/yawn x1000
There is simply no comparison.
You could’ve partecipate too you know. They openly invited the community numerous times and the 64 who did shared their personal information for zcashs stake. That’s a some very solid vote right there.
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Hi,
So investors are not profit seeking? Even zooko said “gpu mine something else and swap it for zec”
really? even if it is not profitable? what incentive is there? like Nathan Wilcox said, “it is all opt in”.
What? isn’t this completely counter to a privacy coin? I have 5 zec on a transparent address. What I have on my z addrs is for me to know. Do I have to screenshot my wallet for my opinions to be valid?
It doesn’t matter where the criticism comes from if that criticism is valid. In this case, people you think are not invested in zcash are making the points of people very much invested in zcash. You then use this (their perceived lack of investment) to dismiss their viewpoint and claim in a very roundabout way that they are actually acting in bad faith to try to damage zec.
If you believe these people are acting in bad faith then just ignore them, they are just trying to get a rise out of you. Just flag the post and let another mod deal with it. Don’t let it get to you.
Wait, what? you said earlier they needed to be public holders if they want a voice. which is it?
(hint, it isn’t the first one).
can people in general please stop with this “prove you are committed to zec!” “im more committed to zec!” It makes this sound like a cult mixed with ponzi.
zec is not proof of stake in anyway. no one, except zcash co and zcash fo, has to prove they are committed in anyway. Not technically nor financially. They have to prove they have done an amount of work to receive an amount of coins. that’s it.
To try to make it otherwise is not good faith. I know a lot of people are doing it, (eg how many gpus do you have? how long have you mined zec? etc, etc.) it is not worth your time to address these questions. they are not relevant to the conversation and claiming they are is disingenuous and a distraction.
We really need @zooko to address the points @daira raised in this post. So I had a visit with Alex Ao - #8 by daira
the conversation stopped when that thread stopped.
Thanks.
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Not speaking for @root, but for myself, my concern isn’t about fluctuating hashrate, my concern is about 51% attacks. (Aside: I wasn’t concerned about them until they started happening in practice.)
My current model of the game-theory of PoW mining is that we should classify mining setups into either $COIN-fate-sharing or re-usable. $COIN-fate-sharing means that if $COIN’s price collapse to near-zero, the value of that mining setup will itself drop dramatically. For example, if BTC’s price dropped to near-zero, then a SHA-256d ASIC miner today that is currently worth thousands of dollars would probably be worth only hundreds of dollars at most.
I say that because BTC mining is currently worth about $13M/day, and the second-most valuable SHA-256d coin is BCH at about $1.1M/day. (Look at the New Issuance column.)
(from https://onchainfx.com/v/UsZtA6)
Therefore, I classify the current SHA-256d ASIC miners as Bitcoin-fate-sharing.
Now any GPU-miner I would classify as reusable. If the price of Zcash were to crash, a GPU-mining setup worth thousands of dollars would still be worth thousands of dollars, for two reasons:
-
Having lost the $1.3M/day of Zcash mining, you can switch to the $10M/day of Ethereum mining.
-
Or you could even just use your GPUs for some other purpose than coin mining, or rent or sell them to someone who wants to.
So I would classify all GPU mining as reusable.
Now, SHA-256d miners are not currently BCH-fate-sharing! Because BTC exists and is so much more valuable to mine (in aggregate). If the price of BCH were to crash to near-zero, this would not do much harm to the value of SHA-256d miners. Likewise, the current Equihash-200,9 ASIC miners are not ZEN-fate-sharing, although they are ZEC-fate-sharing.
Okay, so with that terminology, I would make the following comments:
-
A coin-fate-sharing mining setup might switch to mining a less-valuable coin because the current difficulty makes that coin more profitable at the moment (as described by @chuck732 above), but
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A coin-fate-sharing mining setup will not participate in an attack that could drive the price of the coin that it shares fate with to near-zero
and
- A coin’s consensus rules can make any kind of mining technology into coin-fate-sharing by time-locking the mining rewards. Interestingly, this would work even if a more-valuable coin exists with the same PoW algorithm. For example, if BCH time-locked the mining-rewards, then BCH-miners would be BCH-fate-sharing, even thought BTC exists and is more valuable to mine and uses the same PoW algorithm. BCH miners would still refuse to participate in attack that could drive the price to BCH to near-zero.
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This assumes that the overarching goal of 51% attack is monetary, which is most likely not for current actors it could be to gain market cap for another coin.
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I see a couple problems with your post:
You says the Bitcoin ASIC is worth “thousands”…maybe at one time, but now they can be had for ~$700, just a little less than the Z9 Equihash miner. So the value sink that ASIC miners have into Equihash is minor than compared to what it costs to build a GPU rig (Less than the price of 2 GTX 1070 cards).
You seem to assert that the 51% attacks were caused by GPU miners since ASIC will “fix” it…care to share the evidence on that? I asserted (with caveat nobody really knows) that it was awful strange the targets of said 51% attacks in the news the last few months were coins that said “no” to ASIC and had forked, or were actively working on a fork…three (If you count the strange issues with Monero after the fork) last I counted (was there more?) Neither of us has any proof that I can point too to back up said claim in either direction though (unless you do, and I don’t mean “They told me it wasn’t them”). I actually posted stating Dev’s across coins needed to be communicating more about it, since what I would call a Pandora’s box was now open and it was going to be an issue regardless of GPU/ASIC. As soon as the hash rate is low enough/price to rent/buy hash is cheap enough occurs, the potential exists regardless of whether it’s an ASIC coin or a GPU coin.
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Bitmain’s S9 are below USD 1000, but they are not the top notch sha256 miners, the real good sha256 asics begin at 2.000 and go up to 10.000+ USD. Not that it matters too much …
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I agree with @zooko that a time-locked mining reward would solve the profit-switching issue. At this time it seems like a good idea with a few caveats:
I’m curious how that would work with pooled mining. Specifically, if it would also time-lock a small miner (perpetually?) to using a single pool. It might make switching away from one pool to a better one more difficult.
It seems like this could cause a potential security issue if a single pool goes over 51% and tried to attack the network. Users would have to accept a loss in order to remove hashrate from the attacking pool.
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You seem to be making up the rules as you go, and you are crafting them in a way to support ASIC mining.
GPU miners have a substantial amount of skin in the game too. If Zcash goes down in value (or becomes unmineable by GPUs), then GPU miners lose a substantial amount of revenue. It doesn’t even matter whether they are mining Zcash or not.
Second, skin in the game doesn’t have much to do with the economics of 51% attack. If someone can earn more by attacking the network and double spending on exchanges than they can expect to earn by mining the coin, then they would attack the network. Yes, their equipment might be rendered worthless after such an attack, but they would have profited from the double spend and wouldn’t have to pay for electricity, storage, cooling, or data.
I’ve argued before that it should not be the concern of developers to make it impossible for people to launch double spend attacks. This is something that exchanges need to defend against. If 51% attacks are absolutely impossible, then there is no point of proof of work mining.
Finally, if you are 1) highly concerned about defense against 51% attacks and 2) are not in favor of ASIC resistance, then why don’t you just have merged mining with Bitcoin? I see advantages to having a separate proof of work algorthim to preserve GPU mining, but if you are going the ASIC route, then you’ve eliminated the benefits of the widespread coin distribution that comes from GPU mining.
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mistfpga
So investors are not profit seeking? Even zooko said “gpu mine something else and swap it for zec”
Investors are for sure profit seeking, but there is a big difference. They take a risk with money they directly invested into a given project. You should know that as you seek investors for your project as well. Every investors can lose everything he invested, a miner (no matter gpu/asic) doesn’t lose anything if the project hits the bottom as nothing was invested directly.
mistfpga
really? even if it is not profitable? what incentive is there? like Nathan Wilcox said, “it is all opt in”.
Actually yes, until the project is death it is like that. Auto-Multi-Algo services and/or rental services will catch in at least in waves when the difficulty is low. Actually we even see a lot of projects with minus profit per day that still get decent hashpower somehow. Every miner that leaves is replaced by someone else … With nowadays so many miners online only a view are dedicated to a given project. Just watch this forum, there are 1000’s of Zcash miners and we are maybe at most 20 people commenting on various topics …
mistfpga
What? isn’t this completely counter to a privacy coin? I have 5 zec on a transparent address. What I have on my z addrs is for me to know. Do I have to screenshot my wallet for my opinions to be valid?
Not for an opinion, but for a vote you should have and that it’s a good thing. There is a difference if you hold 1 ZEC and have an opinion on the forum, it’s another story if you hold 10.000 ZEC and would like to have a voting on elections for example.
mistfpga
It doesn’t matter where the criticism comes from if that criticism is valid. In this case, people you think are not invested in zcash are making the points of people very much invested in zcash. You then use this (their perceived lack of investment) to dismiss their viewpoint and claim in a very roundabout way that they are actually acting in bad faith to try to damage zec.
Someone nonstop calling Zcash a Scam (that’s the reason here that root mentioned it) isn’t valid criticism. Neither nonstop bribery, corruption, name callings and death Zcash is a valid criticism, at least non in my opinion.
mistfpga
Wait, what? you said earlier they needed to be public holders if they want a voice. which is it?
Voice isn’t the same like vote. These thread is a great example that everybody has a voice, but not everybody has a vote, for good reason.
Actually thinking about it it’s nearly a hybrid POS than, would at least in my opinion be the easiest way to setup something like that. For example coins matter after x days and expire after x days. This way the time locked mining reward could be granted without dealing with miningpools, whatever. Everything else seems to be a hard setup, but maybe there are better solutions of course.
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Actually if BCH goes to the ground it would impact BTC miners for sure, mostly causing it going to 0 profit with the additionally huge hashrate BCH as well has coming over to BTC. While reverse it would be deadly, no doubt, the impact from BCH to BTC would be big as well in my opinion. Have in mind that the biggest BCH/BTC miningpools have autoswitching btw both coins, which levels a lot of the hashrate in favour of the current more profitable. Just as a side note.
With other words, the bigger the next big project on an algo the more impact it will have on the biggest coin.
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Not aware of these (Not a ASIC guy). Links for education?
You don’t need a link Bitmain doesn’t have and S9’s above $698.00. They don’t have any $2000.00 Asic for sha-256.
probably something like this
Well that’s not “a” ASIC, but a Custom built climate controlled purpose built Container of ASICs (176) lol.
That was kind of what I was getting at @chucky732 , that I had never heard of such an expensive ASIC. @mistfpga suggested the Bitfury Customized container of (176) their ASICs, but that’s not “a” ASIC (singular), that’s a Small farm in a can lol.
Halong Dragon Mint T1: 16 TH/s = ~2.700$
GMO B2: 24 TH/s = 3.500+
Bitfurry B8: 50 TH/s = 4000-5000
just some quickly posted out of mind, there are some more real expensive …
Thx, you could have waited for an answer bevor making such conclusion:
Here a good one:
Asicminer Pro 8 Nano: 3800 TH/s out of 50 Moduls
Price: around 550,000 USD if i remember right, makes per Modul/Asic: ~11,000$ at 76 TH/s
(you can buy of course only 1 modul/asic at the price around ~11,000 USD as well!)
just to compare the little Bitmain S9, 14TH/s at best.
When those hit the market for Zcash, I retire and buy my own country 
So, where’s all that competition for the Equihash ASIC miners ? Remember the millions of dollars that Zooko said was going to be spent to create a competitive landscape? All I see is a few companies out of China selling miners that are all adaptations of the same unit, mining anywhere from 10k to 50k sol/second and price gouging you along the way. By the way , soon as you think you are making money with your Z9’s, they will drop the price to $300/unit, and you will lose your “profit”. Decentralization is definitely not Zcash’s focus.
1 Like