Let’s talk about ASIC mining

You have mentioned previously how you were told a few years ago, that keeping something ASIC resistant was not possible. You didn’t believe them, you did what you wanted even though you were getting the same advice/information from separate sources. In the end they were right, and you have admitted as such.

It’s now 2018 and you’re repeating the past. Ignore what is being said to / asked of you to do and do what you want. Isn’t there a word or phrase for someone who repeats the same pattern and expects a different result?

If the majority of the Zcash community is saying, at least 1 time, make a change and break ASIC, why would you not? Doing so, in the end, makes you a better CEO no matter the outcome. Again referring to a previous post of yours, isn’t that what you are trying to do/learn?

An additional question I would like to ask @zooko since there is going to be a board of directors elected soon. Quoting from Elections/README.md at master · ZcashFoundation/Elections · GitHub

“The Board of Directors is important since they are officially the root authorities in control of the organization.”

Does that mean if the board decides it wants to remain ASIC resistant, what now? Are you going to stay if they make that decision or because the board didn’t do what you thought was right are you going to do a Charlee Lee (quit).

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Following the pattern of Monero, it seems likely that Bitmain has also infiltrated Zcash with ASIC miners already. Following Monero’s example, a Zcash soft fork would quickly expose Bitmain’s attempts to control cryptocurrency’s leading coins as they have done with others. Will Zcash soft fork to expose the truth?

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This is a great question. The Zcash Company and the Zcash Foundation are mutually independent. Neither one has any legal or financial control over the other one. This was intentionally designed this way to make it so that there would (eventually) be more than one center of power in the Zcash ecosystem.

In (non-)answer to your question: I’m not sure what I would do if the Zcash Foundation took a position incompatible with mine on such an issue. (But I’m pretty sure it would work out for the best in the long run.)

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This is a very interesting part of the current events to me. The Monero hash rate fell by about 50% when they switched algs.

I’ve heard from people who ought to know and who have no reason to lie to me that this is because half of the hash rate was ASICs. I’ve also heard from other people who ought to know and who have no reason to lie that Bitmain doesn’t yet have production-level Monero ASICs — only a test run, and that the 50% fall-off was botnets. So I’m not sure who to believe. Or maybe they are both right and just Bitmain’s test run was half of Monero’s total hashpower !? :laughing:

I’d like to see the charts of the hash rate on the Monero chainfork(s). I’m not sure if there is just one or more than one now (Monero Just Hard Forked — and It Resulted in Four New Projects - Bitcoin Magazine - Bitcoin News, Articles and Expert Insights).

Anybody got that data?

Chiming into this thread to say what I think the Zcash Foundation’s role could be in this discussion. (In case you don’t know, the Zcash Foundation is an independent non-profit entity separate from the company, and we are having a general election in the next couple months home - zcash foundation ).

First, the Foundation’s mission includes helping the Zcash community to develop its voice. Therefore I think at a minimum we should include a ballot item in our election pertaining to ASIC resistance. It is not yet clear (to me anyway) whether this is as urgent of a problem or one of wide concern yet. Having a ballot measure can help frame that discussion.

Second, if technical ASIC resistance measures are what the community wants, then the Foundation could allocate technical resources to support the development of them. We don’t necessarily have to rely on Zooko or the company to do this. If more technical inputs (analysis, inputs from experts) are needed we can also try to provide them.

I’ve made an initial ballot measure proposal here, but it was done very quickly and could use input from you all:

Also note that the scope of this proposed ballot is deliberately limited and vague - it’s intended to gauge the community’s opinion on this problem and will determine whether the Foundation takes up this question as a priority. The proposed ballot is not for example, a vote on whether or not we should hardfork in a new proof of work.

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Here’s another important data point of another coin we can learn from: SiaCoin. They announced long ago that they had decided ASIC mining was better for security than GPU mining, for reasons that they explained at length in this blog post:

(I’m not entirely convinced by all of their reasons, but I certainly think there’s truth to at least some, if not all, of it.)

Since then, they launched their own custom mining hardware: November Obelisk Update. As we noted in June, Sia firmly… | by David Vorick | The Sia Blog

And then, apparently, Bitmain launched it’s own Sia-miner, and the SiaCoin devs threatened “If Bitmain takes any action to harm the Sia project, we will soft-fork to invalidate their hardware.” — Response to the Sia Community and Bitmain | by Zach Herbert | The Sia Blog

I’m not sure if there have been any new developments since then.

So it will definitely be informative to see what happens with that coin!

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That’s real cute @zooko, taking a screenshot at a month back when asics were in full swing. Here are some pics with the all tab picked back before asics got involved. the first one is network hashrate, the second is network difficulty. https://imgur.com/a/chgGE0E https://imgur.com/Q0ZGU26
Notice that hashrate and jumped on Jan 29th and dropped back to non asic levels after the fork. The only reason Bitmain started to offer miners for sale was because monero was going to fork and screw their private mining operation. For a measly $12,000 usd, a person could buy an asic that would be dead on arrival. Nice job though, trying to show a hashrate drop without showing its spike or the difficulty spike or any other context. Real classy. This third pic shows that Bitmain wasn’t going to ship until 1 month after monero forked. https://imgur.com/tZO50v1

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The article makes some pretty good points (I like how they at least tried to make the first wave their own build)
It’s important to remember that the zcash mission (Co and Foundation) is empowering financial freedom and privacy through open accessibility of the Zcash network.
Everything done is (must be) to serve this purpose and protect the networks future. It is difficult to say with any certainty what choice fulfills this best. You can also examine the opposite and see which choices don’t fulfill it best.
I think I would like asics more if they could do literally one other thing, but if an asic mined zcash is a more secure environment, then a HF aversion does not serve the mission.

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By the way I mine zcash and there towards the end of the previous reply I really started to hear the fans whir and it dawned on me " shouldn’t I be arguing the opposite, for asic resistance, to protect my mining rig investment? It was erie and a little difficult.
But logic dictates the opposite where the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, at which point it’s not even about right or wrong decisions (but it’s probably right given how hard it is, one of life’s biggest jokes). Zcash is a greater thing than any of us individually, and as such the greater good must be considered.

When it comes down to it, we have to be ready for anyone ready to break the network. There WILL be actors trying to break all cryptocurrencies, not for profit, but to keep their fiat and regulatory control. Bitcoin, in my modest estimation, is closest to being “government hard” than any other cryptos thanks in large part to ASICs. When a state actor tries to break Bitcoin’s network, it is quite possible, other state actors may move to block that action. Bitcoin may really be with us forever.

As for Zcash, moving into specialized hardware is the next evolution to becoming “government hard”. A true privacy currency, easily traded, divided, and stored is the bigger threat to state actors. We need to build our network even bigger than Bitcoin’s. PoS does not help us here, because state actors have too much capital and can take over by buying up and suffocating any wide spread adoption.

My solution is to run towards ASICs, not away from them. Find an algo with the most diverse set of ASIC manufacturers and see if we can fit our PoW into that algo. Currently, I can identify at least 6-10 different ASIC manufacturers, making SHA256, SCrypt, blake2b, x11, and even cryptonight. I actually think the cryptonight miners may be the best solution here. No true coin exists to be mined there, except electroneum.

We must remember, we are trying to wrest control from the slave owners and free the slaves. They WILL burn our houses down, if and when they can.

I don’t agree. ASIC’s can raise the network difficulty, but it is easier to buy them in bulk since they only have one purpose and thus an organization (government or otherwise) with enough money can monopolize the hardware and ruin the network. GPU’s have many other purposes and one organization could not monopolize the hardware. If there comes a day when there are a few ASIC manufacturers -not just one- I may change my mind. If governments start trying to destroy Zcash because of its’ privacy you want and need many people on the network all across the world mining not just a few big operations that are easy to shut down.

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I respect your opinion, and I agree, learning to lead a corporation successfully is absolutely something that can be learned. Leaders focused on profits and corporate gain work very well in todays business world. However, my point was that leadership and leading a company are not the same thing. True leadership, on a core fundamental level, is selfless devotion to those being led, that is a character trait. Character cannot be learned. A good example would be a military leader who would willingly sacrifice his life for any of his men, that is a true leader, and they tend to make very good CEO’s as well. On the flip side, a leader who would gladly destroy any person or obstacle in their path for corporate profits, in todays world would also be considered a good leader. But I have to ask, which one do you want to work with?

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It’s pretty definitive that there were Monero ASICs, and Bitmain almost certainly was running them for a while. Apart from Bitmain, there’s also Baikal, and a few others I’m too lazy to source.

Not sure who is saying there are no Production-level Monero ASICs. There is strong consensus among Monero developers they exist, the core focus of the April hard fork was the PoW change because they believed so strongly ASICs existed. I don’t think a single Monero core dev/steward believes there were no ASICs running on Monero. What % of the hash rate were ASICs is up for debate, but it’s also likely they accounted for at least 30-40%, and potentially up to 70% of the hash rate!

To be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if ASICs exist for Zcash today, and are running on the network already. To be clear, this is purely speculation and I don’t have strong evidence to back this up.

However, if you operate under the assumption that miners are logical actors, the incentive to create ASICs has existed for Zcash for a while. The daily new issuance is 2 million, currently the 5th highest of all cryptos (after Btc, Eth, Ltc, Bch).

From an economic standpoint, the initial investment for a chip ($20-$50m) seems well within the range of possibility. Additionally, even if the PoW algorithm is changed before breakeven costs, Bitmain or whoever can always pass the hardware onto consumers to reap enormous profits.

I recognize this is getting into conspiracy theory territory, but the precedent and economic incentive is there. Wouldn’t hurt to be cautious and assume this has happened already.

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There is a fundamental problem with that assumption. You can push updated software out to a botnet, you cant do that for an ASIC. AND even if you are correct, don’t you think the botnets would have updated by now? The fact that the hash is not coming back (other than GPU shifting to Monero) proves beyond a doubt that the drop is not due to a programmable device (AKA botnet) so therefore it is ASIC based.

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Agreed, see this comment.

The hash rate didn’t just disappear it ended up on the ASIC-friendly fork, and stayed there (about 900 MH, or 80% of the original XMR hash rate), despite the profitability being about 1/40 of XMR. In order for this to fit anything but ASICs all of these would need to be the case:

The miner would need to use their own pool and node, not a public pool.
The miner would have to not update
The miner would have to ignore losing 98% of their potential profits by continuing to mine on the ASIC-friendly fork for days.
Sure, maybe this happened in a few cases, but not 900 MH. That’s ASICs for sure.

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Be prepared is an axiom. If asic resistance is truly futile than perhaps consider the idea of a Zcash (Co, Foundation) created chip essentially being made available to a great number of manufacturers before its created by just one. Saicoin tried a similar idea with 1 manufacturer but were too late apparently.
Myriad mining would help disperse the rewards if one exists already without splitting everything up.

My sentiments exactly. You cant fight ASIC’s forever. So you need a plan to bring them into the network in a controlled manner.

This proves all the more YOU claim to RUN the show and YOU claim to be DICTATOR & CHEIF and to hell with “everyone” (being GPU and CPU miners) and invite “other audiences” (BITMAIN or VIP’s you speak with in back room deals in Montreal at ZCon0 - Does the name “Alan” ring a bell?). Dictator and chief lacks “higher values” and could care less about “community consensus.”

ZCashCo is sounding more like a pathetic centralized dictatorship. Getting close to saying good riddance and heading over to ZEN Cash to see if the developers there actually have “higher values” and an actual desire to obtain “community consensus.”

Ever wonder why zoom avoids answering simple questions as these? The air I get about him for the most part is: Listen to what I’m saying. To hell with what you say.