Author of PonzICO white paper here (proof: https://keybase.io/cin )—thank you! Still optimistic about cryptocurrency but the impending ICOpocalypse does not bode well for anyone in the space...excepting satirists I suppose. ;)
Fun fact: I got an MBA and was one of the first cohorts of a new curriculum, which required an ethics course. Hilariously and sadly, some 20 students were put on probation for CHEATING in ETHICS class.
I think that was the moment I realized I made a $100,000 mistake.
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)
As someone who works at a Bitcoin/Ethereum company, and has passionately followed Bitcoin since 2011, every time I hear "blockchain" as a proper noun a piece of me dies inside. It's like saying "This Is Your Company on Website."
True that, which is sad, because charisma can legitimately lower the difficulty of understanding complex ideas; think of your best teachers/favorite professors. I wish TED was filled with more Richard Feynman (charisma * ideas) and less Tony Robbins (charisma % ideas).
I love this advice, and it took me a while to figure out that for me the intersection is Developer Advocacy. Math, software, public speaking, writing, comedy, business = Dev Advocate at a bitcoin company. I'm not great at any of them individually, but good enough at all of them to make a great Developer Advocate. Took a while to convince someone to take a risk on me (I had a technical Biz Dev/PM background prior to my current job) but finally got a company to interview me the right way...they had me present to 20 bitcoin devs about their API as part of the process, and I happily can say I knocked it out of the park. Barring any sudden discovery of me as a stand-up comedian/writer (unlikely at this point) I'm very very happy to make a long, fruitful career of this role.
Anyway, TL;DR: there are always ways to combine software with other skills. The hard part is finding the role that incorporates all of them (whether you invent it as a founder or join someone else).
Yeah...it's akin to saying "I believe that [extreme outliers happen], then [they define the general rule]." Their outcome is wonderful, and I'm happy for them, but it's so many sigmas from the norm they may as well be Toyota consultants from the 90s.
Anyone else remember using ResEdit on original Escape Velocity plugins? Probably my first introduction to hexadecimal as a kid, heh. Loved the game (and meta game of discovering how to tweak things myself) and excited to try this out.
Black Swan is still his best in my mind, but the Bed of Procrustes can be a nice entree; aphorisms were the original tweets, and can be consumed as such. Then I'd jump into Fooled By Randomness, and finally Antifragile (which is the weakest of them...truthfully I think the entire book could have been a chapter in Black Swan, but I'm glad he wrote it all down anyway).
Love this idea, might copy my current novella on the web (http://www.flailfast.com/) over to your platform to see how it looks. Out of curiosity: any chance you guys might integrate bitcoin donations/payments in addition to USD?