Regardless of the secure computation done during the ceremony at the end of the day there is a degree of trust in the founding participants of Zcash. I think given the people involved, and that they are all essentially security zealots with provable records. messing this up doesn't seem likely. There is no monetary incentive to make a mistake in the trusted setup, and there is significant personal reputation damage to the participants if it was provably hijacked.
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.
> I think given the people involved, and that they are all essentially security zealots with provable records. messing this up doesn't seem likely.
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.
I wonder if there isn't a more ethically sound way of rewarding the founders of cryptocurrency initiatives. A percentage of the total value of the whole currency seems disproportionally large if you consider the value of the total coin offering possible if they ever attained a status akin to the Euro, Dollar, Yen, or Pound Sterling. While that may or may not ever happen, it certainly seems to be a goal for many of these initiatives.
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.
Agreed. As a programmer who's worked with Zooko and other Zcash developers (on unrelated projects before it) I'll add that I was impressed by their security-engineering skill and integrity. (I'm unqualified to judge their crypto.)
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.