We are happy to announce our support for this fork. We plan to add ycash to our flypool.org mining pool and launch a dedicated blockchain explorer at y.zcha.in.
See our announcement on twitter: https://twitter.com/etherchain_org/status/1118458199575879680
Oh we got a fork for commodity hardware mining. Interesting.
Lets face it any ZEC miner that will be mining YCASH won’t be holders. Their trust is severed.
Hmm, I wouldn’t assume that. People who’ve lost trust in the Electric Coin Company and/or the Zcash Foundation wouldn’t necessarily mistrust the people or entities behind Ycash.
Granted, I’m not one of those people, so maybe I’m guessing wrong.
@acityinohio I appreciate you raising these points. Based upon ongoing discussions with a handful of miners, mining pool operators, and engineers, we have decided to launch in July with different (n, k) Equihash parameters. The particular values of n and k have not yet been decided.
To all the miners and Equihash experts out there: We would love to hear your thoughts about which (n, k) Equihash parameters Ycash should choose in order to best incentivize GPU miners to mine Ycash.
Definitely agree that a different address format would improve UX, and that UX is important. I’m not sure that it could result in lost funds, especially if Ycash changes the nVersionGroupId, which we added in Overwinter to protect against lost funds during friendly forks and network upgrades.
Howard just replied to this downthread.
(TANGENT ALERT)
The only thing that I want to add is that measuring “security” by PoW cost seems wrong. Or to put it another way, if that’s the right measure, then we currently have a critical failure to achieve real security. For example, https://www.crypto51.app/ currently shows that the cost to (at least temporarily) control 51% of the ZEC hashrate should be approximately $21,612. (If you could find the miners willing to rent or sell to you.)
That’s nothing! $21,000 ? If that is in any way an accurate measure of the cost to successfully attack, then it is about 1000X too small for the way Zcash is used today, which is moving millions or tens of millions of dollars per day.
So as far as I can tell, if our current security parameter is 1/1000 of where it needs to be, then reducing it by half or doubling it makes no significant difference to real world security. That, or the security parameter is actually misunderstood.
(END TANGENT)
Wait, why is that? Even for people who use zaddrs? I can imagine there might be some pretty subtle interactions between blockchains that could lose some privacy (my “Squeaky Gold Attack” — which I’m very proud of discovering — is all about this effect, but the take-away lesson from Squeaky Gold is that the same risks apply even when there is only one canonical blockchain), but my off-the-cuff assumption is that it would not seriously impact a user’s privacy if they used strictly z2z transactions. If they hold their funds in taddrs then yes, there might be some serious implications — I haven’t really thought it through. But what did you mean?
“Both” communities? Maybe we can have just one community, including people that use both blockchains (as well as various other tools and technologies). I certainly feel like Howard is a member of my community.
Confirmed, Ycash is changing both the address format and nVersionGroupId.
first you need a so called “community” using 1 of the block chains. zcash barely cracks $1-3M total volume… my main gripe with ycash is is does nothing new, or interesting. this will make it more difficult for truly innovative future forks.
not a very good RT/favorite ratio on this twitter post. at this point doubt i’ll even waste my time moving around ZEC to claim ycash. what’s the point of this so called friendly fork?i’ve seen you posting about your zcash fork, @Bitzec all you need to do is “friendly fork” zcash. get rid of transparent addresses, and name to fork “zerocash”. we might as well have a shitton of friendly forks battling one another. ycash is boring, i see an opportunity for you, fren!
I think marketing team should broadcast this project in Twitter more, I do not hear anyone talking about this over there. This could be a good chance for Zcash to pump and we could have some more money.
I took the time to look further into the issue and made some calculations. It turned out it’s interesting to investigate/research this issue.
Calculations and Conclusions:
1.) Low to average Cost Raw calculation based on low/average equihash prices on todays hashrate:
ZEC Network hashrate right now: 3.56 Gsol/s
51% of the Network hashrate: 1.78 Gsol/s
lowest price per Msol/s on nicehash: 0.01 BTC per day = $55.56 per day for 1 Msol/s
average price per Msol/s on nicehash: 0.02 BTC per day = $111.13 per day for Msol/s
1780 Msol/s needed per day x $111.13 = $197,811 per day
$197,811 per day = $8,242 per hour
2.) High Cost Raw calculation based on higher equihash prices on yesterdays high network hashrate:
ZEC hashrate yesterday peek: 4.5 Gsol/s
51% of the network hashrate: 2.295 Gsol/s
highest price per msol/s on nicehash: 0.0317 BTC per day = $176.14 per day for 1 Msol/s
2295 Msol/s needed per day x $176.14 = $404,241 per day
$404,241 per day = $16,843 per hour
3.) Extreme Cost Raw calculation based on extreme equihash prices and even higher network hashrate:
ZEC hashrate assumed: 5.0 Gsol/s
51% of the network hashrate: 2.55 Gsol/s
fictive price per msol/s 0.05 BTC per day = $277.82 per day for 1 Msol/s
2550 Msol/s needed per day x 277.82 = $708,441 per day
$708,441 per day = $29,518 per hour
Final Calculation:
The 3 above examples are only Raw calculations based on price per Msol/s and needed hashrate and are NOT the final calculation as the mining rewards are not included yet and will be calculated below. Not even adding the calculation for example 1 as the attacker at a Msol/s price of 0.01 would make even a profit only from mining rewards.
Example 2:
51% network hashrate costs: $404,241 per day = $16,843 per hour
Mining Rewards: $154,357 per day = $6,431 per hour
Final Attack Cost: $249,884 per day = $10,412 per hour
Example 3:
51% nettwork hashrate costs: $708,441 per day = $29,518 per hour
Mining Rewards: $164,894 per day = $6,870 per hour
Final Attack Cost: $543,547 per day = $22,648 per hour
Having in mind that there are no electricity costs involved the theoretical calculation here and at About | Crypto51 seem to be pretty accurate and the costs are just like that in case rented hashpower is available which seems soon or late the case (See ETC as an example).
Some final thoughts on this issue
If i had to choose an equihash algo i would go with the minex coin parameters with 96,5.
But why using equihash at all? There are way better, more innovative, more asic resistant algos developed these days.
Just one example i saw some days ago:
The Terahash algorithm based on sha3 and optimized RAM hashing function. At least you need a strong CPU (>4 Cores) and a lot of RAM (>8 GB).
Good combinations of Cores / RAM are:
04 Cores /// 08 GB RAM
08 Cores /// 16 GB RAM
12 Cores /// 24 GB RAM
16 Cores /// 32 GB RAM
Such requirements would pretty much ensure asic resistance, fair mining and even a good portion of network security. As said, just as an example.
But i guess equihash is prefered as it needs just some copy&paste corrections and no real development. Reminds me somehow about Verge and their copy and paste skills …
I fail to see how this should make ZEC pump to be honest. Maybe, and only maybe this will result in a short spike right bevor the ZEC snapshot which will immediatly fall back. That’s the usual scenario of forks and airdrop projects. As ycash doesn’t add anything innovative to it i doubt it will be different.
I would say it’s even a good thing nothing is broadcasted. Having in mind a possible trademark violation with an allready registered (at least claimed to be so) ycash name by another financial project which owns the ycash[.]com domain it would result in a pure failure in case ycash is forced to change the name.
Than we have the “friendly” reminder that Zcash doesn’t hold it’s promises, neither on asic resistance nor on the Founders Reward putting Zcash in a negative light. I absolutly fail to see how this adds anything positive to Zcash at all, leave alone a longer price pump.
Very good idea… tbh my first idea was to make a so called now friendly fork … on orginal zcash chain … first problem was that new syncing nodes even zcash orginal nodes where kicked out by zcash chain because of some bug on 2.0 i think … but than if you use the original chain you would inherit all possible inflation bugs before sapling … new chain would use just the second mpc also … anyway i could airdrop zcash holders anyway … 20:1 for example.
But i dont like the idea of removing a great feature like the t adresses.
almost paid zcash devs what their work is worth ; )
One problem with (96,5) is that Gminer has an Nvidia implementation for it, but not an AMD implementation:
If there is other mining software out there that supports (96,5) for AMD, I’d be interested in hearing about it.
Edit: lolMiner supports (96,5) for AMD.
I believe Bitcoin Gold uses Equihash 144,5 , I think lolminer and EWBF both support it.
Zero currency uses Equihash 192,7 which requires 2+GB per thread (!) on the GPU. Optiminer has support for AMD and Nvidia with those parameters: Optiminer/Zero v1.2.0 (AMD+NVIDIA GPU) Linux+Windows
Think zcash electric coin company should delete this announcment (iam reading anoying everytime) alltogether.
If you realy want to make fast money you have to come with some much better idea …
Just sayn
Yours, or Howards ? 
Haha … mine is running allready …no way back no more ; )
Howard should look at other zcash forks all seem to fail prety much … with 144.5 or whatsoever equihash params or should we call it asicshash… if zcash devs would say enought to that founders reward % and do something to get 100% of that piece to build something with that zcash …for the next 2 years…that would be cool. but dont seem like there will be any change coming from most of them … the fr they have will be gone soon … i dont think the foundation will be able to run something useful without funding… maybe it got alil offtopic now… must be my emotions : l
There are several Equihash 96,5 miners forAMD cards around:
Lolminer: lolMiner 1.64: Fastest Kaspa miner in market
Optiminer: https://github.com/Optiminer/OptiminerEquihash
Didn’t look further if there are even other, just the first 2 google results i got …
Evolution & survival are just a question of time, not all projects make it & there are plenty of dead coins out there already.
I have a healthy respect for Howards project. He’s posted many times, sticks to his principles & is actually doing something instead of just complaining. Its a huge step & to do it properly takes time, effort & money - plus he’s being careful to make sure it plays nicely with Zcash.
Its anyones guess what will happen years from now. My 2 zat opinion is projects without a dedicated team wont survive long & the skills required for zk-tech are extremely rare.
