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.
Let’s talk about ASIC mining
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
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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.
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ZEC Miners have the same privacy as Bitcoin miners.
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Asic mining prior to their release in May 2019 is estiminated at around 25%…
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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 
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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again comes in acid, demanding thumbs down button.
bro, you’d be burried under that button if it existed.
you do not need to analyze whole year+ of asics in zcash to see how it turned investors down, you need to check only last couple of months… perfect starting point for your deep analysis might be XMR fork. at that moment ZEC/BTC price were higher than XMR/BTC.
Only couple of months gone, and gone 50% of ZEC price compared to XMR, which forked from asics.
And yes, still, for “some” people it’s not obvious.
It just happens that they bought asics from Bitmain, just a coincidence.
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coin is absolutely dead, noone wants it, except people in china with access to mining hardware.
THANK YOU ZOOKO.
GOING WITH ASICS WERE RIGHT THING, SURE, BRUV
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Don’t understand why there’s been no crypto coin has achieved high decentralization and asic elimination by simply setting a relatively low cap that normies could have and keep up on such as the computational equivalent of 3 Vega 56’s/4 1080ti while requiring a floor set no lower than a single rx480/gtx970 in computational hash power to prevent lottery mining and if you do not meet hash power or continuously bottom out the cap more than not it disconnects you from the server and if disconnected more than 3 times in 24 hour period 30 minute bans get introduced and scale accordingly. Doesn’t really seem like a hard issue to address but payouts would have to be generous enough to cover say $0.10/kwh with large block rewards to keep drawing in the gamblers of society for mining and the investors of society can drive the stock markets and ico’s and a pool fee which goes to GitHub/fork devs for contributions. It doesn’t seem hard and you wouldn’t even need to lose high hashers and Asics you just need 2 different blocks instead of the 1 and a new pool category something like pure decentralization while still being able to offer pplns pool or pps solo. Then again I know that I’m no computer genius, yet I get a feeling either most people are more retarded than I am and just don’t see all easily avoidable corruption or if people are just to scared to do what’s right either way you should totally kill yourself if your ideals, beliefs and loss of freedoms, privileges and especially rights are the slightest bit swayed by the political party behind the act rather than choosing what you feel is 100% the best option for yourself. I am incredibly stupid though but not stupid enough to put my life in the hands of a single party. Trump will try making crypto illegal in the USA just watch. Guaranteed here is seeing it as poor people using a loop hole to avoid paying a insignificant amount of taxes and that it’s backed by something of value like minerals, gems or gases when in reality it’s more like carnival money, Disney bucks, Chucky cheese coins where people place their faith into a complicated economic bartering system to unify global costs and cutting out middle men where the only times taxing should be exceptive would be the initial purchase of the coins, ico or any other way in which they were purchased or sold using gov backed funding such as cash, bonds, ensurities. Mining rewards, prize pools, drawings, investments, other crypto, private buyer to cross boarder retailer all should never legally be taxed but eventually will be as they already had this problem on a smaller scale with State sales tax being charged to out of state business which I can’t see how it is legal at all as your charging taxes for items sold in your state and not be taxed for items shipped into your state as decentralization is closely similar to preventing monopolization and keeping small business thriving because if they were doing a good enough job looking out for it’s citizens with small businesses making it easier for them to get into marketplace competition . Sad part is they for the most part tell their small business owners to fuck off, tough it out or find scandalous ways to keep paying the bills while creating a way to reclaim their lost taxes at the tax payers expense. I work for the city/state and if you do also or know anybody who does you are well aware of how much money they carelessly waste on daily basis which gets passed off to the workers or tax payers.
Hi @isnortflour and Welcome to the forums,
I have managed to read the first part of this, and I think I like the idea. Is there a chance you could edit it to reformat it to have paragraph breaks in it please? I am finding it very difficult to read as one block of text.
Im not too interested in the politics of crypto but you put some strange (to me) but interesting ideas across id like to talk about a bit further. (the payout system, etc.)
I am very much interested in getting a truly distributed coin out there, even if it is a play coin and not worth anything. I enjoy messing with the tech and the very basics of game theory that go with it.
Feel free to PM me.
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A thumbs down or heart (which is a thumbs up) would do the same thing. If the heart means I like the post and don’t’ have to reply to let you know, then a thumbs down would mean I don’t like your post at all and no I don’t’ have to reply.
The block rewards are being distributed to those who mine. Like every single other coin, you have to increase your hashrate if you want to increase your yield or maintain (if the rate goes up). This exact same problem was happening when it was just GPU. This IS NOT an ASIC issue only.
As for the community, you mean the that 98% that never came to the Zcash forums and didn’t contribute anything other than making mom and dad’s power bill higher because they mined Zcash inbetween gaming?
Active addresses -
BCH has less active addresses than it did a year ago
ETH has less active addresses than it did a year ago
ETC went from 200k to 37k within the last year
I have ROI’d every piece of GPU and ASIC I have ever purchased. Don’t buy a GPU that should cost $500 for $800 and $700 for $1,200. Don’t buy an ASIC for double or triple what the manufacturer sells. it for and you should not have a problem with ROI (also make sure you know what you are paying for electricity)
ASIC’s do make the world a better place because they use A LOT less power than GPU’s.
For a coin that is dead, it sure is mined / traded a lot.
@nec You can mine XMR with a GPU all you want and enjoy that ROI – and btw ASIC are back on XMR
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The forum software is not designed around that idea.
For ideas? no. facts, yes. checkout why discourse doesn’t have it.
from - https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-are-likes/30803
There are videos and talks and all sorts in that link explaining why downvotes are a bad idea. I think especially when it comes to creating discourse. I personally agree with that concept.
Never said it was. it is a greater issue for asics though due to no resale value. I said single purpose hardware. that as soon as it gets obsoleted becomes worthless. This is not a positive thing.
No, block rewards are being distributed to those who can mine. Now the number of people with the hardware but not the ability was higher with gpus, so more involvement.
The hardware is now available to fewer people with greater ability == less general awareness == less general overall distribution == me not talking about it with people.
This is partly my motivation for creating a worthless coin of the various privacy coins that anyone can mine, swap, play with the privacy features, lose their keys, get 51% attacked, understand why financial privacy matters.
Are you really that stretched for a point that you had to reinforce one of mine? Look back over the forum activity. When people need to find stuff out they generally engage with that forum. Look at the youtube channels that used to mention it a lot, look at now foundation people that were once community members.
Your mental gymnastics is 10/10 - I was referring to people like yourself, myself, root, shawn, boxalex, chiliebob, hloo, to name but a few of the regulars I have interacted with, not to mention the countless others via pm or just by me reading their posts.
None of us would have been here if it wasn’t for GPU’s you realise that? - That was my point.
I also think your statement does a massive disservice to part time gpu miners and them spreading the word.
Why didn’t you include privacy coins on that addresses comparison list?
So what? Is that all it is to you ROI? Glad you are involved and got what you wanted. the community needs more members like you.
lolwut? are you trolling me? you cant be serious with this comment. you know what the Difficultly Adjustment Algorithm is right? - how many watts of energy does it take to generate 1 zcash today? Now how much at the end of GPU mining? (hint boxalex has already done the maths, read up a few posts)
This spurious save the world green power stuff is total nonsense - more than just watts per coin. it also doesn’t work on manufacturing, it uses more energy to produce the same coin/watt ratio on a custom ASIC than it does on a GPU.
don’t get me wrong I vote green in local elections, and I am an environmentalist, however asics do nothing positive over GPU’s. and they End Of Life quicker making the whole thing worse. more landfill, yay.
Where did I say the coin was dead? I said asics killed the community, and the good feeling that the mining community had towards the ECC.
What are these stats you are showing for? a Vega 56 can do 2250 hashes for ~150 watts. I know this because I do it.
Please stop misrepresenting data, or just flat out making it up. I would like to think it was ignorance but you have done it so much it feels like you are coming from a point of bad faith. Why would you do that? What do you have to gain?
Where did you get the idea ASIC’s are back? the hashrate has been bobbling between 35-40 for ages. who would make an asic for a PoW that EOL’s in 8 weeks?
@nec don’t buy a GPU for monero, it is switching to RandomX in October, I have a thread on it if you want to check it out. Ethereum is moving to ProgPow - which you can gpu mine.
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As i never ever take blind any numbers posted and as i have day taken only for cyrpto i checked your claims and numbers:
BCH, i first didn’t want to check as i thought you are 100% correct, but actually you are not, strange somehow. All numbers posted are exactly for the last 1 year time period:
ZEC: 37k active adresses 1 year ago, today 24k = -21.62%
BCH: 35k active adresses 1 year ago, today varies for some reason daily btw. 31k and 56k
ETH: 328k active adresses 1 year ago, today 304k = -7.32%
ETC: 20k active adresses 1 year ago, today with some days expections daily far over 100k !!!
DASH: 37k active adresses 1 year ago, today 72k = +94.59%
BTG: 4.4k active adresses 1 year ago, today 12k = +166.66%
Just adding numbers to the active adresses claim so everybody can make his own mind about it. For me it’s out of question that ZEC had the bigget loses of active wallets in this time period and the loses would be even way bigger if we take 18 months, but even with 12 months it’s clear that others are not object to losing active adresses…
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See, by not thumbing down a post we have created discourse. cool eh! its almost like that was the idea all along.
And this is why even though we disagree on stuff I really respect your methodology. btw I hearted box’s post not because I “agree with it” but I think it is actual true information that I am not going to double check.
How would a thumbs up help? - or better, what if you thumbed down the post, then what? people just end up getting ratio’d.
Whilst we are on the subject of likes, I notice the war between @boxalex and @sonya for my affection I just noticed today that sonya finally over took box for liking my posts. (do pms count?) - But sonya still has a long long way to go to catch up with daira’s overall like count! (3.5k!)
EDIT: Oh and citric remember the “community governance panel” voted for a change in PoW around nov 2020, doesn’t have to be asic resistant or friendly. I suggest we use these past two years as a retrospective as to what to do in the future. RandomX and ProgPOW will either be broken by then or not.
Yes Im derailing this thread. I don’t care. it died a while ago. and I brought it back on topic with an edit.
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