Dear Anton1:
I’m afraid I do not understand your post, even though I read it, and then read it again more slowly. Please see if I’m getting closer with what I write below, and then write back.
I think the question of “Where the value comes from” is the most important question in this entire discussion. It would be easy to believe that when a block is found, and that block contains a coinbase with new ZEC in the coinbase, that new value has been created. A lot of people probably believe that, because it seems natural. But, it is incorrect. Generating new ZEC in a coinbase does not create new value. Therefore, it must be a transfer of value. Value is not thereby created, so if the recipients of the coinbase received some value, someone else must have lost an equal amount of value. Who?
This is the fundamental fact that everyone needs to understand in order to know what would happen if we—the Zcash community—adopt different dev funding designs.
This same confusion also happens in regular old monetary policy discussions in pre-cybercoin economics. In that context, economists call it “Real Vs. Nominal Value”. “Real” value means how much you can get out of something, “Nominal” means what the number is. If I gave you 1,000,000 Venezuelan Bolivars in June of 2009, you could probably get a beautiful house in Caracas for it. That’s a lot of value! If I gave you 1,000,000 Venezuelan Bolivars today, ten years later, you’d be lucky if you get a single chicken egg for it. The real value of that has been vastly reduced, but the nominal value is the same.
Let’s talk about cybercoins. Here’s how you can tell that coinbases create nominal value but do not create real value: suppose Bitcoin had been defined, instead of generating 50 BTC every block (resulting in an eventual 21,000,000 BTC), that instead it would generate 500 BTC every block (resulting in an eventual 210,000,000 BTC). What would the situation be like today. Would every BTC hodler be ten times as rich? After all, every BTC hodler would have ten times as many BTC! And every BTC is worth $9221.00 today! But no, that’s not what would happen. What would happen is that the price of BTC would be $922.10, and every BTC hodler would have exactly as much real value.
Coinbases create nominal value. Supply and demand is what determines real value. Since a coinbase increases the nominal supply without changing the demand, a coinbase causes every coin holder’s real value to go down a little. The total amount of real value that all the coinholders put together lose is exactly equal to the total amount of real value that the recipient of the coinbase gains.
Therefore, a coinbase is a transfer of value, not a creation of value. And it is a transfer of value from all coin-holders, to the recipient of the coinbase.
Please let me know if that makes sense.