If you are going to claim pool switching is responsible for difficulty swings, back up your claims with evidence. Show which coin(s) lost as much hashpower as Zcash gained. Most of us suspect it is the ASIC manufacturers either testing or mining for profit in short bursts. There are t1 addresses missing when the difficulty lowers.
The difficulty has fluctuated a lot because private pools are coming in and out of Zcash. You can look at the pool distribution here: https://explorer.zcha.in/statistics/miners
Compare the last 6 hours to the last week or month – a lot of large private pools have taken a break.
I’ve noticed the same thing in Decred mining:https://i.imgur.com/mKyRJJi.png
Huge ASIC pools are hopping in and out. My guess is that these belong to ASIC manufacturers, who want to earn coins when the difficulty is low but don’t want to spike the difficulty too much because fewer people would want to buy the $10,000 ASICs (that cost $800 to build).
This is why I want to go back to GPU mining – it’s much more fair and transparent, and we don’t have a few parties being able to control 50% of the hashrate due to hardware advantages.
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Not making that claim at all, I was interested in chuck732’s comment about hashrate lost while auto-switching.
should every gpu be sold with an acorn? i really dont get your logic with this. miners are always looking for an advantage.
as i said pretty much business as usual. you were predicting the end of times and you know what, nothing happened. also, again have you seen the gpu farms man. there are too many gpus that were mining. did you see the bbt video, that guy calls himself a small farm with 2500 gpu. i hate to think what a large farm looks like. stop it already with your bs decentralization.
2,500 GPUs is 0.03% of the Etheruem network.
This Decred solo miner controls 40% of the network.
Zcash solo ASIC miners had about the same amount of the hashrate when they were mining.
As far as I’m concerned, this is a security issue. Lack of memory hardness has made it very cheap to amass 51% of the hashing power on ASIC-friendly algorithms. It would be much harder for someone to do this to Ethereum because the memory would be very expensive.
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so youre saying someone new to mining needs an asic then?
This is a wrong statement. ETH is not 51% proof due it’s memory requirements but due it’s enormous hashrate.
Proof for this is that the next 3 Ethash coins by market cap are allready vulnerable for 51% attacks only with immediatly available rentable nicehash traffic:
ETH Classic, available 78%, cost: $16.500
Metaverse, available 2,089%, cost: $615
Ubiq, available 4,049%, cost: $318
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Think about it this way:
Before Zcash ASICs came out, the Zcash network had about 400 MH of GPU hashing power. The value of the hardware that was providing this hashing power is about **300 million** (400,000,000h/s / 300h/s * ~ 225).
Now, however, the Zcash network has about 600 MH, but almost all of it is coming from ASICs. If we assume that the average profit margin for Equihash ASICs is 500% (which is conservative, imo), then the value of the hardware that is securing the Zcash network is far lower. It’s around $16 million (600,000,000h/s / 15,000h/s * ~$400).
The hardware supporting the Zcash network is a lot less valuable than it would be if it were memory hard.
Want to know something crazy? Bitcoin Gold, which has a much smaller block reward than Zcash, actually has more valuable hardware securing the network. The value of the GPUs securing the Bitcoin Gold network is about $30 million.
So, yes, lack of memory hardness is a security liability because it makes it very cheap to control 51% of the hashing power on a long term basis. I’m not talking about brief attacks with rented hashing power.
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Where are you getting this amazing factual information from?
You can view the network hashrate here: Zcash Hashrate Chart
I’m assuming that few GPU miners are still mining Zcash because it’s much less profitable than alternatives like Etheruem or Bitcoin Gold. (Zcash also requires more power than Ethereum for less revenue.)
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I know where and how to view that, but I do thank you for including that. I am curious, where to do see that the majority of that hashrate is ASIC. I seem to be missing where it says that, or is that some other link you can share?
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I explain right here:
“I’m assuming that few GPU miners are still mining Zcash because it’s much less profitable than alternatives like Ethereum or Bitcoin Gold. (Zcash also requires more power than Ethereum for less revenue.)”
Just using WhatToMine, I can estimate that miners will earn nearly twice the profits mining Ethereum compared to Zcash and they will spend less on cooling costs.
So I think it’s reasonable to conclude that most GPU Zcash miners have moved on. Is this what you are disputing?
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Stop debate change algo to 144.5 immedetly!!!
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There is no changing the algo. It was already voted on and will stay put!! No debating. Move on to another algo!!
The only way to be fairly sure if it is ASIC’s or GPU’s is to look at the miner distribution 3 months ago and compare it to now. Mostly I noticed a bunch of solo mining t1 addresses so those are extremely likely to be ASIC’s since they didn’t exist until the ASIC’s were being tested/sold. The pools are hard to break down exactly, but I believe most of the pool percentages now are ASIC miners. It won’t be a reasonable certainty until the Zcash profitability goes down to Monero returns or less as mined on Nvidia cards.
I get your point and where you are coming from, but it’s a totally wrong calculated. ON first look it might be like that, but it’s not, even less the securing factor.
Your calculation would perfectly hold true IF the given hardware was bound to the coin now and forever.
We know this is not true and no hardware and no system, expect POS staking, is bound to a coin, making the securing network calculation absolutly invalid.
There are more flaws with that/such calculation:
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Where is the point of having for example hardware of $30M like BTG, but it costs anyway only USD 2000 per hour for an attacker to rent that hashrate? (Just an example, fictive numbers!). It’s obvious that the main problem is the renting, the free hashrate, not the value of the hardware (no matter gpu, asic, memory, whatever)
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Determine the value of the hardware? Manufactoring cost? Reseller cost? Whatever cost?
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Fluctuation: how much of the hashpower can fluctate/shiftgo away immediatly?
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how much of the hardware is there due price of coin to profit relation? How much of the hardware would be there if the price of the coin, for example, would be only 50% for some reason?
Actually what you wrote/calculated is an absolute main POS argument as with POS you secure really and indeed the network with the value of your stake and only for this coin.
About the hardware used for ZEC by now. My personal opinion and guess is that it could be in the range of 5-30% by now. Due the profitability calculation it’s obvious that the majority by common logic must be asic by now. The remaining gpu’s on ZEC are for sure by now only mining facilities with real low power costs, running cloud mining contracts and such stuff that will be just here until the contracts run out or more asics drive the difficulty higher. The best indicator for that is that the difficulity is not yet rising too fast and too high. That’s a sign that gpu power still gets shifted away slowly but surely.
haha vote…like in north korea …on coin that had 100 000 miners …43 people voted somewhere not to change and that is voting hahah.
Ok you want change it but dont pretend like it was peoples choice.
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This not North Korea you don’t die. Peoples choice has nothing to do with it. And miners are just that. Their not employees of the company. And don’t have the right to vote, this in not a government where you vote for something.
I stop mining zec when they announce they where going to let Asic in. I wasn’t happy but that’s how life go’s it’s not fair and it does not owe you anything.
By the few of you that keep whining and complaining will not change it to what you want.
And I did not buy any Asic miners. I now have over 200 gpu’s mining another coin .
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I wanted to provide an update here after attending Zcon0. My original reply was staunchly in opposition to ASICs, and so far it has received the most likes in this thread, which indicates there are probably a lot of users who feel somewhat betrayed by Zcash. Most of you probably assumed, as I did, that ASIC resistance was here to stay. Let me explain why I believe ASICs will be made obsolete again, and why this transitional period for Zcash mining will lead to positive long-term outcomes.
The ultimate goal of Zcash is mass adoption as a truly private digital currency. Without real world usage, ZEC is only a speculative asset. If you’re only looking at how ASICs will affect your personal financial interests, then you might be missing the bigger picture. The Zcash team are some of the most dedicated people I’ve ever met, and they are relentlessly pursuing the actualization of Zcash as a technology. Getting rich is the furthest thing from their collective minds.
Right now Zcash isn’t being used for it’s primary feature: privacy. And that’s not without reason, because currently you need to run a full node to use z-addresses. Sapling lays the foundation for mass adoption of z-addresses by reducing the resource requirements for calculating zero-knowledge proofs. Mobile wallets and hardware wallets that can support z-addresses are the two most important developments for mass adoption since the inception of Zcash.
The Zcash devs cannot divert development resources without pushing back other upgrades. Sapling logically takes precedence over any potential proof of work algorithm changes, so the earliest the devs could conceivably start would be after October. It was discussed at Zcon0 that a PoW change would take roughly 6 months to complete, so the earliest possible date for a switch to ASIC resistance would be April or May of next year. By that time ASICs will already dominate the network.
Any change to the PoW algorithm would likely result in a contentious fork, and could even leave the network vulnerable to a 51% attack. For Zcash to succeed, it must retain the secure qualities it inherited from Bitcoin, which includes resistance to 51% attacks. If equihash ASICs can increase Zcash’s network hashrate significantly without destroying miner profitability, that would substantially reduce the feasibility of a 51% attack. But improving network security won’t stop there.
Zooko has stated that he believes the days of proof of work algorithms are numbered, so a switch from proof of work to proof of stake is likely following Ethereum’s successful migration to full PoS. And stake mining is ASIC proof, no pun intended. While ASIC resistance was ideologically appealing, it was ultimately flawed in that no PoW algorithm can stay ASIC resistant forever given the proper monetary incentives. Therefore, people in the community that truly believe in Zcash as an idea should recognize this period as transitional and transformative.
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the bad thing is, no one thinks about us gamers…and no one thinks about the ecological point. Those hungry GPUs aren’t the most eco thing. Don’t know how we want to spend Zcash after the earth burns down…just one point of view 