# NU7 Coinholder Vote **URL:** \ **Category:** General\ **Created:** [August 5, 2026, 10:33pm UTC](https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/nu7-coinholder-vote/56912 "2026-08-05T22:33:49Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 30
**Author:** ![zooko](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/zcash/user_avatar/forum.zcashcommunity.com/zooko/32/32232_2.png) [@zooko](https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/u/zooko)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2026, 1:41am UTC](https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/nu7-coinholder-vote/56912/30 "2026-08-17T01:41:32Z")
Hi Sean, Daira-Emma, Jason, and everyone. Thank you so much for organizing this! What I most want is to attract the largest number and variety of people to come to trust Zcash over the coming years. In my opinion these answers will achieve that goal the most: **Q1: Smooth issuance ([ZIP-234](https://zips.z.cash/zip-0234)) or halvings-plus-smoothed-re-issuance?** A1: Smooth issuance (ZIP-234), because it is easier to explain verbally, visually, and mathematically. Something being easy to understand increases trust. _Verbally:_ Verbally, you can explain ZIP-234 issuance like this: _“The amount issued is a fixed percentage of the gap between the current circulating supply and the 21 million maximum. It issues 16% of the current gap every year, which works out to shrinking the gap by 50% every four years. (If you’re familiar with the previous ‘halving’ schedule, this is the same as that, but smoothed out.)”_ To verbally explain the halvings-plus-smooth-reissuance…well, how to explain it depends on how much your listeners already understand about halvings and [ZIP-233](https://zips.z.cash/zip-0233) Zcash-burning. If you’re trying to draw in the widest audience of outsiders to trust Zcash, maybe you should not assume they already understand either of those two things. 🙂 _Visually:_ Here is what Zcash’s issuance looks like under the “halvings-plus-smoothed-re-issuance” mechanism in a certain possible future scenario: ![Screenshot 2026-08-16 at 7.25.51 PM](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/zcash/original/3X/9/1/914b3a0799cc164d52ea77a2c19ccbd43be4607a.png) (source: [Zcash Supply & Issuance](https://zooko.github.io/zcash-network-sustainability-simulator/#z=CKUBpqq_tbgzw62XpoxA04XhAQW949oBgODu4uSGEQKy5NcBgLCiyqj9AwKz-f8BgKzH8DcD64ypAoDg7uLkhhEC9cvkAoC4yeWuBAMAgICG1Lac9AOAiKWpowcAJXJldHVybiAoTUFYX1NVUFBMWSAtIHMpIC8gMl80MjNfNzI4bjs)) I’m not saying this particular scenario is necessarily going to happen. It might, or it might not. But in order for people to have confidence in Zcash issuance, they should feel like they understand what _would_ happen to issuance in different possible future scenarios. You can play with the settings on that web page to explore what it looks like under other possible futures. Here is the graph for smooth issuance (ZIP-234) in the same scenario: ![Screenshot 2026-08-16 at 7.26.46 PM](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/zcash/original/3X/1/5/15f836ec708624de0c46f2c64e4bd2fb2726adf5.png) (source: [Zcash Supply & Issuance](https://zooko.github.io/zcash-network-sustainability-simulator/#z=CKMBpqq_tbgzw62XpoxA04XhAQW949oBgODu4uSGEQKy5NcBgLCiyqj9AwKz-f8BgKzH8DcD64ypAoDg7uLkhhEC9cvkAoC4yeWuBAMAgICG1Lac9AOAiKWpowcAJXJldHVybiAoTUFYX1NVUFBMWSAtIHMpIC8gMl80MjNfNzI4bjs)) I encourage you to play with the interactive settings on that page and tell me what you think. _Mathematically:_ Smoothed issuance is easier to understand for mathematicians and computer programmers (and AIs). The entire consensus rule is one line of math: ```plaintext ZEC issued in each block = (21,000,000 − current supply) / 2,423,728 ``` “2,423,728” is the number that you divide the gap by in each block, in order to issue half of the gap every four years. Here’s the Javascript source code that implements ZIP-234 on the web page (you can edit the Javascript code on the web page yourself too if you want): ```js return (MAX_SUPPLY - s) / 2_423_728n; ``` That’s it. You now have a complete and correct mathematical understanding of the smoothed-issuance consensus rules. Here’s the Javascript source code that implements halvings-plus-smoothed-re-issuance: ```js let deficit = 15_750_000n*ZEC; let i = 0n; let e = (h - HALVING_2_HEIGHT) / BLOCKS_PER_HALVING; for(; i < e; i++) deficit += (156_250_000n >> i) * BLOCKS_PER_HALVING; deficit += (156_250_000n >> e) * ((h - HALVING_2_HEIGHT) % BLOCKS_PER_HALVING + 1n); deficit -= s; return (156_250_000n >> e) + (deficit > 0n ? deficit / 2_423_728n : 0n); ``` Frankly, I had an AI write that and a different AI double-check it, and cross-check it against the informal verbal description of the proposal on this forum at the time, but I couldn’t really explain exactly why the code is like that or if there is a way to make it simpler and do the same thing. I do know there’s another way to write the code, which is to add another consensus rule that tracks the total amount of burned ZEC separately, in addition to the current consensus rules that track the circulating supply. That would make this function simpler, but at the cost of making other parts of the consensus rules more complicated, and raising questions like “How do we know those two numbers the consensus rules are tracking are consistent with each other?”. It’s totally doable, either with the stateless way (one big function, like the function above), or the stateful way (another variable in the consensus rules and a simpler function), but either way it is going to be more complex than the ZIP-234 version, and harder to explain to non-programmers. In my opinion what earns trust from the most people is something being easy to understand, so that they can be confident when they talk about it with their friends. **Q2 (NSM Reissuance Start Date)** A2: As soon as is safely possible. A change to issuance that happened in the past and has proven itself increases trust, and the longer in the past it happened, the greater the trust. This is the Lindy Effect. A change to issuance that is planned for the future has the opposite effect: it invites skepticism. In my humble opinion, doing the simple thing as soon as possible in order to earn more trust is more important than the other considerations that people have raised, like 1. The short-term effect on the issuance rate right after activation, 2. How much it resembles Bitcoin, and 3. Whether we save up more issuance for future use by delaying activation. Those are all valid ideas, but IMHO less valuable than the goal of gaining trust from the largest number of people over the next few years. So that’s how I would like to vote on these questions, inasmuch as the questions allow me to. That said, I think any of the possible outcomes here are good for Zcash, and better than the status quo–the status quo of Zcash and also the status quo over in Bitcoin land. I’m just glad we’re getting back to our tradition of responsible innovation! _[EDITED] I edited this to remove a whole topic that I advocated for in the initial post (re-issuance of burned ZEC before February 2027). I’m pretty sure just leaving that whole topic out makes this post more readable and hopefully more acceptable to more people._ --- _[View the full topic](https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/nu7-coinholder-vote/56912)._