Hey folks! I don’t even have time to write complete replies in here, much less read all of these hundreds of messages. :-{ I hope that someone is somehow boiling down the major sentiments and ideas for me and others to use. Maybe the Zcash Foundation’s voting protocol will serve for that purpose. Not sure.
Just jumping in here to say two things:
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I’m really chagrined that I let it sound like we were committing to a social contract of ongoing ASIC-resistance. That is absolutely never what I had intended to commit to, because (a) I always thought that it would probably become impossible long-term, and (b) I always believed that there was a fundamental trade-off between widespread distribution of the coins on one hand, and miners having a large sunk-cost investment into the coin on the other hand, and that the latter might eventually prove to be valuable for attack-resistance and network stability. (I still believe both of these things: even if ASIC-resistance is possible this year and next year, it will almost certainly become impossible given enough scale and enough years. And: distributing coins widely with a commodity PoW is fundamentally incompatible with locking miners into a sunk-cost-investment incentive-alignment with custom PoW, and the latter has advantages that might eventually prove to be important.)
But, I allowed ZcashCo’s public statements to let people jump to that conclusion (i.e. we stated that our motivation was widespread distribution of the coins and the mining, which allowed people to reasonably assume that this was a long-term principle rather than a temporary strategy), and I have to take responsibility for that and if possible to try to honor what people thought.
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I’ve been trying to educate myself about the state of cryptocurrency mining. I’m getting in touch with various big mining operations to try to understand their economics. I’m also learning about energy production (direct contracts with plants instead of sucking from the grid, renewables, etc.). One major unanswered question in my mind is: suppose you have a large, profitable GPU-mining farm. Why don’t you reinvest all your profits in scaling it up? In other words, why haven’t professional, large-scale GPU-mining operations already driven small-time miners out of business?
One thing I’ve learned along the way is that GPU mining is absolutely essential to Zcashers in Venezuela. If Venezuelans try to import ASIC miners (i.e. for Bitcoin, currently), then they risk having the miners stolen or extorted by the army which controls all imports. GPUs are not (yet?) nabbed on import like that, and anyway there are a lot more GPUs already floating around inside Venezuela. This really goes to the point that Simon has made a few times in this thread, that custom mining hardware is more vulnerable to special treatment by authorities.
Oh, bottom-line, by the way, is that I’m basically still in the same place now that I was four years ago when we first decided to go for widespread-distribution-of-coins at the expense of sunk-cost-incentive-alignment. I still think that widespread-distribution-of-coins is more important (but I still think that it can’t last forever, and that the other side of the trade-off may also prove to be important).