Let’s talk about ASIC mining

It’s quite legitimate to point out the potential conflict of interest of founders’ reward recipients in any decision that could lead to a chain split. In the interests of accuracy, however, the potential gain is determined by the total price of the split coins, relative to the price as it would have been without a split. This is likely less than double if previous chain split events (e.g. ETH/ETC and BTC/BCH) are indicative, although every chain split is somewhat different. It also applies to ZEC holders in general, not only founders’ reward recipients. (It is correct that some founders’ reward recipients are significant holders of ZEC, and that founders’ reward recipients would receive coins on both chains after the split, subject to any subsequent consensus rule change affecting this.)

Note that in general, I am flat-out opposed to chain splits except in the direst of circumstances. I have found @zooko’s conduciveness to them to be alarming, ever since the “friendly fork” blog post which I expressed significant internal opposition to. I believe that chain splits are generally harmful to the community of a coin for many reasons:

  • They split the development and user communities, duplicating effort and fostering unnecessary conflict.
  • They increase the overall maintenance overhead (preparation for upgrades, mitigation of attacks, etc.)
  • They split mining power, weakening both sides of the fork against 51% attacks.
  • They distort the market in the short term, creating an artificial price hike as people attempt to obtain coins immediately before the split in order to have them duplicated.
  • They require users to perform extra work to redeem their coins on both forks (or else lose some of the value of their stake), which is a severe usability cost.
  • They’re particularly harmful to privacy-oriented coins because they split the anonymity set.

I do not think that @zooko’s position on chain splits has fully taken into account these drawbacks, and I am absolutely opposed to any intentional action to split Zcash between ongoing “ASIC-accepting” and “ASIC-resisting” forks. (Technically, any upgrade is a split, but the whole point of our strategy for network upgrades, as implemented in Overwinter and associated policy decisions, is to make the non-upgraded branch of the block chain economically irrelevant.)

[Disclosure of interest: I am a founders’ reward recipient and ZEC holder.]

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Daira , you are a true hero .
And more than 90% of the community supports you

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Thanks for throwing in there @daira.

While I understand the importance of not pulling core team members away from development work, it’s refreshing to hear any input from ZecashCo that doesn’t inflame the community.

I know answering your question regarding Flypool is only incentivizing further off-topic discussion so i will try and keep this simple and specific as to why it does not belong here.

  1. The existence of ASICs does not cause a pool to go over 51%.
  2. The a pool going over 51% is not dependent on ASICs.

Neither of these topics are causal to each other, purely correlative.These are both issues that need to be addressed but they are separate issues that are not dependent upon each other to exist.

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Why didn’t you formulate it reverse?

  • The existence of Asics on equihash caused flypool going below 51%
  • The pool that went below 51% is not dependent on Asics
  • The pool that made that happen is an Asic pool

Sound more right to me and fits as a side note perfectly into the topic.
As it countains 2 of the main reasons of this topic “asic and mining”. No idea why you think that a mining pool and the asics on exactly this mining pool should not be part of this discussion?!

A warning to many of you: Stop being jerks to each other. Emotions run high, I understand that, but it is against our CoC for you to insult each other or impugn each other’s motives.

If your posts are repeatedly flagged for needless combativeness, you will be banned. ProwdClown was way over the line, so take that as an example of how NOT to conduct yourself.

If you want to discuss moderation policy, here is a separate thread for it: Moderator Discussion - Adherence to the Code of Conduct

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Well, this fightings are partly your fault, because we (pro-GPU/pro-ASIC) do not see a clear direction from ZCashCo/ZCashFoundation on topic matter

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I guess that’s a fair point. A lot of people want an immediate decision from the leadership, and that’s not going to happen. Hence frustration. I don’t blame people for being upset by the uncertainty.

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well put. Particularly in an industry where Fear Uncertainty and Doubt are such a strong forces…emotions will run exceptionally high when the source of the FUD for the community comes directly from the organization itself. Even more compounded when related to the existing FUD regarding ASICs people have been concerned about for a long while.

Welcome to the moderator’s circle. Good luck and have fun. :wink:

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Well, this fightings are partly your fault, because we (pro-GPU/pro-ASIC) do not see a clear direction from ZCashCo/ZCashFoundation on topic matter

It is also their fault that they made this forum available to us and for creating Zcash in the first place! If they didn’t do that none of this 2k+ posts would’ve existed to begin with.

Srsly now, the only problem here is the tribal "pro-GPU vs “pro-ASIC” talk. If you frame the conversation in such manner, people will separate in two opposing teams like tribes. And when these groups are put in jeopardy they will fight like tribes.

So, to preserve the integrity of the community, we should leave our personal motives and preferences and focus towards what is best for Zcash’s future. It is clear that people’s interested will be damaged along the way, and some of us stand to loose some value in the short term. And if we focus on the long haul and support Zcash’s team we’ll gain (edited to *might gain :P) a lot more in the future.

I personally support them for not reacting to the ASIC issue without consideration and that they are taking their time to research the pro-s and the cons of the situation. You can call this creating “FUD” I call it moderate caution and careful exploration of possibilities.

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Tribes? Not all of us are against the takeover of the ZEC network by ASICs simply because we have GPUs. In fact most of us have GPU based gear that can be sold for more than we paid for it and purchase ASICs if we wanted to. However many of us oppose the ZEC network being dominated by government influenced corporations running specialized mining equipment because we understand what that ultimately means to the project - an abandonment of the original premise and compromise to the original mission of privacy and censorship resistance.

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It’s important to clarify this is a GPU vs. Bitmain argument and it really isn’t two sided. The majority of the community does not support ASIC involvement and most of the others are more or less indifferent. There is a relatively small group that actively desire ASIC use. None of those people should ever fool themselves to think there isn’t some personal motivation behind any of these positions.

Those most concerned (myself included) is not because they want hasty action…it’s because the organization has effectively said nothing will be done about it for months and even then there has been no comment towards actually opposing or resisting ASIC integration at all. Whereas that is the desire from the majority of the community.

By that point, most of those miners who have supported ZEC since the beginning will no longer be part of the community. Effectively, the damage will be done.

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Tribes?

Like tribes, that is the definition of the tribal talk. If there weren’t any tribal talk, there would not be any personal attacks and the issue would’ve been sorted on forum community level by scientific method and common sense. Some guys, like myself, even attempted to do that and to offer long term possible solutions, but were buried under a mountain of comments that were nothing more than personal preference and unsubstantiated opinions.

Srsly, look the 3 posts that proceed the one I wrote above, one could not ignore how biased each one of them is.

Hate to brake your heart. All mining equipment is made in the same country and under the same government and corporations. China. Can’t blame them for their production skills. They are superior in that beyond belief

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I was looking at it from a “if I wanted to mine secretly and not be noticed”…wouldn’t it be a good idea to spread it around the pools. Would make it very improbable of detection that way. Just a thought really.

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ROFL…so their conference fails to meet expectations and they right away publish something to blame someone/something else. Damn right it’s an opinion piece, one that hold less meaningful content in it than many posts on this thread. Did they ever stop to think maybe their narrative is the wrong one instead of looking for blame somewhere else?
This article has very little actual content and is little more than a vague opinion. Very much par for the course at coindesk lately.

Maybe that would have been a better post for the price speculation thread? Definitely something worth talking about but not sure I should have responded to it here.

Actually not, in theory for sure, but in practice every pool owner would see the hashrate of a given user and how many workers are connected and that way making a conclusion about how big the hashrate of a given connected miner is and identifying them as Asics.

That’s the reason they use always their own hidden private pool.

Actually this part of the article would fit in imo:

“Permissionless” cryptocurrency purists accuse established enterprises of co-opting the technology to produce watered down blockchain models that protect their incumbency. For their part, the enterprises critique the early adopters as naïve idealists whose complex solutions are impractical in the real world."

Plus, now Antminer Z9 mini is open to the public, there is no need for BITMAIN to hide their hashrate among other pools.

Also, Flypool makes about 57.6 ZEC on a daily basis with their 1% fee, and I don’t think that BITMAIN want to be part of that.

[Moderation edit by @daira: deleted combative statement directed at @Absolute39.] An individual is always solely responsible for what they say, to include the decision to respond while emotionally overstimulated to inflammatory comments made by another or perceived torpor on the part of company officials.
To that last point, while I’m personally disappointed that more research and analysis wasn’t done on this topic prior to the announcement of the Z9, I am, ironically at this point, glad that this issue is being considered in a methodical and comprehensive fashion. Ultimately, I think we should be most interested in progress, not simply motion.

Edit: Have things really become so bad that focused, restrained criticism (describing someone’s statement as ‘bunk’), in any form, is deemed ‘combative’? I directed my counter at his argument and refrained from any sort of ad hominem/personal attack, and it’s still censored. I just don’t quite get it.

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