The Security Behind the Birth of Zcash
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Further, the founder's reward despite having a slight smell is really not an unfair way to structure something like this. Significant resources were put into Zcash well before it was deployed, are the founder's supposed to just eat that cost? Why shouldn't their success be tied to the success of the coin they created over a period of time? Would a Satoshi style pre-mine be more fair? These questions are complicated, but without an ICO driving the development, this doesn't seem like the worse case scenario for a commercial entity.
To me it makes all cryptocurrencies seem like Ponzi schemes designed to profit its founders first and foremost; regardless of any merits.
> […] are the founder's supposed to just eat that cost?
Ideally, some philanthropist driven by idealism would work with a bright bunch of crypto enthusiasts like them to fund development, precisely to prevent the ethical problem of a founder's reward. Alternatively, perhaps a capped value that is based on a fair estimate of the initial costs of development with a fair profit margin (to compensate for the risk) would encounter less resistance than the current trend of an open-ended percentage.
Speaking as one of those people, even with driving ~2000km across Canada with the compute laptop in a faraday cage, I can assure you there's a lot of ways we could have screwed it up... See https://petertodd.org/2016/cypherpunk-desert-bus-zcash-trust... for some of them.
Ideally it would have been more than 6 people, but that protocol really didn't scale to more than a handful of people.
2) If anyone aborted, the protocol had to restart
The next version of the protocol will resolve both of these issues.
> 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.
https://z.cash/blog/funding.html
> 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.
The bank doesn't scan the serial numbers on the money I deposit and yet they somehow correctly credit my account.
Well not _you_ but bills do get flagged if they're involved in crimes (like kidnapping or robbery). So when they're deposited in a bank the FBI can track the _relative_ location of criminals.
I think it would be good to have an optional KYC/AML attached to cryptocurrency transactions. In this way they can be more popular and more connected to the regulated world.
This is already the case, minus the optional part [1]. Broadly, I'd guess anyone involved with an unregulated money transmission operation is one pissed-off D.A. away from serious jail time.
[1] http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-law-what-us-businesses-need-...
(Monero doesn't require a trusted setup, doesn't have a founder's tax, isn't run by a US company, and address balances are private.)
Monero has very good and active dev team that has fixed and disclosed bugs instead of exploiting them for free coins like other alt-coins.
https://petertodd.org/2016/cypherpunk-desert-bus-zcash-trust...