Let’s talk about ASIC mining

Regardless of semantics about it, Zooko himself has acknowledged that Zcash has made such implications to the community and never worked to act otherwise or correct the narrative.
This horse has been beat to death on the forum so I’m sorry for posting it up again, I get that it’s a LONG thread of posts to read through but it’s in there if people want to go looking.

Tonic1080, you know people are not going to back up and look and it’s not like you to give links (hard proof) to back up what information you are trying to make me believe, (the earth is flat darn it!, and when at the end, its a giant instant tunnel like in pac man that puts us on the other side)

I believe the post was he was told by experts that that EquiHash was not ASIC resistant but he was also told that it was resistant by others. So he choose to believe the side that said it was resistant. He then stated it looks like he was wrong and should have listened to the experts who said it would one day be solved.

So without ASICs being massed yet, the difficulty of Zcash has been slowly rising. Using your current rig and if no ASICs joined and ramped up difficulty, lets assume DOUBLE the current difficulty for pricing(big jump)…About $12 a day. so you are makeing about $25 right now.

Lets see what ASICs will make at a modest 5x difficulty which we will easily hit once they start massing on the network…About $6 a day…and wow with Zcash being down again, Z9 mini only makes $31 a day currently. Down $10 a day from a week ago, Good luck to the people buying Z9s.

So you would make more if ASICs stay off the network, and Zcash stays to its word of ASIC resistant. Why would you want ASICs to push your GPUs out? You will lose in the end…Already 70+ days to ROI on Z9 and only the price of Zcash has changed…

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I believe the Z9 will likely be about 120 day ROI due to the VERY likely significant increase in difficulty once they arrive. This is based on observation of other crypto that got overtaken by ASIC. Generally difficulty increase about 50% or more within the first month and continues increasing sharply. This is a risky time-frame because Sapling is scheduled for about 4 months from now and there hasn’t been any comment on how long it will take to fork ZEC if they choose to. Monero has shown it is possible to do something quickly so it doesn’t NEED to wait until December.

Currently, 30 and 90 day difficulty is down about 4%-6% at the moment for ZEC.

Another note of course is that you can probably count that ASICs being run by Bitmain are already on the network. When Monero did the emergency fork, the difficulty was cut in half. Maybe not all was ASIC but there is a lot of belief that a significant portion was.

So here is another problem with ASICs. You can order a ASIC and you have to wait a month or 2, then while waiting, the coin you were buying it for says we are forking away from ASICs. Now you are stuck with an expensive space heater when it arrives.

This is what they did for Monero, pretty shady business tactic to sell them AS IS and with no warning on thier page that they might be useless when they arrive. Why would you currently support ASICs, they are so much risk right now. I guess people just see the carrot and not the stick?

FPGA miner for Equihash claims 10x. Please discuss on thread here:

I think it’s important to keep in mind that mining with PoW coins were designed to be variable. If mining becomes unprofitable from time to time, some miners will drop out and others will mine at a loss, which in turn reduces the difficulty. When prices increase, or the difficulty drops to become more profitable, those miners will start back up.

Mining was also never meant to be a source of guaranteed profit. It’s a competition that has projection and risk involved. Hardware advancements and new mining software have always and will always attempt to gain an edge in this process. It’s nothing new - the ASIC is, as it was for Bitcoin, the next stage of this process in my opinion.

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Yup, and I think that’s why they increased the order limit from 1 to 50. I don’t think they were getting as high or market adoption as they thought they would. So instead they are letting those willing to buy to get more.
Though, I think the Z9 has broader uses available for other coins that have not yet declared they will take ASIC resistance or not (like HUSH) so it’s not an entire loss for those people if ZEC decides to emergency fork.
basically all sums up to, even with risk…“The ASICs are coming! The ASICs are coming!”

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Oh boy…a “philosophy of mining” post…a dangerous rabbit-hole indeed. I have a nice response to that (shocker I know) but probably should be in another thread (or even probably the Market sub-forum as it pertains a lot to the price, volume, and adoption).

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Does anybody know how many Z9 mini are on sale ?

I guess nobody really knows for sure. However, most times it’s mentioned that a batch there is about 10.000 units. I have no idea if it’s true or not, honestly, just writting it here as it’s the number most often seen/mentioned when it comes to releases/batches.

So Let’s assume 10 000 units, that means 100 000 000 sol/s, while the network hashrate is 400-500 Msol/s.
So, the ASIC’s share would be 15-20% of the network.
Even if the numbers double, 25-30% of the network, I don’t see this like a threat of decentralization…

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interesting pont @Dwarf :thinking:

We can debate this for years.
Let’s just fork off video cards and ASICS altogether.
I mean. I keep hearing about decentralization.
Have you looked at gpu prices lately. Back at msrp!!!
These huge mining farms are just going to start scooping these up by the hundreds now that they are affordable.
They are going to crush my two rigs.
I think we should go back to cpu mining. That’s real
Decentralization, everyone on the world can essentially mine again.
Who wants to regress with me???


This is a sarcastic post. As I am for ASICS as I believe they are the natural progression of a healthy ecosystem in a growing successful project.
Even though I am a current gpu miner, I will buy z9’s and point my rigs elsewhere to help another coin start it’s journey

This would be valid IF all Asics of this batch would mine Zcash, but i doubt every Z9 would be on Zcash. But to be fair we as well do not know the exact batch size. I have done some searches and as said, the most common believes are 10.000 units per batch, but to be fair and honest, no evidience and proof for that either. But 10.000 units is not a small amount as well.

That’s one thing many aren’t thinking.
Looks like zen cash are waiting a while
Komodo is not forking and I think hush is not either
Also zclassic which is almost dead, but still has value and not forking.
These machines will not be focused on zcash.
The majority…yes I would say.

Or the 5 people who looked at your question didn’t really know the answer and those of us who “might” be able to answer have been pre-occupied in these threads. I’m sorry you didn’t get a response as fast as you wanted (1 day old post). Try to be a little patient, your not the only person asking questions, making suggestion, debating policy, etc. I’m sure “someone” will see and answer, help, direct you to what you need.

Wow. Zooko seems to be “out of touch”. Kudos to @daira.

That’s batch one.

What about batch two? Batch three? Batch four?

What about the full size Equihash ASIC?

Given the discrepancy between GPU and ASIC hashrates, I don’t think GPUs will be able to profitably mine Zcash after a few months.

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I did some research the last hours as i got curious as well how much units a batch is. From the information i found, beside the common used 10.000 Units it seems that Bitmain is actually not releasing batch sizes of the same amount but splits it more like "Total possible asic production versus actual demand.

I found some statements:
First D3 Batch only 250 Units, while the 2nd D3 Batch allready had 3.300 Units and the last batch for 2017 35.000 units sold over several months.

While the batches for the S9 SHA256 miner seem to be steady at 10.000, maybe because it’s their working horse.

For the L3+ i found 500 units for the octomber batch and i definatly would have awaited a bit more here.

The APW PSU Powersupply Batches are 5.000 from October including 2.500 unsold from the August Batch.

P.S.: I’am far way from saying these are exact numbers but they seem to come from a good informed source (no guarantee of course). The same source is as well claiming that the X3 is still mining on Monero by the way with extraction of the new compiled X3 firmware code.

However, even with these numbers and digts we still have no idea how many units for a given model are made, but i’am pretty sure it’s not a fixed batch unit amount now.

Edited for some additional information on the bitmain blog which seems to valide my guess that they have no fixed batch amount of units but produce more or less on demand:

  1. We do not sell our machines continually. We sell in batches, based on our production schedule. When a batch is sold out there are no more sales until the next batch is announced.

  2. We do not reveal the number of miners we are producing, or future production plans. If such information is advertised or claimed, it is not from us and is not reliable. Customers should not make purchase plans or decisions based on such claims.

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