I want to add that I realize the legal issues make any PUBLIC pre-sale/pre-mine choice dubious. If you do public ICO then the tokens must be registered as securities. If you do PRIVATE pre-sale and then PUBLIC royalties from mining as Zcash proposes, then the miners apparently have to register as Money Service Businesses under FinCEN regulations and the coming G20 plan to harmonize these regulations starting in 2017.
Appears the only options for legal distribution are PRIVATE ICOs (that can include any qualified investors as so defined by the SEC but you can’t advertise this to the public-at-large and has to be viral within the qualified investor social network).
Or via PUBIC proof-of-work mining.
IANAL yet I think Ethereum violated the securities law.
Some have also claimed that PUBLIC airdrops might be legal, when these are not marketed as investments but rather for-use tokens.
i do not agree with the way the OP was put and posted, but that 10% is definitely a ‘thin line’ !
it would be interesting to see where these 10% funding will eventually go , if only into private pockets (there are enough bad examples of that out there) or to real funding of the project (with ZERO community involvement) .
Very very centralised is a supposedly decentralised world !
You know your stuff in tech, and certainly that is where the money is, but do you really think the world’s corporations need perfectly anonymous digital cash and that they should be the primary market for Zcash? To me, that would increase regulatory concerns and legal issues. They already game the system enough as it is, and this is one of my biggest concerns about Zcash and the like. Not that the masses might be free from being traced by governments, but that the insanely powerful just use it to conceal their wealth even more, giving them even more of an edge in an already rigged system.
Ok. How about we start taking some concrete steps to fork zcash. The code will differ from the current version in only one aspect: the entire mining reward will go to the miners and nothing to the zcash company. Same model as bitcoin. Fair for everyone.
If people want a coin with the privacy features of zcash, but without the rewards going to these investors, then they can have this option. Let a free market decide!
I would counter that giving the reward to the miners is a bit off the mark if you want to be fair. What would be fair is to reward those that put the effort to creating the coin and those who risk investment before receiving any reward is the free market. The technology stands by itself even if never mined by the miners. It seems that the whole argument centers on whose making money and not really about fairness. Would you be so eager for someone else to receive your pay for the work you do at your job.
It was a closed private funding round, not a “free market”. There was no price discovery.
If they had allowed public bidding for the 11% of coins in question, that would be a free market.
These types of sweetheart deals in closed funding rounds are not only unstable (i.e. prone to making people want to fork the code), I think they are also contrary to the free market principles of bitcoin.
“Would you be so eager for someone else to receive your pay for the work you do at your job.”
??? You mean like expecting a miner send the coins they mine to a third party?
I concede to the price discovery issue, I should have stated it this way. The people making the initial investment, those working on the code and those who are willing to take a chance on them should be rewarded. There are multiple ways for anyone else to benefit/participate once the coin is in operation. Also Zooko stated above that forking would only help propagate the ideas behind the code and even stated that they are moving all of their work into the public [quote=“zooko, post:5, topic:267”]
We are continuing to move all of our work into the public under permissive licences so that there is no barrier to you re-using it.
[/quote]
So why not create the variant, with the modifications that have been suggested. Personally I would like to see them benefit from their efforts, and if you should ever put the work in creating the variant, i would like that for you as well.
I’d be delighted if you’d fork the Zcash codebase. Of course, we’re going to continue doing our best to make our original version be as valuable as possible to users, but having a live, active competitor that re-uses our protocols and source code and tweaks something like the Founder’s Reward would be a very good kind of competition, to focus our minds on accelerating delivery of value to users!
Of course, we already have lots of other competitors, both “near” and “far”, like PayPal, bars of gold locked in vaults in Switzerland, Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. etc., but a really “near” competitor which is just a clone of our source code would be really helpful for focusing our minds.
Oh, we haven’t actually implemented the Founder’s Reward rule in the consensus rules yet, so at the moment there isn’t anything for you to edit out, but maybe it would work better for you to already be maintaining a fork and you can opt not to apply that patch when we write it instead of waiting til after we apply it and then editing it out. Not sure. Up to you.
Also, if you find any bugs please report, in the interests of all users. Thanks!
Sure! They’re a competitor too. There are a ton of competitors, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a new competitor comes out of nowhere over the next twelve months that is much stronger in some ways, or within some markets, than all of the ones we already know about.
By the way, I hung out with Riccardo “fluffypony” Spagni of the Monero project at the Satoshi Round Table this weekend, and he explained to me what the UX is like for Monero viewkeys and gave an example use-case for them. That was helpful.
Thanks. Outside of Monero and perhaps Ethereum, I don’t see any competitors. That covers the breadth of what is needed in crypto-currency space. Features can and should be integrated between these chains and there will be followers accordingly.
I am also a believer of no rewards to those who put fiat initially. If they paid fiat, they can be compensated in fiat with some premium. That way you are not undermining the rewards. You have to look at it as two different spheres of contribution entirely and not mix it like today’s stock markets. It isn’t and shouldn’t be the same. You might be setting a bad precedent, forget the laws.
zooko, actually correct priorities in the field of investment. But to me and many others I’m still scared(!!!) what a lot of people followed the project from the first his day… And there is a great fear of just what project to develop in Moneta. Investors have Zcoin and Moneta one and the same. But just logging on now monetacommunity.slack.com I see the desert(((
The idea Zcoin is a great idea and she deserves a “sponsorship” which is not present in bitcoin!!! …but I don’t want Zcoin turned into a Moneta…
Еще чуть-чуть слов от Русских наблюдателей.
zooko, на самом деле правильно расставляет приоритеты в сфере инвестиций. Но мне и многим другим все равно страшно(!!!) что множество людей следило за проектом с первого его дня… И есть большая боязнь просто что проект превратиться в Moneta. Инвесторы у Zcoin и Moneta одни и те-же. Но просто зайдя сейчас на monetacommunity.slack.com я вижу пустыню(((
В идее Zcoin есть отличная идея и она достойна “спонсорства” которой нет в bitcoin!!! …но я так не хочу что-бы Zcoin превратился в Moneta…
P.S. ______ I apologize for very bad English(((
I just want to show/to prove/to warn that the project can die and from his death we all will suffer!
@TronMeta, I agree that the people working on the code should be well rewarded, but I just don’t think the funding issue was handled well, and it really is important. In regards to the early investors, they were given special early access that, in my humble opinion, isn’t appropriate for this type of project.
I am happy about Zooko’s openness in this discussion (and even freely giving me advice on a fork!), however I guess I’m just baffled that he doesn’t view the funding issue as a serious concern. In any case, I heartily agree that friendly competition will be good for the technology!
I think it is not that bad for the project at all… If I understand that well, miners will receive less reward… But at the end there will be enough of money in hands of Zcash and their devs / investors to continue maintaining the project in a much better way than Bitcoin does (for obvious reasons… fragmentation of communty, lack of resources… you name it)
How will you create the initial parameters in your no-dev-fee fork? It will be scrutinized even more than the original code base of the zcash company. It will just make it an instrument for PnD teams. I am very worried about the forks that will be come from the original source, some will come with hidden dev fees while claiming none, others will botch the trusted setup in collusion intentionally etc. IMO it will create the next wave of shitcoins like we saw in 2013-2014 time period.
This is what I meant by setting a bad precedent in my earlier comment to @zooko
Someone please correct me if I am overlooking a technical issue, but I see no reason not to use the same initial parameters as the zcash company.
It will be straightforward to see that the fork is honest by comparing the a hash of the source code with a hash of the original source minus the section that funds the zcash company.
It will be left to the economic majority to decide whether a coin with or without a hardcoded allegiance to a corporate entity is, as you said, a “shitcoin”.
No that is not how it will work (secure parameters are secure) and neither is the idea of comparing hash of source code.
Yes the whole corporate angle has a lot of downsides as far as community acceptance is concerned. Corporations can be forced by law enforcement to do certain things or drag them to legal hassles. That is why Kazaa died and bittorrent cannot (btw check out zeronet). Tons of other things but they have already been hashed out. And zcash team is not oblivious to it, so you just have to wait and watch how they finalize things.
