A long but nice origins article about Ethereum and ProgPow, and is possible fate
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Are flypool, slushpool and viabtc not US pools?
Actually out of the 3 you mention only slushpool is not chinese, it’s a czech mining pool (if nothing has changed at all). Right now the #5 for ZEC mining.
Viabtc is 100% a chinese mining pool.
About flypool, pretty sure it’s chinese too. Even more as it shows up as flypool.org/whibbit.cn
alright, didn’t know that, I check always this website Zcash (ZEC) Equihash | Mining Pools and I just relied on the flag assigned to the pools 
Imprint says austria, europe?
Butfly is the company behind ethermine too, if they are a chinese company that would mean roughly 90% of ETH and ZEC is mined from a chinese controlled pool… are we sure here?
That’s what imprint says and Bitfly is for sure registered in Austria. No doubt there, but it seems the mining pool flypool.org has been overtaken or at least it’s main hashrate is provided by whibbit.cn as for today.
Compare the 2 pools and there stats: flypool.org and pool.whibbit.cn
ETH Stats:
flypool.org ETH hashrate: 37.6 TH/s with 239523 Workers
whibbit.cn ETH hashrate: 37.57 TH/s with 239523 Workers
ZEC Stats:
flypool.org ZEC hashrate: 321.8 MH/s with 6171 Workers
whibbit.cn ZEC hashrate: 322.96 MSol/s with 18118 Workers
miningpoolstats shown hashrate for both together: 322.50 MSol/s
ETC Stats:
only flypool is mining here
other Whibbit.cn pools not present on flypool.org:
Zen, ZCL, KMD, Aion, (all equihash!)
Conclusion analyzing both mining pools:
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The whibbit.cn and flypool ETH mining pool is one and the same
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Flypool is providing only 1/4 of the ZEC hashrate while whibbit.cn is providing 3/4 of the ZEC hashrate. This is obvious when you compare the worker amount. As well the reason why whibbit.cn and flypool are listed together under miningpoolstats.com, as they together provide that hashrate.
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whibbit.cn seems to be specialized on equihash coins, hence why they offer other equihash mining pools as well while flypool doesn’t. In the past whibbit.cn provided even more equihash coins like Bitcoin Interest, Buck and others, again all on equihash.
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Due lack of information it’s not clear how both mining pools are indeed related to each other which leaves room for many theories. For example flypool/Bitfly could own whibbet.cn or reverse of course. Or just a cooperation of both mining pools. Actually it doesn’t matter too much as it’s clear that whibbit.cn, with location and servers in china is providing the vast majority ~75% of the hashrate of both mining pools together and that’s what should be of interest for us in the ZEC community.
In case i missed something or someone else has more detailed info or insider insight, please share.
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Me too, beside some others of course. Actually it was exactly viabtc that make me check the origin/location of some miningpools as i know 100% it’s a chinese one but was marked as a US mining pool. After researching some others it got clear that the nation’s there aren’t correct in many cases.
Anyway, it’s a perfect service that miningpoolstats provide and the country flags aren’t really important for most users.
It could be as well intentionally that some mining pools with intention want to be listed under a different country. slushpool for example as a czech mining pool might not get that many miners if listed as such than being listed than a US mining pool. If i remember right, slushpool was the first BTC mining pool, just as a sidenote.
If this is true and indeed the chinese government bans mining it would be indeed good for decentralization:
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Its true, the bottom link on the page is the list, it seems to deal mostly with agricultural things, have to search through it although one of the very last indices has the word internet in it so maybe that one, its difficult to follow (although whether or not they follow through I guess it’s yet to be seen)
http://www.ndrc.gov.cn/yjzx/yjzx_add_fgs.jsp?SiteId=318
You’re right. Though I still condemn any gov. banning legit economic activity.
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I don’t know a lot about China, but would they fuck over Bitmain like that?
I have some experience with communist countries but not with china.
About Bitmain, they might be a “star” and “name” in crypto, but in chinese business i would consider them just a small to medium company. Nothing more, nothing less…
However, i could imagine there are several steps a government could take to make mining not attractive beside just to forbid it. For example:
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Licenses. Make miners need to obtain licenses with 1001 burdens.
(in communistic countries it’s easy to make someone wait as long as they want for a license) -
Higher electricity prices for certain businesses.
(this is done in many countries anyway, nothing new at all) -
Deconnecting/Disturbing internet connections to national/international mining pools.
(This should be the easiest way in my opinion. They (the chinese) have experience with this. -
Making it illegal to hold crypto.
(This would automaticly put every miner into the illegal zone, very unlikely but still an option with the license options together) -
Force them to use only self generated green energy.
(This could be a very solid, even innovative, one that actually makes even sense.) -
Change or make a tax law putting a very high tax rate for crypto mining.
(From my experience a very popular one in communistic/after-communistic countries) -
1001 other ways IF china’s government really wants to end crypto mining there they will for sure find a way. Having in mind the chinese law enforcement and duration of a sentence it could get real risky for miners there. But everything here is just speculation. But for sure China has way more options than a pure democratic western country, no doubt here.
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Imagine that I’m interested in this subject but gave-up wading through 5633 posts and would like to kick off a less opinionated, more fact-based investigation, at a higher average level of expertise and signal-to-noise ratio, necessitating a different venue.
Assume that at this junction I’m not interested in discussing political, economic or game-theoretic aspects of PoW, but have a singular focus on establishing how detailed algorithm tuning would affect $ per sol/sec and W per sol/sec, for the competing CPU, GPU, and dedicated ASIC architectures, currently shipping and anticipated.
Assert that you are rather familiar with original contributions from Prof. Biryukov and Tromp, Equihash and otherwise, and critique that followed. Plus contributions by participants in Zcash performance competition and performance-related Zcash Foundation grants.
Assert that you actually know the algorithm choices made by the Zcash clones, Zcoin, Grin and Beam teams and have read through ProgPoW materials and major responses.
Feel free to indicate which OSS codebases for above contributions you have working knowledge of and which ASIC or GPU HW you have first-hand experience with and which closed source mining software you’ve benchmarked.
Kindly contact me in-channel, via DM or at tearodactylus@gmail.com, and I’ll attempt to setup a discussion format conducive to moving this subject forward.
My intention is to make the outcomes of this effort public, though not the transcripts of every message and conversation.
Tearo
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It doesn’t start to really derail until post 1500 or so
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Ycash is coming, pro-GPU can mine it 
It’s just another coin. You can allready mine ZERO for example. Asic resistant, latest Zcash technology and have no idea why Ycash is seen as something positive
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Because it can create some money in the air… I guess…
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Bitcoin: 5 Facts You Most Know about a China Mining Ban
By Juan M. Villaverde on April 15, 2019
https://weisscrypto.com/en/article/bitcoin-5-facts-you-most-know-about-a-china-mining-ban
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First Welcome to Zcash and your first post.
and whether or not Zcash is ASIC resistant the exact same amount of coins are mined per day (1 block every 2.5 minutes)
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