Some early adopters were also the first to purchase Equihash ASICs. These two groups are not mutually exclusive.
I’d like to see your source for that statistic. Every single miner I spoke to at Zcon0 told me they had already purchased or were planning to purchase ASICs. Everyone has access to ASICs since anyone can order them.
Way to misunderstand the point. ASICs cannot change between different algorithms like a GPU can. Therefore the majority of Equihash ASICs will mine the most dominant Equihash coin.
The likelihood of another Equihash coin being released that exceeds Zcash’s daily issuance or market cap is close to zero. The truth is these ASICs have nowhere else to go, and as a result the network hashrate of Zcash will remain high enough to make any sort of attack from GPU miners infeasible. That could prove to be important in the future depending on how long the bear market lasts.
You might argue that allowing gaming computers to mine opens up mining to a larger segment of people, which I absolutely agree with. I argued this point a number of times on this forum. However, it appears that PoW mining is going through a prolonged period of low profitability or even outright unprofitability. In this sort of market environment, it’s unwise to rely on commodity hardware to secure your chain, as large numbers of GPUs could be switched off or moved to another more profitable coin. We’ll have to agree to disagree, but I believe ASICs are much less likely to switch coins or be turned off, and therein lies their security benefit.
Lol guys @vgm invested big money into ASICs and will say/do anything just to delay any talks about forking away to ASIC resistant or Proof of Stake algorithm before he is closer to his ROI. All this talks about him going to Zcon0 and talking with miners how they will buy ASICs is bullshit. Does the small miner have options to travel to Zcon0 ? Maybe, but probably not. So who goes there ? People like him who own big farms, which he argues against.
Can we stick to civilized discussion instead of hurling insults and profanity? @Trololino
Calling me a liar without proof is uncalled for. What does this ad to the discussion? Why don’t you address the technical aspects of my posts instead of baseless character attacks.
Why not? It was in Montreal and anyone could have requested to attend for free. I wasn’t special.
I’ve never had a “big farm”, only a dozen RX 480’s, a 1070 and a couple of 1080ti’s. Now I have 10 Inno A9’s, which was a significant investment but not a big farm by any stretch. How many people on this forum arguing for ProgPoW have hundreds of GPUs?
The ZCash community was 100% GPU before ASICs came, Do you think more then 10% of the community went out and bought ASICs when there was talk about forking away from the algo? There isnt enough ASICs to go around right now to get one to every person that use to be a miner. That is where the number is comming from.
Wow, just wow. Please step back and read this from a point of view that has no investment. You are saying you talked to every single person at Zcon0 and they all were invested in ASICs, ok right. Then you proceed to say EVERYONE has access to ASICs, since anyone can order them. This is completely false, lots of people are unable to purchase items from China, this isnt some fantasy myth.
I can see no matter what I present to you, your biased view will prevent you from seeing any truth that may lose your investment money. If you can not see any of the downsides with ASIC mining that has been pointed out, nothing I say will change your mind. I wish you luck and please make a thread in a few months on how well the ASICs have done for you, I would honestly like to know.
I do not have hundreds of GPUS, however I do have some extra ones that I dont use for work anymore. So I put them to use mining. This is why GPU mining is so important, ANYONE with a modern computer can mine it. That was the whole point of 1 cpu = 1 vote. If only a select few people can get the hardware to mine, it defeats the purpose…
Only “profanity” I wrote is bullshit which is a slang for calling out your lies. But when you have nothing else going for you, call me out on profanity sure.
I didn’t say you didnt go to Zcon0, I stated that no small miner would go there. How can I as a small miner with 20 GPU’s from Bosnia economically justify paying 900 USD for a ticket, and another 500 for a flight to Canada plus the hotel stay? I can’t, only FARM owners go to conventions, and these are kinds of people you’ve been talking to.
Well I have no way of proving how big your farm is, but like I said small miners cant economically justify going to zcon0 unless they already live there.
I never said that, please don’t put words in my mouth. What I said is that every miner that I talked to told me they had or were planning to invest in ASICs in order to continue mining ZEC. I did not talk to everyone at the conference and not everyone I did talk to was a miner. In fact, miners were a minority at the conference.
Way to pick one sentence and ignore the point I was trying to make. The event was such a small percentage of the community, to claim the majority of the community that was mining Zcash before now owns a ASIC because you talked to 5 miners at Zcon0 and they said they were invested, its rediculous.
That sentence was a complete mischaracterization of what I said.
That’s a fair point, but we really have no idea what percentage of the community attended.
I never once suggested that the majority of GPU miners purchased ASICs, only that anecdotally there is a large intersection of early adopters who were both GPU miners and ASIC buyers. The truth is nobody knows what percentage of GPU miners purchased ASICs.
You were trying to imply that every single miner you talked to at Zcon0 was invested into a ASIC. Sorry I used the word EVERYONE instead of the word MINER.
Yet you bring up the point on how every MINER you talked to at the event was invested in ASICs. Did you straight out say the word MAJORITY no, When you say 100% of the MINERS you talked to at Zcon0 are invested into ASICs, isnt that what your trying to imply?
It really seems like you are just trying to attack the weakest point of the paragraph and ignore the real point its trying to get across, and refuse to answer the main issues.
Forgive my ignorance on the subject, but being from Canada I’ve never had to deal with restrictions. I’m genuinely curious as to why you’re unable to purchase ASICs from China? Is it specific to your country?
I was simply stating that anecdotally there is an intersection of early adopters who purchased ASICs and that forking to ProgPoW would disproportionately hurt those people. I’m not really sure what your main issue is other than an apparent desire to see those that purchased ASICs suffer.
Your the one that wants everyone that was here up till June 2018 to suffer because you invested into Application-Specific Integrated Circuit that can only do ONE thing.
ZCash was a ASIC-RESISTANT coin. You buy an ASIC for it and act like your a victim when people are against them. When you ignore what everyone was shouting for months on these fourms about how we dont want ASICs and all the drawbacks that come with them months before they shipped out.
You knew the risk involved. Buying a ASIC is a big risk, and by doing so you forced out all the GPU miners trying to make money faster. Hope your gamble pays off, or you just ruined a great thing trying to make a quicker buck.
If everyone that bought a ASIC loses money, I would feel bad, however, If you couldnt see what the other thousands of ASICs coins did, or listen to the community, then you deserve to lose your investment.
Someone can only agree to this. I personally run around 100 Asics and it makes no sense to go to such conventions and meetings. Only way someone is going there is if they are investors, live maybe near it or have bigger mining farms and a bigger interest in attending such meetings. With USD 900 per ticket we can pretty much exclude that the average joe miner or ZEC holder is visiting such convention.
Sorry didn’t mean to, I was just invoking your name. I didn’t mean to rub the magic lamp The Z9 is the thing people were asking about.
For an established player like Bitmain yes, even then the devices lack many design tweaks. (for example back in the old days bitfury laughed at me for my capacitor layout on my fpga design. he showed how I could make it much much better by using different techniques)
For a new player to enter the space and manage to produce a product that is viable at a decent watt/coin ratio is going to cost a lot of money. That was the point I was making. Im sure even for Bitmain to spit out a 144,5 would cost more in R&D than parts and more in assembly than in R&D. But I work with a very different sort of cryptographic hardware.
I would love to see a breakdown or any more info. It would be really appreciated if you could make a new thread about it so it doesn’t get drowned out in the noise of this massive thread.
That makes it sound a lot easier than it actually is, unless you are a ASIC producer like bitmain/canaan/inno etc. Which for a privacy based coin introduces a KYC failure point, being the specialist companies can be targeted.
I don’t see a problem with fpga’s i’d say it was a bullish move if anything. my problem with asics is they cannot adapt if the coin needs it, and they introduce a manufacturing failure point. unlike multipurpose equipment like GPUS, FPGA’s, etc. asics are tied to an algo, which can tie the algo to the asic.
Thanks for the response and thank you for your contributions to cryptocurrencies in general.
That’s how competition and optimization works. When a trusted entity gets involved it tips the scale in favor of one over another, there is no longer competition because the winner was chosen.
Doing nothing also goes against the whole point of launching Zcash with Equihash which is meant to be ASIC resistant and still is if the parameters were to be updated.
That was the original intention. When you change the parameters you don’t make Zcash ASIC resistant, you put it in a situation where a large manufacturer like Innosilicon can quickly adapt and create a new ASIC that unfairly takes profits from GPU miners. You hurt users who have made investments. Further it might not be so easy to see when they have one running. At that point, forcing a new parameter change becomes another distraction for developers.
And sure, GPU miners like myself that made investments were hurt by ASICs, but at least it was driven by market forces and advancements rather than an individual. If the community governance panel were to vote to make a parameter change, then that would become acceptable.
Right now, even in a bear market, ASICs are in such limited supply for Zcash. How hard would it be to get one if they actually made money or it was a bull market. How is this good for the network? Only a limited few will be able to secure the network.
Bitmain, sold out…
Limited stock, with a DISCLAIMER saying they will refund your money when delivery day comes and they dont have enough units. AKA sold out.
So right now. If I was a new miner that wanted to start mining ZCash, im out of luck. All the hardware is currently unavailable. How many GPUs are available right now? This is why GPUs are better for the network, clearly much more decentralized.
Every modern computer has a CPU or GPU, this was the whole point of PoW. To move to ASICs that are in such a limited supply and come from one or two sources, who also mine with them. It destroys the whole point of PoW…
The Z9 is the thing people were asking about.
