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[2] Yes they still have that problem, there is no way to verify if no additional coins were created.
^ This is the biggest problem in my opinion. They need a satisfactory answer to this question or else it's going to be pretty problematic down the road. Any significant swing in price (to the downside, of course), will generate all sorts of "OMG, where are all these coins coming from!?" uncertainty...
[1] Zcash will not have a tail emission:
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This will result in severe problems in the future. Stating that there will be Zcash mining rewards for decades is kind of a poor argument, because people take the view / expectation (of no tail emission), discount it to the present and take it into consideration when assessing Zcash.
I disagree with you on this one (and I think I owe you a response on Reddit, now that I think of it). In short, I think this is at best an open question, but if it turns out there is any orphan risk or marginal-cost-per-tx, and/or if miners don't actually compete, longrun, on mostly the commodity block-production anyway, then this just amounts to unnecessary economic meddling, and I hate it that people are so quick to justify this sort of thing.
That said, it's money supply transparency that matters most, so if a coins comes with a tail-emission out of the gate, that's fine (except for the above caveat about it suggesting the devs/community may be prone to over-engineering in the economic realm).
But in Monero's case, you tail-emission supporters broke *the* single biggest implicit contract: don't change the supply dynamics!! I loathe the fact that I bought-in to one economic model in 2014 and then a bunch of economic-meddlers decided to change the model out from under me. Yes, it's small relative to my holdings, but quite the slippery slope. That might as well be fiat, and the move *drastically* reduced my respect for the coin, the developers, and the community.
[2] Zcash will not have a smooth block reward:
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In my opinion, the halving schedule of Bitcoin just creates wild fluctations in price (e.g. bubbles) and (potentially dangerous) large fluctations in hashrate.
I think that's a small potential issue. Transparency is the key; a free-market with good information symmetry should naturally solve for this. What's important is not screwing with key economic variables (you know, like supply) and leaving it to the market to the work out the details.
[3] Zcash will incur the same blocksize issue as Bitcoin, they plan on simply porting everything regarding blocksize from Bitcoin:
Yeah, I think Zooko's missing an opportunity to take the obvious approach of implementing something reasonable like Stephen Pair's simple adaptive size, or something like Monero's alg. By *not* doing something like that, I fear the ZC team agrees too much with bitcoin core-dev's broken ideas about using blocksize as to do econo-engineering.
[4] Due to their "Founder Reward" it is highly likely that Zcash will be subject to FinCEN and therefore miners will be qualified as MSBs, see this discussion:
The founder reward strikes me as too high, and yeah, who knows what the regulatory implications may be.
[5] Zcash cryptography is in its infancy stage and has not been vetted yet, therefore it's more prone to "errorrs". By contrast, the cryptography behind Monero is quite mature and has been vetted over time.
Seems minor to me, but hard for me to truly judge without being a cryptographer.
