How many of you have already purchased an ASIC or are planning to?

Only Bitcoin Gold, BitcoinZ and LitecoinZ have openly promised to fork to prevent the new Z9 mini from mining on their network. From my reading it looks very unlikely that Komodo or Zencash will fork to prevent ASIC mining.Now that it seems very unlikely Zcash will change its’ algorithm or adjust the parameters in time to prevent ASIC’s on the network how many of you bought a Z9 or plan to?

ASIC is worthless. In a short time the difficulty of mining increases, the profitability of using the device decreases. The market is destroyed, mining is centralized and taken over by several whales. The purchase of this equipment is a path to nowhere!

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Agreed. I refuse to feed Bitmain or any ASIC manufacturer. Your just destroying your own livelihood.

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only greedy sell outs would support bitmain

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already bought the asic, friends already bought asic.
currently running 36 cards at 13kSol/s at ~3.6Kw/H

asic miner has higher incentive to be a good actor than GPU miner because any 51% attack perpetrated on even a single coin of asic algo will cause algo switch on all coins of that algo, instantly making the ASIC mashines worthless.

gpu miners can attak with impunities becaus gpu can be just shifted to new algo no problem. so their hardware investment is secure from loss because of flexibility.

Also, most gpu miners are already causing >51% pools to exist because they are trying to reduce their variance, most coins are already having suprnova or another large pool carrying 51% or more of their nethash, arguing that gpu based decentralization makes more secure is a fallacy

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also, bitmain been mining in shadow pools for months already with the batch they are about to sell, and will just adapt to any changes that are made to algo, and continue shadow mining with new mashine until they recoup the development cost and profiting, so forking off is only a very temporary solution, probably within 2 week of a fork they have develop and begin fabricating adapation, with units coming off the fab line by months end

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Sadly, I have now switched the last of my miners that have been on Zcash since day one over to Monero.

I am not going to get into the politics of this or which eventual outcome for Zcash is the best, but I do firmly believe in decentralization and do not think that any coins (Zcash or otherwise) supported by ASICs from one company is decentralized.

I do hear a lot of arguments over how the network becomes more secure with this increased ASIC hashrate securing it against 51% attacks, but is it really?

You can achieve the same goal of a 51% attack in other ways than the often portrayed method of directly attacking the coin’s blockchain, which would be unwise and negatively effect Bitmain’s profit.

I could go on, but all the arguments have been debated for quite some time and there is no need to repeat them as they only fall upon deaf ears. I simply do not think any single entity having this amount of control over any aspect of a coin is a “good thing” and will no longer support it as it strays away from one of the core concepts of decentralization.

We already have Central Banks in our existing fiat system, so why do we insist on continuing to mirror this “centralization” concept now with our blockchains?

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Im still mining ZEC for now, however each 1 ZEC that comes in to my wallet is quickly traded for a coin that I can believe in… which has mostly been cardano ADA and stellar XLM.

Im very happy with selling my ZEC at the start of April. ZEC appreciated about 60% while cardano appreciated about 150%.

I will continue selling every single ZEC i mine, and will never hold ZEC again. I had been holding ZEC for the majority of my mining time… Never Again.

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Agreed. I have quit mining ZEC directly but obviously will liquidate my holdings when the conditions are right. Just because I no longer support the coin does not mean I will not keep my best interests in mind, which ultimately is all this game is about anyway.

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Asics would be a good project if it were not monopolized by a single company, if there was an open and shared community for development of asics with highly distributable projects It would make sense, In this case the market is highly endangered, if zcash team will not do nothing many of us will leave it.
CPU/GPUs are the only hardware already well distributed and not conditionable from big company, if the distribution of money is their purpose they will change else not… in this sense Monero policy wins, but unfortunately the monetary ecosystem is not based only on mining.

Hope it does not end up being bad choice,

Maybe 500 people will buy and Bitmain will mine with equivalent off 10 000 “mini” ASICs…they hold 95% off hash rate on every ASIC coin …this will be the same …you will trow that ASIC in garbage 3-4 months after you get one…and that 500 people will be in 6 months 100 people in a year 100 people because bitmain will control how much it cost you and how much you can earn or loss…they will control EVERYTHING and you nothing.

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yeah, it’s impossible to post on the internet, and trade at the same time. wish somebody would fix that. amazing to me you feel zcash needs to bend over backwards to appease GPU miners. you’re replaceable!

ZCash just needs to keep their word and keep ASICs out of ZCash.
otherwise I don’t really care anymore, I stopped caring when I realize we were being sold out and backstabbed.

because i, like all those who put faith in ZCash have been back stabbed, so I stand up for myself… i have a backbone…

why are you continually posting off topic replies? the question was have you already purchased an ASIC… have you?

Although that sounds logical, it wouldn’t be even remotely true. ASICs take over a coin, and form very large farms. If one was large enough to claim 51% and attack the network…what could the Dev’s really do about it…fork the Algo? Ok, you just killed ALL your hash power…your coin is now dead in the water. Brilliant.

A Single GPU farm pulling off a 51% attack…not very probable, and would require such a huge investment it would be counter productive to attempt. A bad actor Pool, yeah that could happen. But the miners could then just switch to another pool and leave that bad pool dead in the water, no action by the Devs necessary. The power and control is with the community, not a single entity. GPUs are less of a risk no matter how you look at them. ASICs on any coin will eventually look like Bitcoin…where Bitmain personally controls ~30% of the hash power in their own massive farms. That doesn’t include all the other farms that point to AntPool. There is no way to ever justify allowing one company to wield so much influence over a market segment.

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here’s what’s irritating to me: Let’s talk about ASIC mining - #953 by zooko zash seems to bending over backwards trying to appease GPU miners, and you guys still post stuff like this.

Bending over backwards? You mean keeping true to their word? Yeah, we are demanding aren’t we? We put the effort into the coin, invested in it, stuck with it through 1.5 years and now we dare look at the coin dev’s and say “You made a commitment, you need to keep your word”. How dare we right?
Man, I get it, you could care less about miners, that’s fine. But take your head out of the sand. This coin didn’t just pop up yesterday with value and purpose. It took people like us to get it where it is now, believing, investing, and mining. Don’t come into the thread all dismissive like miners were something you scrapped off your shoe. There would be nothing for you to “trade” if we didn’t come to the party to begin with.

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yes, bending over backwards… zooko posted he might even consider coin inflation just to appease GPU miners.

We mine because we earn. We invest relatively a lot and we have relatively large operating costs. That’s the PoW consensus - you pay a lot, earn a good price. With an investment of $20,000, you have computing power of 10 kSol/s and you earn $1000 per month. Developers let ASICs into our garden. For the consensus to be maintained, the difficulty of mining increases in a short time. You will not earn 1000 bucks a month by maintaining your GPU rig. What’s more, the crooks who bought ASICs, despite the expected rapid enrichment, spit in their beard. Increased mining difficulty means that the invested $2,000 will not generate a return in two months and in two years. What to do? Buy ASICs. The difficulty increases again, the profitability decreases, the wrong circle of buying more ASICs continues. Until what time? Once you have invested $20,000 in Bitmain hardware, it turns out that you are not able to get 1000 USD per month, as you did on a dozen or so graphics cards before. This is a road to nowhere and on the part of miners greed and stupidity, and on the part of developers, both. Stop ASICs and centralization, don’t kill community consensus.

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