Here’s an alternative model:
Wealth is being created by ECC, ZF, ZCG, and other unpaid Zcash community members, in the form of new technology, products, and services. The ZEC that I’m zodling represents a share of the wealth that has been created so far. The wealth in 1 ZEC is represented by “what can I buy with 1 ZEC?”
By zodling, I’m taking on risk and expecting to be paid by the community members and organizations contributing to Zcash, through their wealth-creation efforts, which increases the value of my share.
Suppose my investment time horizon is longer than the entire issuance schedule. Then I’m not really paying Dev Fund recipients or miners, because shorter-term drops in price due to miners and DevFundees liquidating their ZEC don’t affect the ultimate outcome of my investment: what I can buy with 1 ZEC at the end of my horizon.
What I am doing is assessing the wealth-creation performance of the entire community (not just Dev Fund recipients), which gives me a probability distribution over the ZEC price 50 years from now. If I’m acting in a wealth-maximizing way, I’ll buy when my expected return is positive and sell when my expected return is negative. The risk that I’m taking on by zodling comes from (a) the lower-end of that probability distribution and (b) the chance that I’m wrong about my probability distribution.
For shorter time horizons, the model is mostly the same, but it’s more complicated because I need to add in another probability distribution that describes everyone’s (not just issuance recipients) selling-vs-buying-vs-zodling behavior and how that affects the price at the end of my horizon. Still, I end up with a probability distribution over coin prices at the end of my horizon, and that drives my buying and selling behavior.
A belief that issuance recipients will liquidate their ZEC lowers the average of my probability distribution, which, if everyone acts in this wealth-maximizing way, lowers the coin price, which can equivalently be seen as zodlers paying the issuance recipients. (And on a micro scale, USD Dev Fund salaries are literally paid by the person on the other side of the trade who now owns ZEC.)
This model has a lot of the same moral implications as the Zodlers-Pay model, and it also includes future zodlers. A future zodler is either someone who doesn’t yet know about Zcash, or someone who knows about Zcash yet has decided not to buy because their future-coin-price probability distribution is expecting negative returns against the current price. It also includes “mixed-zodlers”: people who zodl but only with a tiny % of their own total wealth.
In this model, zodlers are an important source of information: current-zodlers should be good at telling you what they think you’re doing right, because they believe wealth is being created and the price will rise, and future-zodlers should be good at telling you what they think you could be doing better, because they believe not enough wealth is being created and the price will fall. And the shifts in both types of zodlers’ probability distributions can give information in both directions, too. Those shifts are reflected in the current coin price behind a lot of random noise.
A weakness of this model is that it assumes zodlers are wealth-maximizing and not, e.g. holding ZEC just to contribute to a social good or to keep a balance for actual payments use. It also assumes that the coin price is correlated with wealth, which makes sense if we define “wealth” in this context to mean “what can I buy with 1 ZEC?”
(Of course nobody except traders with too much time on their hands are actually calculating probability distributions, most zodlers’ “probability distributions” are just an intuitive sense of the project’s prospects.)
tl;dr: If Zcash fails spectacularly and the ZEC price drops to $0, zodlers have paid the dev fund recipients. If Zcash moons and ZEC is worth $1,000,000, the Zcash developers have paid the zodlers. What will actually happen could be anywhere between these two extremes, and on short time horizons “who is paying who” is not well-defined, except in that zodlers are exposing themselves to risk. Actual gains or losses experienced by zodlers are determined by a very complicated market system, major factors in which are the Zcash community’s ability to create new wealth and the prices at which issuance recipients are willing to sell ZEC.
edit: okay I’m done making edits to this comment lol