Zooko Wilcox

fans.

I don't have measurements of the people because there isn't any way to find out.

If someone in China goes and buys a whole bunch of Zcash tokens and starts using them, there's no way I can tell that they did that.

Oh, I know that because there are millions of dollars worth transacted on markets that serve Chinese people.

And because I talked to the operators of those markets and they say that they have lots and lots of users signing up.

And I just returned from a trip to China where I met a whole bunch of Zcash fans.

Yeah, you can go to Yunbi, Y-U-N-B-I.

That's a Chinese exchange.

But there's also a lot of Zcash fans in France and Russia and Argentina and Brazil.

And so that's another measure of success for me is getting sort of roots put down in different markets in different countries.

Because that's one of the advantages of this technology is that it's borderless, like the Internet.

Right.

So the strategy was, you're exactly right that the purpose of the strategy was to try to attract users from many different places.

And the strategy was that we're going to basically give out free money, right?

So we've invented this thing that can serve as money if people choose to value it like money.

And it's open and distributed and anyone can connect to it.

And now the question is, who starts with the money?

Some other...

crypto projects have had what they call a pre-mine, where the founders of the project start with more of the money, or they've had what's very, very popular, which is absolutely booming right now, is a token sale or pre-sale or an ICO, where the founders start with all the tokens, and then they sell, and then they have an auction or a sale, and they sell all the tokens to the public.

And what we did instead was we started with nobody having any of the money, and we just had mining, which was an innovation that we copied from Bitcoin, so that anyone who has a sufficiently powerful computer connected to the internet can participate in building the network, and they get rewarded with newly generated coins.