Zcash crashes to $4700 USD

After being around for almost 24 hours, the over-hyped Zcash coin crashed 99.73% according to Poloniex. This doesn’t mean we have a penny-coin at the moment as prices are still around $4700 (over 6 BTC) per ZEC. Even people that follow this blog were surprised to see bizarre prices like the 2000 BTC per ZEC yesterday when trading started. It was an equivalent to around $2 million USD per coin. This was the “Tulip mania” (March 1637) all over again. Most people expect prices to go significantly down from here, but who knows the limit of the ZEC-madness?

The founders of Zcash don’t give that much about all the attention or some higher/lower marketcap. The hype worked and most people didn’t had a clue about the 20% “founder reward” in the first 4 years of mining. These details are parked several clicks away from their front page to make sure you don’t find them.

So how are the founders doing so far? Well, I got notified several times about the “slow mining start” so my calculations are probably all wrong! Yes, there is a “slow mining start” which added fuel to the hype and was on purpose. No doubt about it. Or what else could’ve been the reason to start with low rewards? Giving all miners a fair chance to get some coin? Just to see if this stuff actually works?? You can’t have it both ways. If you claim to have a world class team of developers and tested the mining process to the extreme there’s absolutely no reason to start with “slow mining”.

But let’s get back to the founders. So in the first 34 days around 125025 ZEC will be mined. The founders get 20% of that number which are 25000 coins. Not that bad at the current price of $4700 USD. It adds up to 117,5 million dollar. On the 3 million dollar investment that’s a 39 time return on investment (ROI) in several weeks. The funding page doesn’t even state the 3 million investment. It talks about 1 million dollar:

We have closed a $1M funding round with these investors. By acquiring a stake in the Zcash Company, they stand to benefit both from the Founders Reward as well as from the value of any other products that the Zcash Company may create.

Where does the 3 million number come from?? You need to read their blog as the funding page seems to be inaccurate. Continued Funding and Transparency
That’s the title of one of the blog posts. This is where we read about that $2 million in extra funding:

Today we’re announcing that this past summer we took in a new round of funding. Seventeen investors put in a total of $2 million dollars into the Zcash Electric Coin Company in exchange for equity in the company.

I guess the founders forgot to update the funding page or they weren’t able to find it in the first place. Just like all the crypto enthusiasts that were left in the dark about the 20%. Let’s hope this inaccuracy doesn’t say anything about their programming skills. We don’t want another DAO debacle do we? Although it would’ve been fun if Ethereum was as anonymous as Zcash when that happened. Try to expose a hacker on a completely dark blockchain with completely dark contracts if you can! But don’t forget:

Zcash + Ethereum = ❤

So one day we might see the magic of true anonymity on Ethereum as well. But let’s get back to the total number of mined coins after 1 year. As all my numbers were completely off (slow mining silly!!) we still have a lot of blocks with 50 ZEC rewards. It’s around 2,38 million ZEC in 12 months. Which we add up to the 125K from the slow mining period. That´s a total of 2,5 million ZEC with a $11,7 billion marketcap (at current price). Allowing the sneaky 20% founders to grab 2.3 billion of that. But my numbers will turn out to completely off again as this thing will crash so far that several future traders will get margin calls. Don’t say you weren’t warned up front. And don’t feel sad for the founders as well. They probably filled their pockets anyway.