My idea is that one should stop moralizing about what people should do in crypto.

After all, most "investors" in crypto, and in the first place, in bitcoin, are here to profit from the losses of others.  Some crypto currencies (such as bitcoin) have also marginally a genuine use (as a currency, to buy stuff with), but by far most of the volume and market cap is not their use.  As such, people investing even in bitcoin, simply want to "hold" it, or to "trade" it, so that others give more value for it than they spent on acquiring it, to get out more than they put into it and hence to profit from the loss of others.

A pump and dump scheme is no different.  The devs who premine or who find other schemes to acquire coins in their system for less than they plan to sell them do no different than the guy buying bitcoin at $200, to sell it at $700.  They put in money and effort, and hope to get out much more money, at the expense of others.

Now why do people "fall" for such a scheme ?  Because they do the same, or try to do the same.  They try to profit from the "pump" phase, and hope to be early in the "dump" phase.  They hope to acquire cheaply, and sell expensive.  They hope to be sufficiently "in sync" with the dev or other "manipulator", that they can eat their part of the cake too.
In doing so, they also take the risk of being the loser who will finance all that gain, because after all it is zero-sum.  But their drive for greed is sufficient to make them blind for the losses.  But bitcoin is essentially no different.  It is just a bigger scheme AND it has some marginally present real usage too.

That was the main goal of crypto.  To create "issues" for dictators and taxing thieves.

I like this automatic association of people wanting to enjoy liberty from dictatorship and theft automatically be associated with racist, criminal and machists behavior.  No wonder, given this politically correct attitude of statist thieves and dominators, that a guy like Trump won the elections.

Sooner or later people are going to start seeing why "anonymity" (better: fungibility) is important in a crypto currency.
At the moment, one is only investigating "bank" accounts on exchanges of which it shouldn't be a surprise that this behaves like a normal bank account, with all the auditing possibilities.  Soon, one will be doing some chain analysis.

You don't need to know the transaction details (like on bitcoin).  You only need to know that the transaction is legit.  The legitimity of the transaction can come from direct verification, like on bitcoin, or from cryptographic proof, like with ZCASH and cryptonote.  In as much as the cryptography itself is legit, the cryptographic proof of the legitimity of the transaction is just as credible as the direct verification.

This is in fact the same principle as a digital signature, or a hash.

Consider the following situation: Joe has a document, and Jack claims that he has that document too.  For Mary it is important to know whether Jack's claim is right.  But Mary is not supposed to be able to read said document.  Joe wants Mary to find out whether Jack has the document, as he claims, but doesn't want to give the document to Mary (nor does Jack).

Joe can give a hash of the document to Mary, and Mary can ask Jack to provide her with that hash too.  If Jack can produce the hash of the document, then that's proof enough to Mary that Jack has the same document as Joe.

This is a way of cryptographically verifying the validity of a claim, without being able to verify the claim directly.  The direct verification would be that Mary asks Joe and Jack to produce the document so that she can compare.  But Joe doesn't want this document to get in Jack's (if he's lying) or Mary's hands.  He only wants to verify the claim of Jack that he has the document without showing the document.

One could do more sophisticated tests. 
Joe could give a random string to Mary and Jack, and Jack could give another random string to Mary and Joe, so that everyone has both random strings.  They could mix them, say, by XORing them.  This would then be a "public" key of which nobody has a private key.

Joe could now encrypt the document with this public key, and Jack could do the same.  Both could give their encrypted copy to Mary, who can verify that they are identical, but without being able to read them.

There are ways to prove cryptographically that something is true/valid/legit without being able to verify it directly.

You can more or less work this out for yourself.  Assuming no vulnerabilities in the implementation, and assuming no such things like compromised machines, or compromised internet connection (which have nothing to do with the crypto currency protocol itself), here's the gist:

You have to assume fractional "real world" knowledge about certain transactions.  That is, you can know some stuff, like Joe went to Mary's coffee shop and paid his coffee with transaction X.   Joe withdrew coins from an exchange with transaction Y.  And so on.

The aim of chain analysis is to use this partial information of known transaction/person links, and to complete it using the block chain itself.  Here we assume that we DON'T use other information, like IP addresses, compromised computers and so on.

The problem with transparant chains like bitcoin is that this partial information is propagated, because we can follow transaction to transaction ; as such, we can learn that Joe was also involved in several other transactions, by looking at the combination of his coins and his change addresses.

A solution to this is to use mixers.  In bitcoin, you have to take the initiative with others, in DASH, you have to take the initiative but it is then done by master nodes, and in monero, it is done automatically by selecting random addresses on the chain. 

Mixing makes the propagation of the partial information ambiguous, but not totally void.  At each mixing stage, you "dilute" your partial knowledge some more.

Now, the big difference between bitcoin and DASH on one hand, and monero on the other, is that mixing is "far and in between" with the first two (because requiring a voluntary act, and a limited set of participants.  While monero does a kind of "mixing" at EVERY transaction, and selects the participants *randomly*.  (strictly speaking, it isn't mixing ; but concerning the propagation of partial knowledge, the ring signature in monero and a mixer, behaves somewhat similar).

Monero has one further advantage: the ambiguity of which transaction actually happened.  In a mixer, all incoming coins are really spend, and appear in the outgoing channels.  With monero, the incoming coins are not necessarily spend.  They can appear several times, and you don't know WHICH "mixing transaction" actually propagated them.  It looks like multiple spending of the same coin in monero, but only one is "real", though you don't know which one.

All this means that with monero, you need much more "partial knowledge" in order to "complete the trace" than with bitcoin or DASH.  But of course, from a certain amount of partial knowledge, chain analysis becomes moot: if you know already ALMOST everything, then the little it can buy you is not so important.  Chain analysis is interesting when only a little bit of knowledge can learn you a lot.

If I have to know 90% of Joe's transactions before the monero chain tells me the 10% that remains, that's much less interesting than when with 10% of Joe's transactions and the bitcoin block chain, I can find out the remaining 90%.

Point is, zcash leaks about 94% of the information currently, because in 94% of the transactions, the anonymity features are not used (clear transactions).   As such, as a user of anonymity, you clearly stand out, and you only "mix" with others wanting to be anonymous.

The very first rule of anonymity is that all members use it.  If you are the only one wearing a mask on the street, you will be noticed, which is exactly what you didn't want.  OK, one cannot directly see your face, but you stand out.

For instance, you can very easily taint ZEC that have been anonymous.  You could for instance decide only to accept ZEC that have been in the clear since their block reward origin.

I thought that it was typical for a bubble asset to rise in price (until of course it is RECOGNIZED as a bubble...).

A rise in price doesn't necessarily mean a bubble of course.  But with a bubble always comes a rise in price.

What differentiates a bubble from a "fundamental" rise in price is the main motivation of the demand: if the main motivation for the demand is the expectation of a further price rise, then you can say that this is the schoolbook example of "bubble".   If on the other hand, most of the motivation of the demand is something else, and the price rise is just a consequence of that increased demand, but not its drive, then one doesn't have a bubble.

So the main reason to ask yourself is: "do I hold bitcoin or altcoins because I need them to do something with ?"  (--> no bubble)  OR:
"do I hold bitcoin and/or altcoins because I'm expecting their price to increase ?" (--> bubble).

I think we are in an obvious bubble since many years with crypto.  To me, the discerning question between "increasing adoption" and "bubble" is the following: 

What is the main motivation to buy crypto ?  Is it:
1) to use it (to buy stuff, to set up smart contracts, to transfer value, to whatever ...)
2) to hope for a price increase ?

If the answer for most of the volume is 1), then a price increase indicates greater adoption ; if the answer for most of the volume is 2), then it is a bubble.

You can consider your question differently: suppose that you wake up tomorrow, and bitcoin is (again) at $0.10.
You first think coindesk went crazy, but you see that that's the exchange rate on Poloniex, on Kraken, on Coinbase, ....
Suppose it remains there for a week, then for a month.  Would you buy it ?

There's a long article on coindesk about the trusted setup of ZCASH.

Now, given that the *apparent* market cap of ZCASH is actually falling, is this an indication that the "golden key" is printing coins ?

After all, we expect the price to fall because more coins are mined, but that's because we divide the market cap by more and more coins to have the coin price.  But imagine that there are more coins than officially known ?  The calculated market cap would then decrease even if the actual market cap (with a lot of golden key coins) were rising, because one would only multiply the price with a part of the amount of circulating coins...

Buy pizza with it.

You are talking about a different effect here.  The "naked shorts" imply a confusion between "paper gold" and genuine gold.  In fact, paper gold is like good ol' fractional banking.  As long as there is a "parity" between an once of paper gold, and of genuine gold, it seems as if this naked shorting is creating gold out of nothing and is causing inflation.  However, this is actually only inflation for paper gold.  When there's a lot of naked shorted gold (paper gold), it is the opportunity to acquire cheap physical gold, because when the bubble bursts, or when it deflates, the whole market cap of paper gold will go to physical gold. 
But this is not the action of the FED.  The action of the FED is to buy gold when it is expensive, and to sell gold when it is cheap.  That sounds like a crazy doctrine, because normally you lose when buying high, and selling low.  But if you can print money at will, that is no problem.  What happens when doing so, is that the FED increases the volatility of gold, and "stabilises" the paper dollar.  In doing so, it pumps effectively the held value in gold into the dollar.  When gold is expensive, its policy makes it even more expensive, meaning that people have to spend a lot of value on the little bit of gold they can acquire.  Later, when the gold price diminishes, the FED throws even more gold on the market, making the gold that people held, less worth, so that they can obtain much less value against it.
For any other agent, this would be a terribly lossy and expensive thing to do, but as the FED can print the money it likes (and is "backed" by the very stuff it is buying), it doesn't cost the FED ziltch doing so.

In fact, the naked shorting of gold counteracts the FED's manipulation.  I'm pretty sure they don't like it.

There's nothing that can stop the FED from doing exactly the same with bitcoin: buying it against printed dollars when it is high and selling it (absorbing dollars) when it is low, increasing its volatility.


Suppose the FED is willing to print $50 billion dollar to "own" bitcoin, what would be the problem ?  It could print 50 billion, buy up all bitcoin, which is then "backing" the printing of those $50 billion.  When the FED has bought 4/5 of all bitcoin, and people have been spending fortunes on the 1/5 that's left, the FED sells its stash of bitcoin all at once, crashing the price. 
All the value that people had been spending on acquiring that 1/5 of bitcoin is now gone (into dollars printed by the FED).

And the cycle can start over.

Value is pumped out of people wanting to store it in bitcoin.  Like value is pumped out of people wanting to store it in gold.

I only saw your thread now.  I agree with you.  To me, bitcoin was a great invention, but had some (understandable) design errors which resulted in its centralization in China.  China not being the country that protects at best individual rights, the Chinese government can take over bitcoin at any moment.  That said, almost any rich government can do so, by setting up huge mining farms somewhere in a hidden place (area 51 ? ).

This is why I think that the real future of crypto currencies is the continuous creation and use of altcoins.  I know that sounds strange to bitcoin enthusiasts, but "centralization" is just as well on the basis of uniformisation of protocol than on centralization in hierarchical structures.   The word is "diversify".   Cryptocurrencies should be diversified.  New altcoins should continuously be created and used, and total market cap should be spread over many of them, continously changing.  If bitcoin becomes the crypto monopolist, then that's a single point of failure.

This buthurts the hodlers, who want to obtain maximum "seigniorage" for minimum investment for nothing, but has nothing to do with the actual *use* of crypto.  What saves eco systems, economies, invester portfolio, and democracies is diversity.  Because diversity allows at least a fraction to escape calamity.  Uniformity is great, until the uniform system is victim of a calamity (such as a government takeover).  Distributed systems are diversified.  Monopolies are their enemy.  Crypto is no different.

I think it is 20% the first four years, and then zero, which amounts to 10% of the total amount of coins that will ever be mined.
So the "investors" take in total about 2.1 million coins, which is 20% of the first 4 years, and as after 4 years about half of the total amount of coins will be mined (10 million something), in the end, when all coins are mined, those 2.1 million will correspond to 10% of the total.

After 4 years, there's no "miner's tax" any more, but during the first 4 years, it is 20%.

Bitcoin cannot last forever, because of the 10 minute block time, it means all nodes have to be within 10 light minutes.  Mars is outside of that range (it varies between 4 and 24 minutes).  You cannot have bitcoin miners on Mars and on earth, because a block mined on Mars could not reach miners on earth before they mined the next one, and vice versa.

As the earth will be swallowed by the Sun turning into a red giant in about 1 billion of years, that would be the end of bitcoin too.

Hence, bitcoin cannot go interplanetary and certainly not interstellar and hence is doomed to die with the earth, even if our species or whatever is living on earth can leave, it cannot take bitcoin with it.
 

Eh, ZCASH is not an application platform...

The *market cap* is declining. 

http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/zcash/

... unless they were the people selling the coins to themselves, of course...

This crazy price to me is an indication of market manipulation.  No-one in his right mind would ever have paid more than a million dollars for a coin that is fresh.   But if you hold a ZEC and you hold 3000 BTC, then why not buy your own ZEC with your own BTC and have the price charts explode (with the hope that another idiot is going to buy your coin later at $100, instead of the initially planned $15 or so) ?

Funny.  We need to have state and law in anarchy