To quote Zooko himself[1]: "I don't agree that what we're doing with the Zcash Founders Reward is a premine. It's not pre! (Also it isn't mining.) But the part about it not being pre seems really important to me, because it means that anybody who can run a Zcash miner (which, I hope, will be almost anybody on the Internet) can have access to Zcash currency no later than the founders do.

"As I described on my blog post about "the Zcash Founders Reward", this seems to align incentives in everyone's best interest."

1: https://forum.bitcoin.com/ama-ask-me-anything/i-m-zooko-wilc...

He clearly doesn't understand the point - the point is that those founders have 10% of the coin, great control over the market and they've not had to pay (in the sense of PoW or cash) to get that control.

Nothing about what he said prevents this at all. It's still a pump and dump scheme, just longer term.

Basically they solved the most minor part of the pre-mine problem and claim they solved the whole issue.

Of course they've had to pay. In the case of the investors, they've had to pay cash up-front to fund the development of Zcash. In the case of other shareholders of Zerocoin Electric Coin Company, they've had to pay for, or otherwise legitimately obtained their shareholding -- for example by their labour, in the case of developers who are also shareholders.

"Pump and dump" means fraudulently manipulating the price of a stock by making deliberately misleading or inaccurate statements in order to sell it at a premium. That's illegal under securities law. If you invest in something that then increases in value over a long period because people generally think it is valuable, and at some point you sell it, that is not "pump and dump".

Declaration of interest: I'm a Zcash developer and I hold some shares in Least Authority, which owns part of Zerocoin Electric Coin Company.