I really like the idea of ZCash, but what about the following two major concerns I have?

Hey guys I do not sound inpolite. I really like the idea behind ZCash as truly! anonymous payments seem to be possible (if desired).

  1. I have read the following critical article on the web (https://medium.com/@yobanjo/zcash-hype-getting-ridiculous-2d218a02357) - with 20% of all ZCash coins going to the founders until the year 2020 this sounds like a real threat to the currency itself. Not only because this is likely to be a bit unfair towards miners and traders, but also because the whole currency may drop dramatically or even die if all founders sell out their ZCash in 2019 / 2020. Alright? How can ZCash be a good investement if founders get 20% of all coins?

  2. Very often I hear the following argument against ZCash (this is how Monero arguments against it, but I also heard in some forums - Monero has other disadvantages):

Zcash required a Trusted Setup. This means that you have to trust that the system was set up honestly. If it wasn’t set up honestly, unlimited amounts of ZEC could be created without anyone knowing. This would make the hacker rich and devalue ZEC. There is no way to know if the Trusted Setup was executed honestly. We have to take them at their word. This introduces a human point of failure into the system which is counter to almost every other cryptocurrency. You should only have to trust math and verifiable source code in cryptocurrecies, not humans. As we’ve seen with virtually all large software companies, such as Microsoft, Apple, and even governments, they shouldn’t be trusted.

How can I be sure that the ZCash system was setup honestly?

Looking forward to your answers :slight_smile:

The answers are here on the forums. A simple search should yield the answer to both.

*Zcash

  1. if artifical supply was created, we’d immediately know it https://explorer.zcha.in

  2. founder’s reward is good because it pays our dev team so they don’t need to pull scams, and pump-n-dumps so they can live/eat (dev team is very high skilled, and could easily be poached)

  3. also, believe founder’s reward in regards to total supply is actually 10%.
    “The end result (as shown in the diagram) is that there will ultimately be 21 million ⓩ, and 10% of it, or 2.1 million ⓩ, will have been initially distributed to the founders” Funding, Incentives, and Governance - Electric Coin Company

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So far this sounds good, but 2.1 million ZCash is currently about 0.5 billion! dollar in USD currently. That is a lot of fuckin money :wink: (Please correct me if my calculation is wrong). Besides that the developers and investors probably have got some additional ZCash (through mining or investing).

Three years ahead when getting their Coins one of two investors / founders /developers will change all their ZCash into USD or EUR in order to buy an island in the Caribbean and a nice villa or something like that XD

And this is where ZCash is condemned to drop dramatically in value right? The same (but less dramatic) would be happen to Bitcoin if the top 100 Bitcoin owners would start to sell large amounts out, but the effects @ZCash may even be more extreme.

Please correct if and where I may go wrong with this opinion :slight_smile:

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@Shawn

Thanks for this link; I was educated quite a bit.

You can’t prove it so you either trust it or you don’t. I think most reasonable people who have researched the lengths that were taken to conduct the ceremony have come to the conclusion that it’s highly unlikely that it was compromised. This is really good podcast about the ceremony The Ceremony.

The page needs to be updated. It has some old info which would confuse people.

way i look-at-it - zcash does what i need zcash to do. really care-a-less how much the devs team gets paid. funny-thing-is, they could probably increase ZEC’s value by lowering the fee. they might even make more money than they do now in fiat terms.

What old information exactly are you referring to @Blue?

They are working on two approaches: LMP- Low Memory Proving, reducing the RAM required for z_addresses from 3.1GB to 1.4GB allowing for the average smartphone to be able to run them (this has been proposed for the next 1.0.12 release!) and the second approach is DPT- Delegated Proving, allowing a separate server to validate private transactions allowing for very, very lite wallets to process private transactions (like browser-plugins, apps, raspberry pi, etc
)

This is not going to be true. These updates won’t be in the 1.0.12 update.

It is still marked as proposed in the PR

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It doesn’t say they will be in 1.0.12. It says they’re proposed for that build. Not the same thing. So that whole quote is indeed still correct.

As it stands now, they can probably have it for free.

LMP has now been moved to 1.0.13