So if the GPU mined part of the algorithm pays well you don’t think the miners will switch back to ZEC?
As soon as ZEC shows up on the GPU whattomine charts as profitable you will get flooded with gpu traffic, not even talking about the nice hash traffic that will come …
No doubt there are some miners that won’t switch back to ZEC for whatever reason, but these are immediatly and directly replaced by the above mentioned… easy and simple as that…
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You will get exactly the types of miners the PRO Asic camps claimed ALL GPU miners were. Profit hunting auto-switchers. You are never going to see the loyalty from GPU miners Zcash once had, and that is a crying shame, but it’s the projects own fault. You don’t get to spit into the eyes of the community that got you here, then claim we will be back when it’s convenient to you. Life just doesn’t work that way and yes, people will leave money on the table based on principles alone. The purely business types will mine whatever is most profitable, and that’s fine, they will mine and sell as fast as they can to limit risks and maximize profits. That’s what you would get at this point barring an influx possibly of new miners just starting out…until you burn them again.
No I don’t believe any of the developers lost their jobs. (yes I know you meant the GPU folks). Zcash was and is still an investment for miners banking on an increase in value over time. You can crack jokes, be sarcastic about it, mock it, whatever you want to do, doesn’t really matter to me. I covered my expenses, and I hold a good chunk of coins on the off chance value does go ballistic once again.
That being said, trying to pass off a half effort as “appeasing the other side” is just disingenuous when you already know they are gone. It would be one thing to mine coins with GPU’s at a loss and hold as a long term investment, but when that level of effort yields little to nothing to hold…that is just pointless. GPU miners moved on, at least anyone with a serious involvement. I’m sure there are still a few hobbyist’s who are “just learning” so they aren’t actually trying to make any real progress just yet. But eventually they too will either get bored and exit, or move to a coin that has more promise for a GPU centric miner. Which is perfectly fine. As I said before even the ASIC miners are now facing minimal returns and potential losses to mine depending on costs. So much for the “responsible delivery of mining equipment” that was supposed to ensure the market wasn’t saturated…did anyone really believe that was going to happen? I know I sure didn’t. Played out almost exactly the way I said it would…just happened faster than I expected to be honest. Floooooooood…no profit…done. They didn’t Terk Er Jerbs…they made De Jerbs pay so little only the big big big boys can play and make a profit in the end. Decentralization…ha ha ha ha ha ha. Yeah ok.
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Excited as a miner? 20chars…
That’s why I said that @JKDC. They will mine for profits, dump, and move to the next coin. The days of actual support where you had a large group of GPU miners who stayed mined, and held the coins they mined…are pretty much gone. I’m sure you would get some hobbyists who are just starting out and learning, but I seriously doubt you will see the bigger players in any meaningful way long term. Zcash left a bad taste in their mouth when they got pushed out. Some survived and moved to another project, but a lot of them ended up out of business in the end. You would have to be exceedingly naive to believe you would ever garner the same support from a group you damaged like this.
Per @nathan-at-least :
Hello all, back from vacation. While I support the design requirements both @zookozcashand I laid out above for a Zcash upgrade, I’m going to advocate within our company that we postpone Harmony Mining from NU2-Blossom (with NU3 being the next candidate slot).
There are four logistical/technical (not strategic) reasons for doing so:
- We are behind schedule for Blossom / NU2, according to The Network Upgrade Pipeline, Upgrade B 2019. According to that plan we should be in the midst of third party security auditors analyzing our specification while we work on implementation.
- There is no clear leading candidate for block selection design (including difficulty-adjustment), and I believe the “rewards ramp-up” + time-locks are inseparable and thus inter-dependent on the block selection design.
- @daira’s simulation is precise for two designs, and shows in both cases a reduction in rollback protection. Even though @zookozcash clarified that a regression is acceptable, I want a stronger understanding of how much of a regression a given design introduces (and then to weigh that against advantages we’re trading off for).
- I haven’t looked at existing designs yet, and I’m not aware of any company engineers doing so, yet, and our best effort should verify scrutinize similar designs, their security models, and our different requirements and design choices. (Much love to @zawy12 for linking directly into Grin DAA code in this comment! That’s a good start, though I’d want to start by looking for security models / design rationale.)
We’ll continue R&D for these design goals on the NU3 Upgrade A 2020 slot.
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It would be best to research Hybrid Designs or PoS for 2020, seems like a rather near vision approach continuing with the dual mining thing.
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Great stff, Thanks for sharring this information 
We will research that. It seems unlikely that would be ready for NU3, though.
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Just out of curiousity as i rarely check the gifthub channels. Is only this to be done in 2019? No other improvements?
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Several things didn’t need consensus changes: for example shielded n-of-n multisig; rollback attack mitigation; BOLT; and deprecating sending to Sprout addresses. Also there is a bunch of work needed to capitalise on Sapling. But I’m not going to pretend that Blossom isn’t sparser on features than we originally thought it would be. Part of the reason for that is that it isn’t a circuit change, so any idea that required a circuit change needed to be postponed to NU3.
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Sounds pretty parsimoniously in my opinion having in mind a whole year for these improvements/changes.
Out of curiousity, how much funding/resources are used for these NU2 targets?
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It’s not a whole year until specification freeze for Blossom. That’s at the end of February. If there’s a criticism to be made here, it’s that we weren’t overlapping more R&D for the next upgrade while also doing Sapling. But Sapling was so ambitious that that would have been extremely difficult.
What you can do in an upgrade is constrained mainly by technical feasibility within the timescale. It’s indirectly influenced by funding in that developer salaries are a substantial part of the outlay, and you need enough developers on board for the whole period of research, design, implementation, analysis, deployment, and consolidation of ecosystem support, which is at least 2 years (and which we’re still in for Sapling, btw), to make changes in a given upgrade feasible. Given the “crypto winter”, it’s not feasible to hire more developers at the moment.
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In my opinion it’s a whole year work involved. As the upgrades/updated/changes are based yearly the whole worked involved for each upgrade is just a whole year the team is working on a given NU upgrade as it includes after and bevor announcing/finishing the upgrade/update work, not?
It still doesn’t answer my question how much funding are going into a given upgrade/update NU, or are planned to go in. I think it’s just normal to measure a given done work compared with the expense for it. Of course time is the next factor to this and it’s a know factor allready, about 1 year. Leaves only the expense factor open. I guess and hope this is not a secret on how much funds for NU1 have been used and how much is planned for NU2, or?
We haven’t published what we spend funding on, but developer salaries, for example, can’t be attributed to particular upgrades – any such attribution would be completely arbitrary and wouldn’t tell you anything useful. The developer is either hired or they aren’t.
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The entire pipeline might look about a year long, but that’s due to overlapping work on the current upgrade, the next upgrade, and future upgrades:
- Blossom needs to be specified, implemented, audited, and tested within four months (so that it doesn’t delay specification and implementation of NU3).
- In that same time window, we need to write draft ZIPs for NU3 (hopefully the community will contribute some as well!), and then do NU3-oriented R&D and feature selection.
- Alongside this, we need to be spending some time on forward-looking R&D for things that might be considered for NU4 or beyond, but need more research before we can be sure they are feasible.
So it simply isn’t the case that the Blossom upgrade (or any upgrade, for that matter) corresponds to one year’s worth of Zcash Company engineering time, with us doing nothing else.
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I see that Zcash team has great plans for 2019, keep it going!