For those of you concerned about pump and dump, they've specifically addressed it in a blog post [1]. And they are open sourcing a ton of stuff. But that's addressed in their blog. So to me, the lay man, it seems like they won't be doing a pump and dump. I say lay man because I'm really not qualified to assert that my statements are indeed correct.
So, what is to stop someone from forking the code and removing the percentages that go to the Zcash company and devs? Similar to how Monero was forked from Bytecoin due to some odd shadiness (not that I think Zcash and co. are shady!) [0].
> 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.
I don't see how anyone can audit that statement since the transactions are encrypted [1].
> I don't see how anyone can audit that statement since the transactions are encrypted
Couldn't one audit the code? Provided zcash itself doesn't have 51% or more of the mining network post launch the open source code should be verifiable and needs to have some special case to route the "founder reward". Though I admit I haven't looked through the source code so I may be missing something.
[1] https://z.cash/blog/funding.html