[FlailFast]

It's important to consider the pros and cons about the Founder's Reward with Zcash, and I appreciate you trying to start a discussion, but I just wanted to clarify that your numbers are slightly off.

20% for the next 4 years goes to the "founders" (which is not just the developers, but investors as well). But much like Bitcoin the total monetary base is fixed at 21,000,000 ZEC. And also like Bitcoin, the total mining reward is halved (roughly) every 4 years, and consequently decreases exponentially until it reaches that total reward.

Effectively, this means that the Zcash Founders Reward doles out 10% of the currency to the investors/early development team over the lifetime of the currency, and in many ways mirrors a startup vesting cycle of 4 years (minus the one year cliff). Their blog goes into more detail about the reward here: https://z.cash/blog/continued-funding-and-transparency.html

Personally, I think this reward distribution is a significant improvement to the "premine/ICO" antics you see in many other cryptocurrencies/tokens, even if I think it's a little high. I applaud the team for trying something new/seemingly more fair.

(Also, not affiliated with the team, just a cryptocurrency nut: http://keybase.io/cin)

[plasticmachine]

The amount of perverse incentives it creates is insane. Instead of investors being forced to slowly accumulate ZEC, they are given it almost in bulk, and are in a perfect position to manipulate and short the market.