One way to try to deter pump-and-dump is to make it so that the founders don't have any sort of privileged position, but then how could you afford to do all of the work to create a solid, usable protocol? The Zcash team (https://z.cash/team.html) is a world-class team of experts, and we all have mouths to feed during the years of our lives that we're devoting to this project.

Our solution is to trickle the Founders Reward out to the founders incrementally over the first four years, integrated with the rhythm of mining.

This militates against pump-and-dump in two ways:

1. Neither the Founders nor anybody else has a giant stash of Zcash at the beginning with which they can manipulate the market price.

2. The Founders are locked into receiving more and more Zcash over the first four years, so their incentive is for the price of Zcash to go up during that time.

In my opinion, this hack is awesome.

It affords us the opportunity to focus several years our lives on solving this important problem, which otherwise would probably go unsolved, and it offers a transparent and simple financial setup that users can evaluate for themselves if they think it is a good deal.

So I categorically reject the word "scam". There is no reasonable interpretation of the word "scam" which applies to the Zcash Founders Reward.

https://z.cash/blog/funding.html