Thats answer is brilliant as always zooko, but i think the main concern of people who really care about zcash, in crypto-etically-way, is the openness of zcash founders reward for investors or simply people. Seems that was a very closed group…
2 Likes
Yes, Creighton seems like a good guy, i dont think he is planning anything sinister, he seems to have the same outlook as you, zooko, a better future for people. thanks for chiming in! 
nice to hear from you directly sometimes
I don’t see any issue with the “Reward” this looks very normal for me for some guys that have invested a lot of time and work, they have also to eat and pay the bills.
Anyway, hope this will be the most secure and used digital currency #zcash
I just hope there won’t be ever possible to mine Zcash or Zclassic for tthat matter, with ASCI miners.
If that happens, ZEC will drop under 1$, and ZCL under 0,01$.
2 Likes
You are right that #FoundersFund would have created better optics Zooko.
Great respect for your positive attitude!
Though I think the most interesting topic in all that is the question how to fund development?
When Bitcoin started miners and developers have been (probably) the same persons and there was no big competition, so a dev could get his stash of coins quite easily. Also the price increase was so slow over several years that the non-mining devs could easily buy in cheap and therefore get their share in the future value increase.
That model seemed to have worked for Bitcoin (though probably not for all devs), but cannot be repeated anymore as the miners are just waiting for the next big thing where they can point their gpu rigs to, so a normal dev who is not a pro miner will not have much success to get a reward by early mining.
Also buying in early is more troublesome as price often grows very fast and some devs simply don’t have much savings on the side to be also investors in their own coin. Diversification of investment is another reason to not put all on the same card. Beside that, why a dev should waste his resources and time in mining or speculating anyway just to get his fair reward for his work?
So which models are left?
One option is to operate as traditional VC funded company like Zcash and Blockstream is doing.
Another option is to experiment with new forms of DAOs (not referring to TheDAO as a prototype of the DAO idea).
To have no funding model at all and just rely on altruistic contribution might be an option as well, though it usually has very low success rate and can be considered by far the most difficult variant.
The traditional model has the advantage to be tested many times and to carry therefore lower risk. Devs can focus on the actual work and can count with a professional work environment.
The downside is that it creates some dependencies and does not breathe the openness which is often expected from Blockchain based projects (closed to accredited investors, devs are employed,…).
The DAO model seems to me personally the most attractive one and the model I plan for my own project (Bitsquare). Though from my own experience I know how hard it is and how much effort it takes. Time and energy which is then missing to stay focused on the core project. Also legally it operates on thin ice. So I perfectly understand that it is not the preferred option for everyone.
The altruistic model is for me not really an option and it does not solve an important problem but just ignore it: People who are creating value should get rewarded for that.
So back to ZClassic I have following problems:
- I find it un-ethical to take the hard work of others and criticize that they want to get a reward for that work.
- I find it unfair and wrong to put the miners in the one and only position who are allowed to earn revenue, though they have not added value as long the overall project has no big value to secure. What would a miner do without devs who created what they mine? Sure miners have an important role but so the devs.
- I think the slow start for mining reward is a good idea, avoiding that the insiders (project initiators) abuse their position to get a big stake in the first coins.
- Criticizing trademark registration of Zcash but being proud of running patents (Rhett’s Twitter account profile) does not fit well together to me.
Anyway I also think that an alternative fork of Zcash should make it only stronger and adds some resilience. Just would have preferred that they did it in a more ethical and civilized manner.
5 Likes
Yeah the altruistic model isn’t working too well right now for me, over a month spent on porting Zcash to non-linux/non-x86 platforms, I’ve succeeded with Mac and ARM so far (Windows still not done), and have less than $200 to show for it…which people toss tons of BTC at mining software.
People somehow miss the fact that:
More #zcash platforms = more developers = more applications = more users = more demand for ZEC = higher price for ZEC
2 Likes
Well from what I understand you should be able to ask for a piece of the founders’ reward pie. Since the philosophy here seems to be that everyone that creates software for the zcash community should be incentiviced…
I personally think that having one party holding 20% in the short term and 10% in the long term of the total supply is very risky for a global currency (and as I understand this is where you are headed)
In the end the market will decide.
Well, that’s not how the Founder’s Reward works. I’ve gone out on a limb by putting so much effort into porting it on my own without funding ahead of time, and I’m hoping that that pays off.
When the Zcash Foundation is fully set up some time in the next 6 months, multiple employees of ZcashCo have indicated that they’re going to put my name in the hat for a grant to support my ongoing ports and other open source Zcash contributions, but that’s a long way off and not a sure thing by any means.
If I get my work in front of the current Zcash investors and other stakeholders enough, I’d like to think that at some point they’ll see that I’m working in their best interests and kick in some donations or other funding.
If anyone’s feeling generous until then:
Donations in BTC to: 1L33E8M1LdXmAtgWaSgAVr4TEyDrLWk69B
in ZEC to: t1WeYg7Vwe1E2N5sxY6MQ335x4i12KZwSMu
or in dollars via PayPal to radix42@gmail.com
1 Like
the first distribution of the Founders’ Reward, which is due to happen soon, is going to the investors, because their sub-slice get distributed first.
So the first 331,250 ZEC from the Founders’ Reward will be distributed to the investors, and your funding only begins after that (in about 7 months or so)?
No more profitable to mine ZEC or ZCL except developers and founders. It’s over. 
First SeenFri 28 Oct 2016 09:19:56 -07 (23 days ago)Last SeenSun 20 Nov 2016 04:02:26 -07 (4 minutes ago)Transparent Balance11576.606875 ZECBlocks Mined0Txns Sent0Txns Received13609Total Sent0 ZECTotal Received11576.606875 ZEC
I think its a bit less…
11576.606875 ZEC
You’re looking at the situation from the wrong angle, every coin has several evolutional ways, here are some of them (most common):
- Bitcoin-like, coin finds it’s practical use in real world, you can use it for your everyday needs, golden standard or fiat-alternative if I can say so. Can be reached by high acceptance of crypto-community and financial structures, takes minimum 2-4 years period.
- Ethereum-like, perspective technology and idea, accepted nearly from its start and then nearly ruined by its development team and their decisions/holes in protocol. What we see now is 2 hard forks, vision that devs are completely corp-ruled and lack of trust in coin. Crypto is not like something that needs centralised control.
- Altcoin, coin made mostly for mining-only, can have some value, but only mine-and-sell algo works here, very rarely can have any single-purpose application use IRL.
- Pump-n-Dump, just another clone of an existing coin, made only to make some money in a short period (of course, for its devs), hundreds of them around, pure scam.
Currently Zcash is too young to say something definitely, but it does not seem 3) or 4), it has protocol realisation issues like 2) and perspectively bright future as 1) has.
Mine to sell may be a good choice if you pay your bills from crypto-income, but wiser will be to mine and keep the coin and watch it for at least 2-3 years (like crypto investors do, they’re just buying cheap coin from you now to sell it in future for 3-4 times higher price).
Technology is very perspective and potentially ASIC-resistant, in 4-6 years Zcash can switch places with Bitcoin (just look at fiatleak.com and see who wants to regulate bitcoin market ;), also Bitcoin ecosystem step-by-step becomes centralised in PRC (±60-70% of hashing power))
Anyway, everyone is free to choose what to do, if I’d choose to mine-and-sell, Zcash’ll still be the most profitable coin to mine (of course if you mine it on GPUs, CPUs are miles behind), in my case it’s 50$ difference between Eth and ZEC pure income a day (not so large garage mining facility driven with ±50% green power)
2 Likes
Sooo funny that noone talks about http://zcoin.tech here. It’s like it does not exist. We had zcash and zcoin and only now comes zclassic. I think Zcoin is a bit more interesting than zclassic by trying to be a bit different from zcash.
In my mind not hiding the amount of transactions is a serious downside of zcoin compared to zcash
3 Likes
@anon47418038 Agreed. As transaction amounts are transparent, a global adversary would theoretically be able to de-anonymize users.
2 Likes
Well, I do like the idea of practicaly knowing the amount of zcoins generated and in circulation opposed to zcash where one knows theoreticaly but not practicaly. In zcash one relies on an algorithm to do its job and in zcoin one can see yourself that everything is in order - no coins appearing out of thin air. I do like both projects overall.
1 Like
Coin devs seem to be very tricky ones, looked at their blog and found hidden marketing , just look at this article Coin and Zcash: Similarities and Differences .
By steps:
- Zcash conceals the amount of money sent in each transaction, whereas Zcoin does not. So Zcash is less prone to privacy timing attacks than Zcoin. On the other hand, this comes with a big tradeoff for Zcash, in the form of potentially undetected hyper-inflation in Zerocash’s money supply.
let’s count, 3 paragraphs about potential attack on Zcoin, 10 paragraphs about Zcash potential bugs, based on Eth and BTC experience, without ANY proofs, just use your imagination, they say
- Parameter generation
RSA Factoring Challenge against “assumption that all actors in the parameter generation do not collude together”. Devs offer us to trust RSA keys because they were generated in 1991, but… NSA was born in 1952… If they’ve already compromised all RSA recommendations, I personally don’t believe they started it in 2000th’s, the only reason they haven’t already compromised Bitcoin is that secp256k1 curve is used in key generation. And then again they post a link to a blog where completely lunatic Doctor Evil plan is described (assuming it as a stone to Zcash garden)
- Zcash requires a higher use of memory with significantly longer time needed to send a private transaction than Zcoin. On the other hand, Zcoin currently requires significantly more storage space than Zcash.
Simple math works here, RAM vs Storage. Author tries to convince us that it’s easier to keep “heavier” chain than upgrading RAM. Anyone here tried any parsing ops on Bitcoin blockchain in it’s current state (nearly 100GB in size) running on HDD? It’s a pain in the ass not only for R/W speed reasons, but it also requires 24+ Gb of RAM… Anyway, HDD or SSD, just compare prices in your local shop for DDR3 RAM and for Storage (in both cases we take 3-4 years after coin creation), additional 4Gb RAM seem cheeper for me, I may be wrong. 5x time gain vs 20x larger size for Zcoin.
And in the end: “Zcoin has some major advantages over Zcash, as well as significant disadvantages. By increasing awareness of these tradeoffs, privacy-centric users can more effectively use either coin tailored to their concerns and specific use cases.”
OK, guys, now you say us to be free to use Zcash or Zcoin, but as a sum of everything written to this point, Zcash=shit, Zcoin=perspective, and with some improvements Zcoin will be God’s blessing.
Why I wrote all this? Just look at Zcash blog, only Zcash-related stuff. Like in business-world, spitting shit on your competitor means that you’re afraid of him/her, me personally’d make a bet on devs who spend time on software development and protocol improvement rather than on boiling shit and spreading it around.
Just my personal opinion, anyone is free to disagree or agree with me. For God’s sake, we’re in the Internet 
2 Likes
Looks like Zclassic is dead. Price continues to fall.
2 Likes
It was not too ramble-y. Although I am not on the dev team, I think that as a holder of ZEC, my investment in the coins will be worth more because of the dev fee.
What critics of the dev fee forget is that Free software isn’t free; it is in fact just as expensive as paid/non-Free software to produce. That wonderful value stream that miners are currently capitalizing on?
Yeah, that is the value of software development. R&D will be critical to the continued success of Zcash.
3 Likes