I’m one of those people boxalex, but I caveated myself stating it’s all speculation no matter how you want to use it. Nobody knows what was where and when, if at all. It’s speculation at best on what “appears” to have happened, is happening, based on a point of view. Several spikes were pointed too, but to be honest it looked like normal NiceHash, other cloud mining (insert name here) activity. Unless someone can point to a sustained increase of 100-200MH over a day or so that didn’t vaporize just as quickly I don’t think any argument can be made as to whether it may/may not be ASIC activity. That doesn’t take into account whether any “secret” miners exist either, where a group/company designed their own ASIC to mine. Do they exist, do they not? How many? What percentage of hash power are they? We will probably never truly know any of those answers.
Casual non-technical people would also be less likely to buy an ASIC as well as they would have to be more committed to coins with that particular algorithm. A coin can either have professional, centralized miners like with ASIC’s or casual miners with GPU’s. The ease of setting it up is more than offset by risk. It is hard to believe Satoshi didn’t see this coming when he designed Bitcoin. I definitely believe he/she/they would want miners to resist ASIC’s.
Well, with ASIC mining, your share of the network hashrate will decrease more quickly.
Go to Bitinfocharts and look a the hashrate growth charts for Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dash, and Monero, and then compare them to Zcash and Ethereum. It will be very obvious which coins are ASIC-dominated.
I won’t argue about the D3, L3 and the Decred Asics as it’s indeed a matter of setup, electricity costs, coin price, if someone needs to sell immediatly or can hold the coin for longer for a better price and many other factors. For sure, in some the regions with higher energy prices some of them are not really of any profit.
Just noting here that the competition forced these out … Not that it matter that much. Anyway, wasn’t my point.
About the A3 Bitmain Sia miner. Someone can only agree to it. It’s the biggest fail investement someone could have done (expect 1st batch). But with only 1 coin on the algo it’s ultra high risk knowing that competition will come strong. I than back didn’t buy it as the risk was to high!
Here some bonus fun as i have no problem to admit the true. Even i was aware that the Bitmain B3 on tensority with only 1 coin has the very same risk than that A3 back than i bought 1 unit as i like Bytom project.
Long story short. Today i mananged to get the 2x 1080ti’s in my home pc running on the Tensority Algo with 1,500 H/s while the B3 makes just 1,000H/s. So right now, my Home Pc mines better than my B3 Asic, lol.
Bad investement, i should have known better with 1 coin on an Algo 
Feel free to laugh about it, i won’t take it as an offence, i’am actually laughing myself about it… 
You are speaking from the standpoint of the devs when you make that statement. Having “less skin in the game” is what leads to decentralization in the first place. Anyone with a recent GPU can mine. People that buy the equipment to mine are what leads to centralization and miners like that want to control the coin to protect their investment.
Totally agree, and my comment yesterday wasn’t directed towards you, just be sure. I just got provocate to use that argument by having read about 500 posts that Asics are on the network and a sudden everybody begins to deny it. No big deal anyay, as you said it allready, we never really will know with 100% what when where was and where it came from … Totally agree.
When you enlarge the photo you can see what appears to be a layer of dust on top of the heatsink fins.
A coin can also have non-professional ASIC miners. Several users joined here and said that they wouldn’t have been mining Zec without the availability of the ASIC.
Overall, I think an ASIC makes it easier to mine than GPUs when you look at everything involved: knowledge, hardware and software skills. This is different for users with just a single gpu in a gaming machine - but Zcash is past that point, and arguably, was never “small” enough to be mined substantially with a gaming pc.
For me, this points to one differentiating factor: risk. Do small miners take risk with new hardware? Maybe and may not. Medium-sized miners? Usually. Large miners? Definitely. But, the same is true for buying more and more consumer grade graphics cards.
Can you argue with the statement that with ASIC’s the difficulty increases much more quickly than with GPU’s? It is more of an arms race. The fact that ASIC’s are easier to set up means miners with deep pockets can set them up easier and fill warehouses full of them. GPU rigs require more maintenance and buyers must compete with more customers to acquire them. If GPU manufacturers would commit to a max buy policy of just a few GPU’s per customer it would be ideal for decentralization.
Anybody know what channel the discussion is happening on?
Also if you look at the photo in this tweet, there is no dust, so it looks like brand new equipment. (previous post showed someone receiving equipment caked with dust)
They can’t set them up easier, just equally as easy. Scaling a big operation takes more time, effort and planning than people think. It can take 6-12 months to get a big ASIC operation going. The cooling requirements, electrical requirements, space, air filtering… it all becomes more difficult at scale. The only benefit is the lower cost of electricity.
My bet is that 100-1000 small users can outpace larger farms because home systems can handle 3-5 ASIC miners right from the start without any additional setup other than a shelf and plugging them in.
GPU rigs require more maintenance and buyers must compete with more customers to acquire them
Both of these aren’t true - GPU systems can auto-restart and basically run themselves just like ASICs. I don’t know what you mean with the statement that buyers must compete with more customers, could you clarify that.
Even without photo it was nearly clear in this Z9mini case that the shipped 77x Z9minis are “2nd hand” after we saw that the secret Bitmain Mining pool went down in hashrate at the very same time they announced to ship the first Z9 minin.
And no, i’am not going to defend that for sure. When in 2 weeks the next Z9 minis arrive and when i have mine in hands i will open it immediatly too to check if that one is “2nd hand” too…
Seems, at very least, that the very first batch is “2nd hand and used” has been proofed … no doubt here!
This is algorithm and mining-software dependent. I remember when gpu mining software was around 22 Sol/s (and that was high).
I’m thinking your both right to a point on this. The planning that goes into a large scale mining operation is often misunderstood, just simply from the Power/Cooling aspect. Balancing 3 Phase commercial power is no trivial task, neither is designing and deploying a cooling solution to evacuate excessive amounts of heat at that scale.
JKDC is right however that ASIC is far easier to deploy and maintain. You don’t have the excessive amounts of trouble shooting standing up a ASIC as you can with GPU rigs, and you are competing with pretty much every GPU miner, and gamer to procure parts. You don’t have any of those worries in ASIC.
But to be fair, your trading one set of headaches for another. I can’t say if it gets any easier on the ASIC side of the aisle overall. But I can see scaling issues whether GPU or ASIC from power/cooling/data/security as my trade is building out and maintaining large scale data centers.
Blockchain is in its infancy, the ASIC vs GPU debate is irrelevant in the long term. Crypto currency mining is just a distraction and a tiny blip in the evolution of blockchain technology. Crypto will become the medium of exchange in the distributed world economy. The networks that provide services will eventually dominate the blockchain landscape, proof of compute, proof of bandwidth, proof of storage… search, social media, video, medical, gaming, shipping… the list is endless.
However, its interesting to me that exactly NONE of these applications can be done with ASIC’s. So ASIC’s could be restricted to Crypto transaction processing and securing a currency? Arguably a very important and fundamental roll, if they can maintain that niche. Everything else will be GPU’s, CPU’s and IOT devices.
Can we discuss this? Id be interested in hearing the opinions of both pro and anti ASIC.
Wait, wait, wait, this is the guy that made the video about Zcash and Bitmain Gold mine and took it down 2 weeks after i asked him if he is aware that these are not Bitmains wallets but Zcash Co. wallets??? 
I kinda chuckled a bit on that boxalex…I vaguely remember this, and it’s still funny.
I think you are right. There is a lot of preparation with Asics if you want to run more than let’s say 10 - 20.
I thought about sharing some more info and/or pics, but than again, the personal haters would immediatly jump on that train…
GPU’s have more uses so more people compete to buy them (gamers,miners,graphic design,AI etc.). GPU rigs are more prone to crash in my experience and need people to watch over them more, especially on a Windows system.
Initial setup with GPU rigs takes more time as well. You have to get risers and configure the motherboards. Some motherboards are finicky even when they are supposed to work. I have a MSI Z370 Killer and I couldn’t get more than 3 GPU’s to work on it even though it is supposed to. I have had no problems with AsRock boards so far. I have had problems putting switch boards and risers in certain slots as well and they had to be moved around etc.So there is extra time to set up a GPU rig. An ASIC just has to be plugged in and then type in the pool and wallet.
Nah, it’s build it and leave it. Most of my rigs I haven’t touched in months. I get crash reports from my systems when they reset and haven’t seen a single one in over a month, it’s that infrequent. It’s almost always just an update anyway and they just come back online and start mining again.
As for setup, once you set one up, you simply copy the files to each new one after that.