"But in ZCash, the miners only get to keep ninety percent of those coins. The rest gets dumped into accounts controlled by the ZCash company"
This alone makes me extremely sceptical.
This alone makes me extremely sceptical.
> At first, 50 ZEC will be created every ten minutes. 80% of the newly created ZEC will go to the miners, and 20% ZEC to the founders.
> Every four years, the rate of ZEC being created will halve (again, just like in Bitcoin). After the first four years the ZEC created per ten minutes will drop to 25ⓩ, but after the first four years, 100% of it goes to the miners.
> The end result (as shown in the diagram) is that there will ultimately be 21 million ⓩ, and 10% of it, or 2.1 million ⓩ, will have been initially distributed to the founders.
> With this approach, the founders are incentivized to support Zcash for the long haul (at least for four years), and they have limited ability to pump-and-dump.
From https://z.cash/blog/funding.html.
I don't know if this makes things better or not, but it sounds reasonable to me. From what I understand, "pump-and-dump" has been a concern in cryptocurrencies.
Four years is not the long haul when talking about a new currency.
Currencies take time for sure.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_dollar?wprov=sfl...
The other option might be a blockchain that doesn't do time based payouts but does volume based payouts. Rather than having blocks issued on fixed intervals you could have them dynamically issued and computed based on the previous blocks time to reach a calculated size threshold to hash. Unless you were psychic and could guarantee your coin would take off, investing the electricity to generate bogus volume would be a tremendous gamble in resources to try to beat the market.
(See: Tulip Trust)
It's 80% for the first four years then all after.
The fact that this isn't completely clear to people is another reason to be skeptical.