Let’s talk about ASIC mining

Not really, not yet. I will send you some info via PM as not to derail this thread. But I intend to drop my vega 56’s for ryzen 2600’s.

But sure, the whole idea of moving to cpu is that anyone who has a pc could mine on their downtime or on unsued cores whilst gaming, etc. The intent is excellent. Don’t know if it will work out like that. I would be careful making big financial decisions on this but it is a really good excuse to get a better cpu :slight_smile:

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When are they going to switch algo on XMR?

Pretty sure it is supposed to be implemented by October.

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Great, thank you! Is there a reliable performance benchmark comparison for the different CPUs?

More than intention it was more a logical conclusion on what money incentive would bring.

I say it now: less than 1 year and randomX will not be asic resistant anymore

Incentive is high even if monero’s issuance is less than others, and many will find workarounds only for the joy of “cracking the code”.

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Well…

I was going to spend the weekend doing extensive cpu/mb testing for randomX. now it looks like I will be doing GPU testing too.

From the monero sub reddit

Most of the basic benchmarks are here:

Still looks like cpu’s are better.

@Hannibal @Sacsayhuaman @Spiral1990

Here is a start :slight_smile: let me know what other hardware you would like me to test, or whatnot in that thread over there.

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Sometime (and I missed them both) in the last 3 days Bitmain has pre-sold Z11 for July (sold out) and in August (Sold out).

Thank you for the update!

Currently I am (CPU) mining at 2KH/s average on my test-setup - curious how much it would be on RandomX!?

This is pretty interesting. I wonder if it’s a signal that ASICs have reached a level of maturity for Zcash? E.g., no more 10x gains over previous models.

So per the bitmain website, they are only listing the Z11 for sale (sold out)
but visiting a few other sites I noticed one site has additional version of the bitmain equihash miners listed ?? interesting!

Guys look. We can literally replace ASICs with GPUs and the situation would be no different.

China already has the electricity costs better than the US. If you replace the ASICs with the GPUs, they are still going to be in the same place because of the energy cost.You think GPUs farms are going to be different than ASICs? Literally no difference. You saw the price increase in graphics cards. ASICs actually have skin in the game because any GPU miner can just go to another coin that’s more profitable. GPU miners don’t care.

I keep seeing this “centralization” topic. Again, do you really think that situation will change? Chinese companies can easily replace their farms to GPUs and then you’ll complain because they will always have more rigs at lower energy. It has nothing to do with it being “centralized” in China. If an American company did the exact same thing, Chinese Miners would complain the exact same way and scream at centralization in the US. There is literally no difference what the situation is with centralization. There will always be a work around. Bitmain will always look for a work around because AMD and NVIDIA are too busy to get into the market otherwise you would be screaming about them too, which if you google it, you will find that both of of the latter chip makers are admitting partnering with the ProgPOW team for that. The next BITMAIN?

I honestly don’t understand this centralization thing. A company really wanted to take over a coin, they would. I keep seeing that the some 51% attacks would take $30k per hour for it. If someone actually wanted to destroy it, it would happen. You’re literally seeing a shift fro BITMAIN to AMD and NVIDIA because you want to spend so much money to switch over the ProgPOW for what? The Chinese holders will then complain because centralization in the US. It is a never ending battle. So much time, money, wasted resources are spent on this. That is the downside of a POW system. Because of energy costs, you will always battle the one that has the lowest. GPUs will always go to the coin with the most profit. A lot just mine until a new GPU comes out, sells their obolsete that one and gets the more efficient one. So you increase the price of GPUs, gamers are yelling at the miners but they don’t care, so then why should the ASIC miners? GPU miners scream at BITMAIN but are the same ones that are going to buy the ones from AMD and NVIDIA when they produce their ASICs for the ProgPOW. This literally makes no sense. You move to a POS system and BITMAIN buys most of the coin, eating up the whole centralization idea. I would rather not get into the POS system because that is off topic, but no one can keep bringing up centralization when any system you look at, the big players will always have the upper hand.

I personally have a solar roof on my house it keeps me somewhat competitive, fighting the chinese energy costs. I own GPUs and ASICs. I prefer ASICs because of the effeciency. I know both sides of the story because I’m living it. Forking is a dumb idea, you are only fighting the enivitable with admitable proof from AMD and NVIDIA getting into the market now. It will be no different than BITMAIN. It’s sad to see the split with the community on this from ASIC miners who carry the load and GPU miners who want to have another choice in coin. GPU or ASIC miners, will always try to find the most effecient way to mine. One side will always be upset and will want to “dump all coins” no mater what direction. ASICs will dump when the algo changes and GPUs will dump when it doesn’t. At least the ASICs are more loyal than a GPU who will abondon ship if anything goes wrong.

A core foundation of cryptocurrency is that is decentralised so no one can take your money from you. OR black ball you from having a bank account. It is also so there is no one central point of failure.

Compare it to bittorrent and peer to peer networking (napster for example) rather than iTunes, or World of Warcraft (where if you get banned you lose everything)

No they aren’t, they both released mining variants of their gpus that had much tighter memory timings and no video out headers.

Okay so you don’t want them to get in the game, which is it? Regarding the ProgPOW ppl working with nVid and AMD - it makes sense if you are trying to make software that utilisies the gpu aspects of the gpu that cant really be done on an asic without that asic being a gpu, then you would be a fool not to talk to them.

99% of the problems with algo’s being ASIC mineable is from them being designed from a crypto and software point of view not a hardware.

You want access to the people that design the board layouts, design the chips, the cache, that decide on the memory, the software, the drivers, etc. And you have to talk to both because there is no standard for gpu architecture like there is for x86, etc. (Intel, Google and Bitmain all make an AI variant of a gpu with intel releasing a proper gpu sometime in the next couple of years)

How is an asic more efficient than a gpu? you know what the Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm is right?

I can go to the shop now and buy a GPU and start making 3:1 on my electric in the uk. Where can I get an ASIC?

I hope this clears a few things up for you.

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I think in the case of Zcash most GPU miners were very loyal. After the Asics , a lot of them moved on. Most GPU miners holdl ed while most Asics kept on selling to roi. Talking for my self ( europian elec prices ) I even kept on mining when I " lost " money, and didn’t sell shit, If I had bought an Asic I would honestly say I would sell to get some money back before the new batch. With GPU there will be allways people with 1000 of them, but you still could make some money with a 1060, with an asic from two gens ago you will be happy to cover costs. And since a lot of asics come from China, they aren’t avaibal in every country and in the States they got a nice premium due to the ongoing trade war. And here was the biggest point for me against Asics, 1 could forsee that in case of Asics on the network, it wouldn’t take long before most Hashpower came from China. I rather see large GPU farms then that are shattered around the globe.

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From Zcon1: Transaction Linkability in Zcash: Portrait of a Miner in a Landscape - Daniel Feher

Some interesting parts of the Research:

Estiminated GPU miners (individuals) prior to Asics: around 60,000
Estiminated Asic miners now: around 15,000

  • Main users of shielded transactions are the mining pools. That’s interesting as it means the shielded transactions for the average joe user are even less than as we thought.

  • ZEC Miners have the same privacy as Bitcoin miners.

  • Asic mining prior to their release in May 2019 is estiminated at around 25%…

  • Mixing public and shielded transactions in a privacy-oriented currency is not a good idea.

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Maybe we should create a Tinfoilhead threat.
The 25 % " pre mine " isn’t really that shocking to me, but I wonder where the Zcash are going.
I am under the impression for a long time, that some asic manufacturers that are deep into Bitcoincash, use their mining profits from Zcash to support their ongoing war with Bitcoincash SV.

The amount of GPU miners that got lost are more concerning in my opinion. A lot of people that could spread good PR got lost, and some even got mad and mad people mostly aren’t good PR. Maybe in RL even bad publicity is publicity, but in a space like cryptho build on trust, bad publicity in my opinion means the beginning of the end.

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i know ycash wont be able to be mined with an asic but will zcash still be able to be mined with an asic after the fork?

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I was just thinking yesterday that this thread had finally died :slight_smile:

welcome to the forums.

Yes zcash asics will keep working, there will be no change for them or the zcash network. You don’t need to do anything or change anything it will just continue as normal.

you might want to look into claiming any yec that you have though.

cheers

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ASICs killed Zcash. RIP

There really needs to be a thumbs down added to the threads to go with the like this post.

This has been talked about, and proven that your statement is wrong.
ASIC’s have been out for over a year and Zcash is still going… It’s still going, still mined, still bought, still sold, and is still just as strong as when it was thought to be GPU based only.

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uhuh. that thumbs down button is a two way street (and I think it undermines the concept of hearting posts)

Here are some ideas to consider:

It might not have killed the coin, but it killed a lot of the community.

and what has it done for decentralisation and distribution of block rewards not really being that distributed. to as many people as possible?

What about the much low number of active addresses?

What about a topic not even about zec getting more views per day than the proposals because it shows how to mine randomx?

What about people never ROIing on single purpose hardware?

Stop pretending asics are magic and make the world a better place.

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