I don’t know bitcartel.
It seems like the wild west of words but little to no actions.
I would be more than amazed to see ETH team move to ProgPow under a year.
EDIT: I’ve got many GPU’s and I would be more than happy for an anti-ASIC fork
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Sia have decided to hard fork to brick all the current Bitmain and Innosilicon ASICs see Sia Proof-of-Work Reset. After much discussion with the… | by David Vorick | The Sia Blog
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I’m not sure how anyone should really feel about this. SIA actually openly chose the path to ASIC, were even developing their own. They got beat out by Bitmain and Innosilicon…not surprising. But now they are going to turn around and brick ALL the ASIC off. How should SIA miners actually feel about it? Does anyone wonder was it only ok for ASIC if the ASIC controlled by the Devs dominated? Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? I get it they feel like Bitmain/Innosilicon did something underhanded to the community. The article says this will be good for the coin as it will help eliminate single points of failure…but their original plan was their hardware to be that single point of failure. How is one any better than the other?
I just don’t know how I feel about it to be honest…what came, passed, and the now…it is of their own doing.
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They aren’t bricking all ASICs just all non-Obelisk ASICs.
That is even worse @garethtdavies. That’s essentially saying the current centralization isn’t “our” kind of centralization. How can you (by you I mean Sia) justify “your” hardware being the “only” hardware that should be allowed on a network?? Seems to me that is trying to correct what you (Sia) perceives as a mistake, with an even bigger one. If a coin is going to constrain and control it that much…then why have it mineable at all? Why not just be pure PoS, or simply power the network yourself, or with nodes you “vetted and trust” for that matter?
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Yeah dude, decentralization is thrown around a lot, at least ZEC will admit to the centralized aspect it currently holds till the halving
Dont get out of the boat
I’m less worried about ZEC than I am concerned with what “in my perception” for SIA is one bad decision after another. How could anyone trust a dev team that is essentially saying the only ASIC hardware allowed is the devices “we” sell you.
I give ZcashCo and the Foundation more credit than that. They made it clear early on in the ASIC debates that developing their own ASIC was looked at, but it wasn’t feasible really, nor was it something they really wanted to be involved in. (Right choice in my meager opinion).
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Sorry, yeah I’m not super familiar with SIA other than articles about their Asic release and such, it does seem strange but well just have to wait and see how it goes i guess
From the article:
We believe that an ASIC manufacturer monopoly is strongly preferable to being a GPU mined coin.
We encourage all manufacturers to add secret extra circuits that can act as failsafes.
So the pipe dream of a competitive market for ASICs has now revealed itself to be a dystopian nightmare of backdoored mining hardware from a ruling oligarchy.
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This is the history of the chip business. It’s capital intensive and brutal. It’s not new and not specific to ASICs. General purpose: high vol/low margin vs. specific purpose: low vol/high margin. Intel vs. SGI. Take no prisoners. It’s not a dystopian nightmare or some grand conspiracy. It’s just paths to profit and different time horizons for different business models coupled with nascent cryptocurrency adoption. If we assume the generals are all working in the best interest of the common good, we fail. The “little guy” is a mining farm in northern Europe with 1M+ GPUs with unique and exclusive access to cheap power. In order for this to work, all parties must be able work in their own selfish best interest. It’s not evil. It’s both difficult and beautiful.
I think your views are a little off the mark @Joshs.
A guy running a million GPUs has never, in any stretch of the imagination, been “the little guy”. You consider Nicehash to be the little guy LOL? The little guy is most of us on the forum with a handful of 6-7 card rigs. The garage miner so to speak.
I’m not sure where you are going with this. Should we just accept it as how it should always be? Then why do crypto at all? What is the difference between control being in the hands of a few ASIC makers and control being in the Central Banks? That is just trading one master for another…that wasn’t the point of Crypto though, was it? See what I mean?
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I do understand and appreciate your perspective. I should have been more thoughtful in my response.
I appreciate that. I just see Crypto as an opportunity to fix a great number of issues with how “money” works in the world…but we absolutely need to be mindful and careful or the same issues that plague FIAT, will just pop up and take over in crypto.
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I have yet to see a Zcash team member/dev come out and say here is why ASICs were a good thing for the network, and we are happy with how it turned out for mining. All posts have been whats currently wrong with ASICs and how they are harmful.
It all seems to boil down to one reason why we are currently ASIC now. It would be to much risk/work to try to fork ASICs away (scared to fork a algo change?). They were caught with thier proverbial pants down when the ASICs came out. They had no plans, had never disscussed what they might do IF or WHEN a ASIC might come out. Took them more then a month to finally have a meeting and come to this conclusion, and then decided not to fork. Giving a big middle finger to all the current GPU miners that supported thier network.
Why did you guys not already have a statement/discussion/plan about what you would do IF or WHEN a ASIC came out months ago. Atleast people would of known your stance on ASICs and how you would accept them because they add security and forking could cause issues. Atleast we would of known you do not care about ASIC resistance or GPU mining enough to think forking is required.
If I would of known Zcash would switch to ASICs at the first sign of them comming out(they were not even mailed out yet and you guys said ASICs are here to stay). I would of never started mining Zcash knowing they were going to say the ASIC resistance is over when the first ASIC is made for the algo…what the fawk guys…seriously.
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Sorry for the confusion when Im talking about making a statement/plan. I am aware of everything that was posted AFTER the ASICs were announced.
Im more talking about BEFORE the ASICs were announced, why was there no plans/discussion in place for when this event happened? Did the team/devs never think a ASIC was going to be released for Equihash? Was there any disscusions about ASICs in ANY meeting before they were announced? Was there any thought put into ASIC resistance beyond the initial release?
It just seems like you guys had your eyes set on Sapling Upgrade(rightly so) and were blind sided by the ASICs, and had zero plans in place, and never even had a discussion about what you guys might do IF and WHEN they might come out.
It’s been thought about and debated for over two years prior to ASICs showing up: Plan how to change the proof-of-work · Issue #1211 · zcash/zcash · GitHub
The biggest issue was Sapling timing as Zooko has mentioned in this same thread: Let’s talk about ASIC mining - #1197 by zooko
A key part of that blog post is:
While the company is not taking a technical position at this time, should the foundation (or anyone else) propose an upgrade that has gone through the Zcash Improvement Proposal (ZIP) process and comes with the rationale, engineering and planning required for a safe network upgrade, we will consider merging it in and committing to its ongoing support.
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Thanks for the quick responses. Will read more!
You answered your own question. They touted Asic resistance from the beginning so they could pull in a bunch of gpu miners to get the coin off the ground. I believe it was in the “Why choose Zcash” part of their homepage. With the exception of a couple members, the whole team and the foundation rolled without making a single attempt at resisting. Any Gpu miner that stayed after that is way more trusting(gullible) then I ever want to be thought of as.
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Well they stated Sappling was a priority. Now that Sappling upgrade is around the corner, do you think they might change the algo afterwards ?