Let’s talk about ASIC mining

All these guys who are against ASICs are the ones who invested in gPUs and want to keep that diversity of mining different coins. I don’t think they are true to ZCash cause if they were why would they mind mining it with ASICs ? More performance more rewards more secure network and as far as centralization goes its same thing instead of Bitmain ow GPUs are made by 2 companies AMD and nVidia. And the reality is for POW coins ASICs is the future. Sooner or later it will happen. And Bitmain monopoly will be broken once other Asic manufacturers become bigger or new ones start offering ASICs possibly Samsung. And if Bitmain can keep the price reasonable and have 1 Asic order limit it will help in vast adoption resulting in decentralization.

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Oh boy… we should be true to the environment… ASICS are electronic waste as soon Moore’s Law hits them. Forget them… It is cheaply produced stuff which will be used first and foremost by the company behind them and than released afterwards to idiots.

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I agree and understand but they will come without invitation.

How? by hard forking? how many times?

How many times?
Every 9month. Why? Moore’s law. Even if they speed-develop a ASIC which can be used “hidden” and “internally” for a short time, it would be impossible to create sales afterwards (reselling value = 0). Chines regulations will kill them by forcing them to stop mining.
BAM… problem solved.

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Alternatevely:
IF there would be a “healthy” competition between at least 3 providers of ASICS and no-one would need to wait month for another batch… than and only than I could accept those things… But still it is a waste of limited environmental resources…

Creating those things is also unnecessary … they raise difficulty artificially and not because there is a real demand for the network itself…

So nope… keep them out.

  1. The introduction of new bugs or exploits, whether accidental or malicious in nature. Changing a minor algorithm every few months or every year might sound simple in theory, but there are many things that can go wrong. Public blockchains should maximize resiliency, which means they should stray towards the conservative side when making large changes to the protocol.

  2. Hard forks will scatter the hash power on the network. If ASICs are successfully removed from the network, the drop in hash rate could be huge, bringing the network to a crawl, and making the difficulty adjustment erratic for some period. Additionally, constant forks will scatter hash power, creating more orphans and decreasing the overall security of the network. It becomes more feasible to rent hash power and attack the network, as only GPUs and CPUs will be operating. As a result of this security vulnerability, the Monero community has called on new users to contribute hashpower after the fork.

  3. GPU mining is also susceptible to economies of scale and domination by vertically integrated companies like Bitmain. If developers remain adamant in maintaining GPU mining and keep hard forking, players like Bitmain could also enter the GPU development and mining game, which would likely result in similar mining concentration. The most important reason Bitmain has established dominance of Bitcoin mining is their enormous amount of capital and cheap electricity. These same advantages can be extended to GPU mining.

  4. ASIC developers could build more flexible FPGA designs that can adjust to small algorithm tweaks. ASICs work only for specific algorithms, but it is becoming feasible to implement more flexible hardware that can adjust to small changes. These FPGAS are much slower than super focused ASICs, but still much faster than GPUs. This has large implications. If a proof of work algorithm change occurs, it might destroy 3 out of 4 ASIC models, while the 4th FPGA still works on the new algorithm. This is a worse outcome compared to doing nothing at all, as it results in even more centralization.

There’s a lot of problems with constantly hard forking. There’s security concerns, you might scatter the hash rate, and you might not eliminate more flexible FPGAS. Additionally, if players with large amounts of capital enter the GPU Mining space, it could be vulnerable to the same domination by vertically integrated companies.

reference: Is The War Against ASICs Worth Fighting? | by Derek Hsue | Token Economy

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  1. Hmm… nope… You can "slightly " correct just by raising memory requirements. 9 Month are long if you just change a small number, there should be enough time to test it … 8 month long.

  2. This is nonsense… all the network activity would drop at the same time. Their miners are creating traffic which would disappear. = Less HASHpower required AND even without a call it should be worth again for “previously” underpowered miners to come back after the fork. So this is a natural move.

  3. This would be welcomed… They compete with AMD and Nvidia which is healthy. GPU’s as multipurpose tools are welcome. If Bitmain would go the route to reduce a GPU design to only Mining bits… well than they produce only environmental waste… no resale value again.

4.FPGA while reprogrammable underlay Moore’s law as well. This means FPGA may loose every new GPU upgrade their role…


I am really disappointed about the “decentralisation” problem and I will reuse and rework a little bit to offer an ASIC proof coin.

One solution i have in mind is to use 2 protocols at the same time … one creating hashes and one organising data (SaaS). The hash protocol itself should be switchable on the fly or just use existing networks (executing transaction on any other existing network = wherever the fees are low). I could just change the whole algorithm on the fly. Of course the miner application must be flexible to follow this swap.

Whatever… in my next Holliday I will come up with a testnet, miner, and wallet.
I am a fan of Zcash and I hope they keep ASIC away “as best as possible”. Nothing more, nothing less…

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Not true. With only 1 hardfork you could implement a system that gradually upgrades the algorythm or implment some sort of voting system witch dynamically changes paramaters and so on.

Wrong. Zcash difficulty gets adjusted every block. This is not monero.

This is simply too far fetched… if we had a 3rd competitor in the GPU realm it would be a blessing and not a conviction…

Could? We are talking about can.
ASIC developers can build more flexible FPGA (if not already created), but why would a company continue to invest in something they can’t control? The PoW algoryhtm is something we, the community, can demand to be changed and will fight for. I’d prefer upgrading the network every week then letting ASIC steal even a small percentage of overall hashrate.

Doing something is better than doing nothing.

I don’t understand why people are so scared of hardforks? We are many hardforks away from cryptocurrencies final form, it’s part of the process. Code can always be improved and more performant. Upgrades MUST be made. ASIC companys can’t continue to develop and throw away their investments, at some point they are going to have to just let go. It’s our job to figure out how to make their investment the most risky possible… let’s gamble!

The best strategy to win “rock paper scissors” is to pick randomly each time:
Upgrade equihash parameters on X, where X is the date when to change parameters.
Date could be a ZK variable shared on the network that is generated randomly each time and value could be something like - from 3 months to 36 months.
Just a quick random idea that would give more discourage for ASIC developers…

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Thanks, looks logical. but in one point I’m not agree.

These changes make system dynamic and so fragile to attacks.

what you think about PoS? (your view as a community member if you were not a miner.)

PoS from an environmental POV is much better… But it is still unfair because the “weight” of a user is measured also by the “amount” of coins he owns.
Basically a rich one weights more than a poor one.

I would welcome a system which applies “work” (consume energy = money) only when really required. PoW on Demand… less payments = slower block building (variable on demand) and less calculations = less energy need. Payments should be than payed to all connected users equally during a block building time.

This is something I wold like to create.

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Thanks for commenting @zooko. I think what he is saying is that we should be thinking more instead of commenting with instant-gut feelings and ideas where clear evidence is lacking.

More things people should be thinking about in terms of PoW vs. PoS:

  1. PoW systems also allow the “rich to get richer” just as PoS systems do. If you can afford more S9s or more 1080ti’s you will have more profits. PoW does have more setup time, initial cost and inherent uncertainty, but the result is essentially the same.

  2. Over time PoW will become an easy target as people try to mitigate Climate Change. I don’t think PoW systems can plan to exist for decades in a situation where an ever-increasing difficulty is pegged to continual energy consumption increases. This is a reality that people should consider.

  3. Aside from the requirement of small miners to mine with a pool, ASICs would allow for more non-technical miners to get involved compared to the more complex GPU setup. This suggests that ASICs would actually increase “decentralization” if pools didn’t exist.

  4. Does the complexity of GPU systems make them harder to manage as scale increases? If so then ASICs would lead to more centralization and larger miners, if not, there would be no difference.

When I started commenting in this thread I was anti-ASICs, but honestly at this point I don’t think the ASIC/GPU argument matters at all in terms of mining “centralization”. Mining pools should be the target if you’re worried about decentralization of hashpower. ASICs may even make it easier for small miners to get up to speed quicker.

As a parting thought: we all have conflicts of interest here. We own expensive hardware and spent considerable time and effort setting these systems up. I’m in that group just as much as any of you. However, the fact is that the anti-centralization argument just isn’t very good against ASICs when Flypool/Bitfly controls >51% hashpower. If you want Zcash to regain decentralized mining, maybe we should be talking about that instead.

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Thank you for your input, I think implementing some sort of “Diffie-Hellman” protocol for this aspect would be revolutionary. Some sort of ZK on the equihash parameters would be crazy futuristic but not impossible…

Same exact thought:

I believe you understood him wrong. What I understood from intervention is:

Even on twitter he stated:

Ugh. I don’t want to deal with this. I don’t believe that any proof-of-work change can achieve what we really want, which is decentralization and attack-resistance.
(https://twitter.com/mineZcash/status/981167668316131328)

He clearly got other things to worry about.

Absolutly agree. The argument against ASIC here is of fairness and respecting your own words.
Equihash was picked also for the ASIC miner resistance fact. Denying it now would not be cool (witch no one is).

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Note that this issue is also being actively discussed at the moment on Plan how to change the proof-of-work · Issue #1211 · zcash/zcash · GitHub .

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Clearly the former. My understanding is that the code did not properly implement difficulty enforcement, allowing the attacker to submit blocks every second almost independently of the PoW. A basic arithmetic error was then made in the attempted fix (I’m not sure whether that was the only problem), requiring the fix to be reverted.

ASIC dominance makes it very difficult to change the PoW, but it doesn’t necessarily make other changes difficult. I am very concerned, however, about ASIC mining coalitions having veto power over upgrades that affect mining rewards or fees, for instance, on which they have a clear conflict of interest and incentives that may not be aligned with the user community.

[Clarification: an ASIC mining coalition would not be able to prevent nodes following an upgraded chain, but they would be in a position to attack or threaten to attack the network.]

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This is a solvable problem. It’s possible to support mining using both the old and new PoW, gradually phasing out the old PoW. This also has the advantage that an ASIC mining coalition would be incentivised to mine on the upgraded chain immediately after the upgrade (otherwise, they would lose the potential short-term mining rewards that they could have got by mining on that chain, which are likely to have a greater fiat-equivalent value), and so the PoW upgrade would be much less likely to result in a significant chain split. (Technically, upgrades of the type used by Zcash always result in a chain split, but if the upgrade goes as intended then almost no nodes are on the original chain.)

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You are very wrong on this one although i agree with many of your points. The likelihood that such a huge pool making millions like flypool would risk it all just to do this theoretical boogie monster called 51% attack every is talking about, is 1000 times less than ASIC centralization. Why do you think Verge was so easy to attack? exactly, because they allowed asic.
I can assure you that if you yourself had the control of flypool, you would never dream of doing a 51% attack.
Never the less, lets assume that happens, so what? 1 time double spend, flypool is dead in a matter of hours and all miners witch to other pools = problem solved. On the other hand, giving in to ASIC means death of all GPU miners for ever, no going back, no more decentralization ever and zcash will become a bitmain salve.

can we please stop this climate change nonsense? here is a documentary of actual climate scientists (not TV celebrities, news anchors or politicians) that will explain how ridiculous it is to talk about “mining power affecting the climate”.

Even VISA transaction cost more electricity than the entire network, let people stop using VISA first then they can start attacking crypto SMH

We can’t competition to Bitmain if all these coins keeps forking and staying ASICs resistance! Cause then no manufacturers will be willing to put resources into and Bitmain will keep enjoying its monopoly.

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@mario if Flypool made a double-spend other pools would be forced to go along with it, because if they didn’t they would be mining valueless blocks. No miner would switch to a losing fork.

The price might drop, but if they were making double-spends they could potentially profit more than the loss from a price drop, depending on the time frame.

Currently it’s my observation that flypool takes more than 1% - probably close to 5%+ due to calculating shares inaccurately. They show lower hashrate than latency can account for. That’s pretty dishonest behavior in the first place so there is no reason we can expect them to follow any rules when it comes to their bottom-line. If they can double-spend and make more, they might just do that. It’s a pretty scary thought, but it’s a real possibility.

Further, having the most hashpower gives Flypool the power to dictate protocol changes and ignore those they don’t like. Only mining full nodes that include transactions in blocks actually matter in terms of protocol changes. That leaves just the pools and a few large solo-miners. I really hope miners slowly migrate away from Flypool.

Bottom line, having one all-powerful mining pool is theoretically worse than “centralized” asic mining.

Visa transactions do not take more electricity than cryptocurrency mining. I don’t know what hat you pulled that from but it’s completely wrong. :joy: Crypto mining takes the power of a medium-large size city (last I checked). Visa doesn’t consume that kind of power.

There is ample evidence over decades of research along with empirical data proving with 99% accuracy that Climate change is real. There have been misinformation campaigns to discredit this fact, but all of the data is there:
https://ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.shtml

Further, @mario joined two days ago. I just realized this thread my include people who have an agenda or a reason to hide their main handle.

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