To quote the blog:
"Zcashâs monetary base will be the same as Bitcoinâs â 21 million Zcash currency units (ZEC, or â©) will be mined over time. 10% of that reward will be distributed to the stakeholders in the Zcash Company â founders, investors, employees, and advisors. We call this the âFounders RewardââŠâThe end result (as shown in the diagram) is that there will ultimately be 21 million â©, and 10% of it, or 2.1 million â©, will have been initially distributed to the founders.â
The banks in a system-wide breakdown such as a repeat of 2008 canât depend on anything they invent themselves because it is by definition when trust is broken and all fictitious debts like treasuries and mortgaged-backed securities are worthless (the Fedâs âassetsâ bought from banks with QE). Instead of depending treasuries that might be about to collapse, they could get rid of excess dollars by buying Zcash. They are not legally allowed to spend their dollars on most U.S. assets other than treasuries (which is why they are forced to buy treasuries). But if the U.S. canât trace the money⊠So in a competitive international banking world, an asset the banks canât control is exactly what the biggest banks need in the biggest quantities. They currently have gold, but even when resorting to that they still usually have to move âpieces of paperâ around (or middle-man bits) that represent the gold instead of the gold itself.
International banks and countries are playing poker with each other. Not letting other players know the size of your stash is important so they canât plan on how to drive you out of the game. Itâs also a basic principle of war in terms of troop capacity. China is hiding the size of its gold hoard for this reason. They are going to look at Zcash and go âgee, you mean we canâŠâ This is actually the biggest theoretical problem with Zcash [ other than the devastating effects that constant-quantity currencies have had on populations in the past, to the advantage of banks. See the âWizard of Ozâ alleged allegory about how disastrous a gold standard was in the late 1800âs, giving banks an advantage over farmers, industry, and labor (scarecrow, tin man, lion) because they were following the constant-quantity gold-brick road instead of simply tapping into the larger quantity of silver (Dorothyâs shoes were silver in the book). ]
If a constant quantity is accepted as a standard, then those charging interest and not spending the gains acquire a higher and higher percentage of the total, getting not only the interest but the gains from the dwindling supply. See Michael Hudsonâs writing on biblical tradition of debt defaults and why ~2% inflation is needed to keep rich asset holders on their toes, investing instead of holding and increasing their control by leveraging past control.
The normal historical default in times of financial crisis, war, or post-war debt is gold. Thatâs why after 2008 banking regulations worldwide demanded more gold on balance sheets. But itâs an ugly and cumbersome option. As more banks jump on the wagon for a constant-quantity cryptocurrency, the first banks to do so will be big winners and the last players will break even on a real and verifiable asset transfer that doesnât depend on treasuries keeping their value, gold that isnât there, or derivatives of nothingness. The banks could agree among themselves to do it first for a particular cryptocurrency before the general population is even using it for the marketplace, and then theyâll âhelpâ (via the government) the public to follow suit in the market place, driving up their asset value.
By âconservativeâ future value I meant âif the project fulfills its goalâ. By suggesting they should have demanded investors gain âonlyâ 100x I am giving the project only a 1% chance of success to reach my âconservativeâ value. It appears developers and investors are demanding a 50,000x return (5,000,000% gain) on value if they succeed.
This is typical in todayâs world where computers and a few programmers can do the work of millions of brains. Very little capital is needed to make very large gains. All the big buyouts the past 15 years have been about mind-space acquisition (patents, eyeballs) and manipulation (monopoly position, lobbies), not monetary capital needed to build physical capital to help society as a whole as classic economists had hoped for. Amazon is an exception, and Google actually needed some of its profits for expansion.
By not demanding a more reasonable amount of capital from investors the project is putting itself at higher risk of failure because it is open source. If they do not use massive capital to establish market share before a competitor does, a competitor might use $100 million to copy everything they are doing in addition to buying marketing, merchants, and miners.