Does anyone else feel like we shouldn’t change the zcash algorithm?
If the community splinters into a GPU driven fork of the coin to just run away from ASICs that will always catch up, should we just not all band together to continue building zcash strength and awareness.
I really like this project for the community that it comes with. Something about Zookos vision, and the equihash algorithm, the 0 knowledge proofs, and other aspects of zcash that make it so strong.
If a increased hash rate continues to drive this project forward, that’s a good thing for all of us. I’ve seen other projects fork and it weakens the community and support for the coin.
So instead of bitching about ASIC’s vs GPU’s
Lets just all get together and do this! Let’s get it
Changing Equihash parameters from (200,9) to (144,5) would actually be returning to the intended parameters at launch.
Prior to launch, the built-in CPU solver was not optimized, so there was a fear that solutions with (144,5) would take too long to find, given the block interval of 2.5 mins. Also, we didn’t know how much of a speedup GPU miners offered.
Changing the PoW parameters can also have benefits such as improving verification time, which would help Ethereum Solidity contracts to verify Zcash blocks, as well as tphones and constrained devices such as Raspberry Pi’s.
If someone discovered a security bug in the PoW, we would also have to change it.
Loyal ZCash miner here, been mining ZEC exclusively 24/7 over a year. Two things brought me here:
1 - Privacy…gotta love that
2 - The “perception” of ASIC resistance created by the ZCash peeps long ago.
I dont want to be forced to eat a turd sandwich with this ASIC nonsense. BTW, there’s a thread with a squillion posts on this debating it ad nauseam. There’s no reason to start another one.
bitcartel, your thoughts on the equihash algo are very insightful. However, I wonder how long it will take bitmain to modify their ASIC’s to run at 144,5 instead of 200,9?
ultimately, the asic resistant aspects of zcash and the equihash algo was one of the main reasons many of us decided to mine ZEC imo.
I guess what I’m saying this that we can run away from the ASIC’s (which we all knew were coming eventually) or we can face this thing head on.
If the Z9 which produces 10K Sol/s was not MADE FOR US the zcash mining community, then I do not know who it’s intended for. Fighting this thing is like taking on a cannon with a bow and arrow. It wont work in the long run, unless we use the cannons ourselves…
So why don’t we all amp up our hash rates, and start moving ZEC into a top 10 market cap position where it belongs. We’re still < $1B market cap as of this writing.
After all, we are talking about specialized hardware that was built to help us run this algo.
Why mess with a good thing, when we can do the complete opposite and embrace it.
I maybe wrong, but I rather see these things in the hands of the community than some corporate mining farm that will destroy our interests entirely.
for me the situation is as following, I`m a private guy and I don’t want to get rich, but I want to make some money, for power and others. I want to use a ASIC miner to host it effectivly outside my home.
If zChash is changing their algo, my invest is lost and I will stop mining.
There are other coins you can mine on equihash, not only Zcash
nobody promised that zcash will stay asic friendly, neither the other projects on equihash
when you buy an asic its always risky business, you got even a warning on the Bitmain page about it.
why the hell should a multi-milion dolar business like Zcash keep/adjust their algo due a profit wish of a random guy? Just no logic and without any common sense.
If you are not ok with the risks hardware takes with it, just buy coins instead of hardware.
this doesn’t change anything. A company and/or successfull project should make their decisions for the projects favour, not about the wishes/profits of a handfull miners, no matter if gpu, asic, fpga, cpu or whatever.
At this point I think a move from PoW to PoS is the best scenario for everyone. Doing this would level the playing field substantially so that GPU miners can still be a relevant and part of the community. PoS would increase the amount of memory required for the ASIC to the point that external memory chips would need to be used. This would lower the performance of ASIC architecture, but would by no means render them useless or prevent future ASIC development. In addition, there are several security concerns pertaining to the use of PoW as recently pointed out by Ethereum’s founder Vitalik Buterin. He said the following:
“PoW is extremely expensive, and furthermore is fundamentally vulnerable to 51% spawn camping attacks with no effective strategy for recovering from one. Selfish mining is profitable starting at 25-33% hashpower, and 51% censorship attacks are definitely profitable.”
Is this alone not a reason to consider a move from PoW to PoS? When we add in the issue of centralization and exponential increase of network hash rate and difficulty due to ASICS, I think there’s more than enough ammunition to make this argument. At this point, I’m not sure why the ZCash team is hesitating, unless there’s some unknown security or technical reason. Having more folks in the ZCash community has many benefits and also helps facilitate the ultimate goal of ZEC being adopted as an actual currency that’s used daily.
I will add some arguments and reasons why the future should be POS and nothing else:
no more cheap specialised hardware needed, every cell phone, pc, laptop should be enough in the long run.
with the above you eleminate one of the biggest hurden, expensive hardware, opens doors for wider spread.
no more mining pool middle man needed which in theory create themself a possible threat for a 51% attack.
no more only computer technical advanced people are able to mine, again enforcing wider spread.
unfair starting positions are nearly eleminated as cheap electicity cost doesn’t realy matter anymore.
no more total useless “waste” of electricity. Have in mind we fund and finance here some of the biggest monopolists in every country
real wide spread, everybody can have a staking wallet, not only a closed community of miners.
fresh cash flow. As soon as the average joe without expensive hardware and technical knowledge can take part in mining “staking” new cash will flow into the crypto.
no more sponsoring/financing unfair asic producer practices (secret/private mining).
no more mining under unfair conditions, applies for both, GPU’s/Asics as both face unfair conditions vs big mining farms.
enchanced security (51% attack, time spoof attack, * attacks)
direct investments into the project instead of hardware and hardware producers
more project loyality of stakers/coin holders, no more easy dumping like miner rewards currently.
easier project/code changes as nothing is anymore related to a given algo.
less centralization, mining pools, producers, farms are not more a decentralization threat.
Even though I have one Z9 mini, I think the algorithm should still be changed so that Zcash works better with Ethereum and/or other performance optimizations not related to mining.
Whatever algorithm is decided upon should:
Force miners to only mine Zcash
Be ASIC-friendly and easy to implement (multiple manufacturers)
With some degree of certainty, last for at least a decade.
Two of you guys are already mining with a Z9 Mini, so how does it benefit you to change the algo parameters from 200,9 to 144,5? It will dummy your Z9 investments and do what, fracture a part of the Zcash community. I just don’t see the benefit guys, help me understand.
