Folks: I’m definitely not going to delay the launch due to the existence of proprietary miners that are 100x better than the zcashd miner.
The most important thing, to me, is getting this breakthrough privacy technology into the wild — letting it get out of control. There are a lot of people around the globe who are interested in building Zcash into their businesses and systems. The most important thing is to take the next steps to make that possible.
The next step is the Oct 28 genesis block.
That said, I would love for Zcash mining to be widespread, decentralized, and open. Running the Zcash Open Source Miner Challenge is one way that we — the Zcash Company, with help from our friends at https://LeastAuthority.com — are trying to do that.
Beyond sponsoring the Challenge, though, there’s not much more we can do about this. The community is going to have to figure out how to achieve decentralized mining without the Zcash Company taking the lead on that. Or, if we can’t achieve decentralized mining, will just have to live with mining that is similarly centralized as Ethereum mining is. That’s not the end of the world. Nor of the Zcash project.