Let’s talk about ASIC mining

Mining
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The MAIN reason I want a BIG Equihash coin to REMAIN ASIC resistant is what I’m calling, “Network affect.”

Meaning, If ASIC’s push us (GPU miners) out of mining ZCash and Ethereum pushes us out of mining ETH by not remaining ASIC resistant while rolling into POW/POS hybrid, there will be a LOT of GPU’s looking for a coin to mine with very few PROFITABLE options.

There will be lots of people pointing their rigs at remaining ASIC resistant ALGO’s while creating less profitability for those who mine it.

It sounds like I’m going to find a ZEN forum and Komodo forum to communicate with developers in order to find out where they stand and if and/or what may or may not be in the works in regards to maintaining ASIC resistance.

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Please provide a link, whether public or private.

It will take several or many people (like yourself) in order to pull this off. I have a technical mind as well but my background since 1997 has been teaching telephone technicians how to use their meter to identify and locate troubles. Usually a one or two week course. The length of the course was determined by whether I was teaching veterans or new hires how to use a new meter. I got my education from the Marine Corp from 1984 to 1988 as a communications electronics technician.

I’m a fast learner if I have someone who knows what the hell they’re doing and can point me in the right direction in regards to a knowledge base to gain experience with possible hands-on.

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I do know a couple of friends in my private chat room on trading view who know a LOT about code. I’ll share the bitcoin talk link with them as well.

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but going back on your asic-resistance promises which will destroy the investment of all your current GPU miners who supported your network is NOT good for the community :wink:

great spot there my friend, i can’t believe how sneaky and shady this is.
Funny enough, my post from 6 days ago where i speculated why on earth this subject is even up to debate in ZCash ? yeah, that was one of the theories …

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Note, he doesnt really believe that. He knows 100% its doable, very easily as well. But he already made a deal with ASCI manufacturers as suspected…

This is not a privacy coin, this a CEO of a company trying to get as rich as possible regardless of who gets run over…

They don’t, its a receipt for disaster and bitmain will win this for sure. Karma will play its favourite game.

Well said and a great idea, i will do the same as well. Thank you.

definitely a must. We need censorship-free forum. Can you give me the link for the talk you and @zL0k1 are on now?

I am 100% with you on this. I believe there are already tested ASICs on the market for ZCash, and since we now know what kind of backdoor shady tactics and deals with ASIC manufacturers are being done hell. I am no longer going to support anything related to zooko. This going is going to die for everyone but zooko and his “VIP” friends.
Only a fool would trust a CEO of company that clearly demonstrated that they have no issues in backing on the entire principles of their company and making the share holders meanwhile lose hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I like the idea, i like the community and god knows i wish i had time to make my own FROK with honest practices and real support for my community of miners. No 20% cut, no secret deals with “VIPs” and no BS.

By this, i urge @daira @bitcartel and other great minds here to fork off ASAP and i as well as everyone else here ( as well as on this subreddit) will be the first to send our hashrate in your direction. The right thing has to be done and we all know it.

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Unfortunately miners don’t have the status of shareholders, and actually, maybe we never want this to be the case. The modern government protected construct of limited liability corporations excludes us as being stakeholders, and the construct of a simple cryptocurrency also has no stake tracking in its design. By design, of course, and until there is a smart-contract version of this (many attempts beginning stages, but nothing complete anywhere yet) that’s how it will stay for some time.

Technically speaking, us miners are something more like customers, but not for paid contracted services but something closer to partners but in both cases without any agreement. They really can do whatever they like. Maybe there is no court that will arbitrate a complaint but that makes no difference to the fact that they are publicly violating what any reasonable person would consider to be a duty of care. It’s most especially brutal in cost to the newcomers, and extremely disloyal to those who participated in the early part of this project.

You’d have thought that a privacy oriented cryptocurrency dev team would have better ethics than this but what ya gonna do?

By the way, I am tracking wtm’s profitability table on an hourly or so basis. Someone is clearly jumping a lot of hashpower between equihash coins, and it looks like their tempo is increasing, as I have seen it move the top coin around 3 times today, and until today it was only 1 or 2 times a day they were switching.

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WOW 434 long feed! (side-note)

After following on the thread so far, I see ONE huge misunderstanding about ASICs and ZCash. Most criricism is against them is due to assuming (granted ASIC for equihash exists) will lead to the same hash-rate difference we saw with Bitcoin SHA256 PoW, that is from MH->GH->TH in less than 3 years!
Which, by virtue of using memory-bound PoW hash, makes this gain of 1000 impossible, it will be marginal the ASIC perf J/hash compared to GPU rigs. So NO, GPUs will remain relevant and feasible for mining and you wont get outdated over night.

Please have a look at the following chat between @daira and @zooko on github : https://github.com/zcash/zcash/issues/1211#issuecomment-379477645
posted by @bitcartel previously (sry quoting I intentionally omitted in order to add the comment number)

Where it ends with @daira comment:

Blockquote
The issue was raised, by @zookozcash and @h4x3rotab at least, of whether a parameter change to (144, 5) would be sufficient to prevent ASIC mining, or if it is then for how long.
It doesn’t seem economic with current technology to put the amount of memory needed for (144, 5) on the same chip as the Equihash logic. (It might be with “3D” memory technology at some point, although not with the current Intel XPoint technology.) Forcing a split between multiple chips preserves the main limitation in the performance of Equihash, which is memory bandwidth.
My estimation is that a (144, 5) parameter change is likely to delay ASICs long enough to allow time to switch to PoS or a PoW/PoS hybrid if we decided to do that (which is dependent on many other factors).

SO, unless we are talking some HUGE memory advancement anticipated in the next few years, which frankly I don’t see coming from Bitmain :smiley: , we can all go and sleep safely! That ZCash is ASIC-safe if not ASIC-resistant (bullet proof) !!!

ALSO, I am I guess the sad minority (see prev posts @root ) that are opposing any intentional ASIC-resistance. First, as initially brought by @zooko himself, focus of devs drifting in the wrong direction. I’ve seen enough of fighting the wrong battles in the crypto community, e.g. IOTA quantum-resistance, while I am patiently waiting for z-addr only TXs and z-addr mobile app.

BUT, mostly because it technically won’t work (constant mouse cat game!?) and makes 0,000,000 economical sense, while helping secure the chain. Why would fight ASIC that is marginally cheaper,more-powerful and not bulky&loose as a rig? (again see my comment no 1000 hashrate improvements possible)

PLEASE, note further : I don’t oppose PoW hash change, but if so at least make it on the memory intensive parts of the algo (and do it rare), and don’t fight ASICs by intentionally change params that you DE-intensify someone actually thinking of investing in ‘inventing’ specialized hardware. Because, we might still see innovation in hardware (else you are left to the mercy of GPU manufacturers that clearly don;t give much F about minners and even consider it semi-legal) is something I am firmly AGAINST such future. Some clear advancement are clearly possible(e.g. DDR5 memory optimized bus to asic chips(s)! will love to have one only for z-cash :wink: )
More of a bonus, I agree will be nice to have hashes shared by more coins than 1, as @zooko pointed as defence that ASICs are also not 1-hardwaare to 1-coin but 1-hardware 1-hash, which might even advance to many-hash many-coins ASICs (for the whole of $crypto community ). Why fight that?

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Standard GPUs actually do have at least an 8x disadvantage against custom made ASIC solvers, at least half of my rigs do, 8gb of memory, less than 1gb is actually needed for equihash. That means for sure any given specifically targeted ASIC is going to have a pretty big edge actually. Which isn’t really anything much we can do about it. I’m lucky as it is that I got all my gear before the GPU price blew up almost 400%.

But there is definitely something going on. A huge number of miners are more frequently and much larger amounnts of hashrate are skipping around between equihash coins. The hashpower has dramatically increased, and it did not decrease significantly while the profitability fell so low it was almost time to turn off my rigs because of the cost of electricity.

Of course I don’t want to be stuck here right now, but talking about obsoleting hardware that is only just on the margin of actually turning a profit, right after 2 months of nearly unprofitable mining is a bit of a punch in the guts and it has tended to be the case in the past that when ASICs show up on a network, none of the miners using them tell anyone else, a lot of rumours swirl for several months and then we see an announcement from an ASIC maker that in fact they are now selling them.

If you consider that the biggest part of the cost of GPUs is the memory and for equihash that memory is ridiculously overkill, yes, what is really required to build them? The very same GDDR5x memory chips, a relatively low end processor with a fast memory bus controller. Something like what was in 2016 generation GPUs. So it’s very plausible that ASICs are already mining, that a small number of early testers are on the networks already, and the reason for this recent lack of drop in hashpower and really large amount of hashpower chasing profits, it all screams ASIC to me.

An aside - technically, it almost wouldn’t even be an ASIC. It should be programmable. It should be possible to load it with different solver kernels quite easily, with a small minimal OS on an eMMC or similar flash disk, maybe also surface mounted to the board.

And if you hadn’t read zooko’s recent comments, reading between the lines it sounds like there is at least one project running that he is affiliated with to actually build a specialist equihash mining device. If there is one already in the works then there already being devices live on the network is far from implausible.

I’d love to be able to get these things too but I was scraping on the bones of my ass for most of the last 3 months, not just because of the downturn but a whole bunch of other unexpected expenses cropping up. Let’s just say that this chatter does not put me in a good mood just when I was feeling like there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and instead, an ASIC train headlights…

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Just in case anyone thinks I’m talking through my hat, this already shoots way above what is required for a competitive, cost effective equihash module that would probably cost about 1/8th the cost of a 1080 and would come pretty close to equalling it’s 500sol at stock clock.

There is no doubt this kind of hardware is already in production, at the GDDR5 level. That’s not an ASIC, in the proper sense of the word. It’s a memory hard PoW/SETI/etc compute unit. I pretty much guarantee within 6 months these will hit the market and likely lower specced hardware is already on several crypto networks.

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No, if you look at the context in which I made that statement, it was in support of the anti-ASIC position, since @ZC93 and others had been inaccurately arguing that ASICs can mine only one coin and therefore that ASICs imply investment in the success of a single coin. (But I correct inaccurate statements anyway regardless of which side of an argument makes them.)

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I’ve been arguing consistently and repeatedly for maintaining ASIC resistance. I don’t speak for them, but so have @bitcartel and @str4d.

[Edit: more precisely @str4d has stated that ASIC-resistance is one aspect of our actual goal to encourage decentralisation.]

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Thank you for your support for ASIC resistance in public. I only hope the majority of developers will soon come around to do the same.

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Blockquote
That’s because, as bitcoin has proven in the past, GPUs won’t be able to co-exist with ASICs, as their arrival is likely to push the hashrate to a level where other types of miners will become unprofitable.

This is exactly my point, NO it won’t happend with mem-bound PoW hashes.

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this is entirely speculation at that point, it might as well be the 8x price with RnD included !!!

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

Found the numbers.

Cryptos use 30.1 TWh == 2.4 million households, 0.8% US demand.
Visa: 0.19 TW == 17,000 households

Cryptos use 158 times more electricity than Visa.

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lol so you ran out of pro ASIC arguments after the truth came out and you decided to copy an old comment of mine and nitpick it to start a new argument? Nice try.

not sure why you decided to not read this when i first posted it to you, but here it is again. This is how real non-fake math works.

how about this?

but hey, if you wanna spread FUD and fake math, by all means. Don’t let me stop you. Just don’t include me in this, i have no time for such nonsense and this thread is not about this subject. So please go argue with someone else privately about this.
Have a nice day!

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Fake math? The Medium article you posted was counting lightbulbs in buildings as part of the entire banking industry amount of electrical usage. By that standard we would count every point of sale for cryptocurrencies, every full node and every auxiliary electrical usage possible. We were comparing hashpower electrical usage to Visa processing electrical usage. The numbers I gave were real, actual numbers between the two.

Further, I’m basically on the fence about ASICs because I don’t think they matter at all for decentralization where Flypool has > 51% hashpower already. I don’t see you crying anywhere about that. You seem only interested in making any effort to protect your own investment.

I won’t respond to you anymore, you’ve proven to everyone here that you’re a toxic user after joining 9 days ago. Good luck.

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this is a very interesting thread full of information and intelligent people .

I will just share my 2 cents view as a micro miner who has a render station that mines with it in spare time .

I am not against asics in general but I see it from different perspective . to me, any one who develops an asic for a currency that was developed not to be mined by asics is unethical person or entity . no respect to the currency developers nor the community that supported it since launch . that behavior is unacceptable and it should be even criminalized .
its exactly like having a road for pedestrians only and few guys decide to drive on that road .

being able to have a car and drive on a pedestrian road doesn’t give you the right to drive there or use it there,but most certainly if law enforcement don’t act and people wont complain , I will be one of those driving on that same road over 100mph .
and the only impression any one will have over such a place that allows such behavior go unchallenged is a failed corrupted state .

I fail to see any difference between this simple example and asics mining zcash or other non asic cryptos .

I felt little offended by how some might give a hint that its inevitable and we should accept it . or even do nothing about it .

specially coming from some of the zcash foundation itself .

I have very strong respect to monero after their fork . it showed developers dedication,caring and swift responsible actions. and a community with strong will .

I can’t help it not to feel little disappointment .

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To add to my earlier post about how ASIC mining can be controlled and regulated:

I was reminded of this by news today:

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So why can’t Zooko see all of this evidence you are compiling and still be pro-ASIC? It would be virtually impossible to ban video cards. Plus the fact that miners with Nvidia cards are already “aligned” anyway?

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