ASIC are build for warehouses…that is why they are boxes with loud central fan so Bitmain can easily stack them next to other in their mining facilityes 
Home use is just smoke screen and its probably less then 1% what is in mining facilities
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I agree, I haven’t touched my production rigs in months. They just run, report when they have an issue, and restart (my test rigs are a different story as intended).
However, many miners do not have the technical ability to make this happen, so there is credibility to the argument that ASIC’s make things easier for the end user… assuming you can completely trust the manufacturer, which is part of the opposing argument.
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Wow, the picture of BITMAIN Mining Farm that has been posted on this thread like hundreds times.
I’m so shocked by the massive mining power of BITMAIN and literally having a heart attack right now.
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Because they all look the same so it look like its the same.
People who bought last month Bitmain B3 ASIC payed 3000$ (and Bitmain sold 2500 off them ) and it already earns just 5$ a day- electricity and will go much lower 
Bitman laughs you all
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Can anyone identify ram-chips on those Z9 mini PCBs?
What discord channel was this picture posted in?
I’am not sure, but it seems someone from the BitcoinZ project or someone affilated with them has posted the pic as i saw their logo on it. Maybe contacting them to find out the Ram chips and other spec. would worth a try…
Would be nice if the outcome/results are shared here too, not only on gifthub…
Guys, I am a little new on this topic, but I tried to follow it. I don’t understand how can zcash foundation embraces asics after they build their comunity on gpu mining. If what you say is true, that the people that mine on asic will be fine if the price drop to 150$ and difficulty rise to 20 mil, wouldn’t make the people that belived in this project and have been mining(maybe for 1 year) and are holding to their coins, hopeless? This project has so much potential, but without the comunity it is done. How can you embrace asics in this circumstation…it just blow my mind. If asics are they way, then fine, but you haven’t done anything to try to fight them, like monero is doing.
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for everybody worried about competition, here a new player is entering the market on building Asics:
rather you didnt post that, it’s going to be hard to endure the list of frivolous complaints for a very good first release hardware by GMO. Bravo to them.
Wow, x2,4 price, x1,7 hashrate, x1,4 power consumption. Such competitor. I know few (5+) ASIC’s manufacturer, but they can’t beat Bitmain’s products ROI.
2200 Watts…that is going to be some loooud ASIC…
And would make now on 150$ billion coin less then makes 1080Ti on RVN (30 million dollar coin) for 200 watts.
it’s more energy efficient with these new chips. And for a 1st product not bad at all imo. Higher price for newer technology, normal … Still, it’s a competitor. Everybody can now go with a japan producer …
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Folks, the Zcash Foundation’s governance process includes at least two proposals about changing the Proof of Work. Check it out. GitHub - ZcashFoundation/Elections: A space to describe and run the Zcash Foundation's elections.
As for my evolving personal opinions about this stuff, remember that I said a few weeks ago that I didn’t think 51% attacks were a serious concern but that if they started getting exploited in practice that they would quickly become a huge concern to me? Well, that’s happened.
BTG and ZEN have been successfully 51%-attacked, and I think the XVG attacks had a 51%'ish flavor to it, and there’s something weird that is going on with XMR but I don’t know what. But just looking at the BTG and ZEN attacks, that’s already enough to make 51%-attacks rise to a primary concern in my mind. I think 51% attacks currently threaten the very existence of Zcash and defending against them is an urgent and critical job.
This makes me value ASIC miners a lot more! Commodity (CPU/GPU) miners (e.g. Nicehash) could participate in a 51% attack and then start using their equipment to mine another coin. ASIC miners can’t do that (unless there is another coin that is at least as valuable to mine that uses the same PoW algorithm).
Having a sunk cost of investment into specialized hardware is great for making a miner more risk-averse about something that could harm the long-term value of the coin (over the depreciation period of their hardware, let’s say 1 to 3 years). This is true for both small-time miners like the individuals who have been ordering Z9 minis as well a for a large-scale professional mining operation.
Note that this does not mean I distrust GPU miners. A huge number and variety of people — both individuals and also several huge professional operations — have supported Zcash ever since its launch. I have always been grateful to these people and I trust them to be good and honest and honorable people. However, our network architecture shouldn’t be reliant on the trustworthiness of specific humans, but instead should be based on cryptography and economics.
Specialized hardware improves the economics by aligning the fate of the miners with that of the coin-holders. (Another thing that might achieve the same effect is time-locking the mining rewards to unlock incrementally once a week for a year, so that all miners — whether using commodity or specialized hardware — have aligned fate with the coin-holders.)
On the other hand, I continue to value the diversity and breadth of GPU mining, allowing Zcash to reach places where it would otherwise be impossible to acquire. This was my original plan when choosing a memory-oriented Proof-of-Work: to get widespread distribution of the coins in the short term, and then to get improved fate-alignment in the long-term when the inevitable centralization and specialization of mining took effect. But I’m not yet ready to let go of that first effect! There are so many people who still can’t acquire ZEC any other way than by mining, and those people also currently cannot acquire a Z9 mini.
So, my thoughts on where to go next are still evolving, but the main thing I wanted to update people about here is that the development of live 51% attacks radically changes my priorities.
In the long run, I suspect 51% attacks will spell the end of Proof-of-Work mining. Researchers like Joseph Bonneau and Ben Laurie who called it out as theoretically unsound may be proven right. So in the long run, we may need to migrate to a PoW/PoS hybrid like Decred uses, or something else. But in the short-run, we just need to keep our users safe and our network reliable, and keep everyone on board with learning and improving as we go.
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Do you think its a coincidence that these 51% attacks are all coming at the heals of the equihash ASIC release? This most likely a coordinated attack from ASICs (or the team behind them) to promote the need for ASICs. Do you think its a coincidence that its also against the current largest coins that said they would fork? Basically, the equihash algo is being bullied into working with the mafia. Simple as that and you are falling right into it…
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Why wouldn’t ASIC miners also attack Zcash?
The economic incentive is there - they can short ZEC via futures and CFDs.
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Those z9 pics were on safecoin discord general thread june 1, invite at safecoins website, there’s actually a whole other discussion involving the z9
FYI - your ability to throw a dig into Monero security amongst this… is tasteless.
And to reiterate my point from above. If you can not see that the things you want to protect, are actually the things that are attacking, you are blind. We have gotten here because we have allowed mining to get centralized. Centralization leads to focused attacks. Being proactive with not only miner decentralization, but algo decentralization (each coin having their own algo variant) is the way forward. There is no turning back once we give into factory farm mining.
I don’t think Zcash has to worry about 51% attacks because of its high network hashrates. Zen and BTG have network hashrates that are one tenth as large.
Second, GPU miners have skin in the game, just much as ASIC miners do. A GPU miner who is mining Ethereum still cares very much about the value of Zcash because it directly affects his revenue. So, as far as I’m concerned, GPU miners’ interests are just as aligned with Zcash as ASIC miners’ would be.
I also don’t think the 51% attacks were caused by GPU miners because the attacks would potentially hurt the value of the coins they are mining (as well as GPU mining in general). It’s worth noting that the BTG attack involved a double spend of 18 million, which means that the attacker had a lot of money to start with and was willing to risk all of it. It wasn’t some average Joes who launched the attack – it was a team with a lot of money and experience. Pulling off an attack like that on Zcash would be exponentially more challenging.
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Right now it’s impossible to rent enough hashpower to attack Zcash as well as it’s impossible for Monero. You can call it just a conspirational theory, but the attacks on Equihash coins started after ASIC releases. I don’t want to tell, that it can be only Bitmain, but if we look on real profit from this attacks - it was zero. Exchanges just increased minimal confs and that’s all. And after first loss on BTG, attack repeated on Zencash: again with zero profit. It makes me think, that the main motivation was not profit on double spend.
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