Great article, always nice to get a warning in advance.
One thing I've always struggled with, when considering altcoins, is the chance or possibility of a big bitcoin miner pointing their hashing power at the altcoin blockchain for an hour or two, completely messing it up, as a strategic move to kill it as a competitor.
Steem has the proof of stake/witness process, which I understand insulates the steem blockchain from this possibility.
Could zcash theoretically be destroyed like this?
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What do you mean by completely messing it up or destorying it? A huge spike in hashrate can lead to spike in difficulty, but this is not like destroying it, with the more recent difficulty adjustment algorithms used the difficulty is readjusted much more often (up to each block) than it was with Bitcoin and Litecoin for example. Zcash uses such algorithm for difficulty readjustment, though there will be a lot of hashrate right from the start anyway for sure.
As for Steem mining, just take a look at the miner-witness queue at the moment, it has been dominated by two users for a long time and since they are using private GPU miners they are essentially killing the will of anybody else to mine. Fortunately mining does not play a big role in how Steem is secured, but who is to say that somebody with a lot of voting power on Steemit cannot decide to intervene in the top witness list...
Sorry, I wasn't clear and may be missing something, as I'm not great technically.
I meant a malicious 51% attack.
With the interest Zcash is getting I highly doubt that any single miner will be able to pull off a 51% attack, that would mean a tremendous hashrate controlled by a single user. If there is such a user he would most likely be willing to mine and profit from it than using it maliciously. I'm actually yet to see a coin being destroyed by a 51% attack and double spending... though some smaller have suffered from loses from such attacks. It is not like you can just point out your Bitcoin mining farm to mine Zcash, because ZEC uses new and different proof of work algorithm and you can only mine it with CPUs and GPUs. Renting all available hashrate from a service such as NiceHash will also not be enough for 51%... and before trying to double spend coins you need to actually have some, so you need to either buy or mine a significant amount first.
Thanks, that's just the clarification I was hoping for :)