My first impression of Zcash is that it really seems to be the best privacy solution out there. But why it has to be implemented as an inferior crypto 1.0 blockchain? There is absolutely no need to repeat the mistakes of Bitcoin, like proof of work, lack of governance mechanisms, giving new coins to miners (ok, at least you give some part for real workers and investors), halving of issuance rate every four years…
I suggest that you look this whole system as a decentralized autonomous company rather than just a currency. When the system handles a lot of real value, it’s not going to work well as a normal open source project that lacks governance mechanism and is basically an anarchistic organization. It’s required that a system (that handles a lot of value) has some kind of clearly defined ways of conflict resolution.
Bitcoin is now in deep problems because there is no clear way of deciding things like blocksize. Bitcoiners just have to argue and fight, there doesn’t seem to be any constructive way of making the important decisions.
When you look at the point of view of DAC, it is clear that one good governance mechanism is to give voting power for company shares. Another solution would be giving voting power for miners, but that’s not really a good choice. Miners are just block producers. They are workers, not owners of the DAC. It’s better to give decision power for the owners and not for workers.
In your case the DAC would be a company like Paypal. It will produce a payment network and issue a token that customers can use. It will collect payment fees from customers so that it can be profitable or at least cover all the costs that the service demands. It will have workers (block producers, developers, marketers, etc.).
I don’t really understand why anybody would like to use proof of work these days. Isn’t it obvious that POW will result in centralization and massive wasting of energy? You get what you pay for, and POW-systems pay for people to use energy. If new tokens are issued as a subsidy for block producers and value of the tokens rise very much, that will lead block producers to use enormous amounts of electricity. Environmental problems will be obvious. It will also lead to centralization because of economies of scale.
Some of you probably already saw where I’m coming from. Lately I’ve been mostly interested in Bitshares because it has the most elegant solutions for blockchain governance that I’ve seen. Core token owners have voting power and they elect witnesses (block producers), committee members (who control the blockchain parameters like fees) and workers (mostly developers so far).
Governance problems of Bitcoin should have shown already to everybody that it does have very inferior system of blockchain governance. I really don’t understand why people (like you) are still so eager to copy it’s system with all the flaws.
BTW, there is also a possibility of implementing Zcash to Bitshares. This way you wouldn’t need to build your own infrastructure, you could just use already existing blockchain.
This would also give Zcash users an option for price stable assets which I think is quite necessary for future. Most people around the world are not interested in using very volatile currencies. They are very inconvenient to use everyday and are mostly good only for investing and speculation.
You can also make money with this option. If you implement Zcash to Bitshares, you can issue a fee-backed asset at the same time. An FBA is like any other cryptoasset (you can transfer it like any other coin) except that it has one powerful feature: it will get dividends every time somebody makes Zcash transactions in the blockchain. It’s like a mini-DAC in a DAC (where the FBA is the share of mini-DAC). FBA-owners have incentive to develop, fix bugs and market the particular feature, because they will get paid more when more customers use that feature.
You can do crowdfunding by issuing FBA and selling it to people in exchange for development funds. This way you can give large crowds an incentive to market Zcash and get excited about it. This is a superior way compared to proof of work mining – people are paying for development of the technology, not for electricity.