It's worth reading the Zcash perspective:

> 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.

> the founders are incentivized to support Zcash for the long haul (at least for four years)

Four years is not the long haul when talking about a new currency.

Four years is an extremely long time when talking about a new currency.

A currency from 2016, maybe. Not on the greater scale of things. I'd argue the dollar has only recently hit maturity in the past 50 years, being written into law in the 1790s [1]. The yuan has been around for over 2,000 years [2].

Currencies take time for sure.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_dollar?wprov=sfl...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_yuan?wprov=sfla1

Bitcoin is extremely new on the grand scale of things and has already been around for nearly 8 years now. 4 years is nothing.

Unlike Bitcoin, where Satoshi probably mined 5% of all BTC before other people noticed? Or unlike Bitcoin, where developers get paid by layering centralized startups on top?

5% < 10%, last time I checked. Also, "Bitcoin did something fishy" should be a reason to invent some thing less fishy, not more.

The only way I could foresee a cryptocurrency where, by its nature, the early adopters would not have a significant amount of money in the eventual economy, is to make the rate of money generation grow with participation and / or transaction rates. The former is effectively impossible to judge, unless you use the block difficulty as a measure of popularity, and the later seems like it doesn't accurately reflect the market cap - coins like doge had much higher velocities than btc at unique times despite being a fraction the size.

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.

If I recall correctly, it's not 10% of the entire supply, but rather 10% of the first 2 years worth of supply. After that, the 10% cut from miners is stopped and their 10% of the supply will slowly decrease as the overall supply increases

No, it's 20% of the first 4 years' reward, which is equal to 10% of all time's reward.

Or Ethereum where the founders reserved 12.5% of the presale to themselves. I had no problem with that, and the Zcash incentives seem better than the Ethereum ones because they're effectively vesting over years.

Until proven otherwise, Satoshi still didn't touch his original mined coins…

IIRC they are supposedly locked in a 'trust' until ~2020

(See: Tulip Trust)

This is one of the many claims by a person who came forth and claimed to be Satoshi. Although a few notable people in the community believe(d) him, most don't. This should be treated as a rumor at best.

I don't think that's directly comparable -- he announced in advance what he was doing, and everyone had the opportunity to start mining. Getting 5% was an artifact of others not participating as much when they could have, not something written directly into the protocol.

The word yuan has been around. RMB is a very new thing.

> the miners only get to keep ninety percent of those coins

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.