward from the start, and therefore not violations of any promise. Hence, although I would oppose changes to the distribution of the Founders’ Reward within Zcash, a fork that switches things up doesn’t bother me. Zcash was licensed permissively on purpose. Being able to leave and do your own thing is the magic of open-source software, as Josh mentioned (“voluntary exit”; I’ve also written about the topic before).
(My perspective doesn’t preclude a new dev fund being “voted in” by the Zcash network, so to speak, but the specific details would matter a lot. I concur with @arielgabizon and @daira’s comments circa the ZEF debacle last year, which means that I categorically oppose any change that would divert unmined Founders’ Reward ZEC — literal ZEC cybercoins, not market value — away from the people who currently own rights to it. Unless they freely, individually chose that.)
Okay. Done with commentary on Founders’ Reward dynamics.
Compared to the rest of you, I’m not worried about Ycash implementation details. I don’t have to use Ycash, after all, and as a rule I don’t make risky investments, so I don’t feel like I need to know in advance whether Ycash will work well or become popular. I can wait and see, then decide whether I want to participate. (I do plan to claim my YEC once it’s convenient to do so, because why not? Anything beyond that is an open question.)
Granted, assuaging people’s concerns will be important for gathering support and marketing Ycash, but I don’t have strong feelings about whether or how @hloo does so. The commenters here have raised good points, and Ycash will have to handle the dilemmas and hard tradeoffs that face all new cryptocurrency projects. But I don’t expect Howard to have all of the answers right away, and if Ycash goes down a path that I disagree with, that’s fine.
Broadly, I’m in favor of good-faith experimentation and competition. I don’t know @hloo well, but our interactions so far (including in person) make me optimistic that he will do his best to steward Ycash responsibly and transparently. If Ycash turns out to fit my needs and values as a cryptocurrency user, I’ll be happy to participate in its community and become a supporter.
I don’t have much crypto but I hold 90% of them in Zcash.
I’m new in crypto and is my first time to hear of a friendly fork, I’m not really sure how this will work.
I have though 24 AMD GPU’s that I have not been using since Ethereum became ASIC,
And I know that there are a lot of us hobby miners that ended up just keeping them in the storage dead. Maybe someone can come up with a mining farm in the US, power efficient where we can send them? I’ll be willing to join hands with a project like this.
This may be out of this topic but since you are knowledgeable to make a new coin, I was hoping you can advice what to do with my sleeping AMD GPUs?
More pools support: