Unlike the situation where mining profitability is maximal right from genesis with 50 ZEC block reward, slow start creates a situation where profitability will be maximal at the point where difficulty starts growing faster than reward, which may not happen right from the start given the tiny reward that will be distributed in first blocks. This removes the incentive for miners to rush in to be first to mine, and risks letting the network more exposed to 51% attacks during the early days. Indeed, one of the perverse effects of the slow start is that if mining power is correlated to reward, the cost of a 51% too will ramp up linearly.
Is such a long “slow start” really a good idea? Shouldn’t it start at a higher value like 25 ZEC per block growing linearly over 2500 blocks, to ensure that there is at least some level of FOMO among miners in the early days?
