605,698,062 Sol/s is unreal. I’ve been adding GPU’s from other coins and am still falling on daily production on ZEC. Miss the good old days of 2-months ago.
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I’ll be blunt. If you don’t mitigate like Monero and instead embrace ASIC, I am out. 100% out. Won’t be back kinda out.
I am sure I am not alone in this sentiment.
If you want to be the next litecoin, then more power to ya. You missed what this is all about in the first place, decentralized generation and processing. The first ASIC, will also quickly be the largest holder. They will control it then.
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Whether its ASICs or GPU farms, any kind of mining centralization is bad.
The proposed law talks about zoning, “to regulate and control land use and to protect the health, safety and welfare of its residents.”
https://www.cityofplattsburgh-ny.gov/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=229
It’s not hard to imagine a scenario where dedicated mining hardware in the form of ASICs become restricted and sales are regulated.
This is why dual-purpose commodity hardware such as a regular PC with a graphics card are so important to the health of a public cryptocurrency network (my personal opinion).
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There have already been a number of excellent responses to why allowing ASIC mining of Zcash is not a good idea, so I will not write a book but will add my voice to the I think it is a bad idea to not fight ASICs camp.
The biggest argument against changing the code to make Zcash more ASIC resistant seems to be it is inevitable so why try to stop it.
One of the initial features of Zcash was it offered ASIC resistance and now the first time the threat comes along the developers simply stick up their arms and say “oh-well, we tried” doesn’t cut it. Maybe if the code had been changed a dozen times already it might be a valid argument, but not even trying to fight the first threat to come along seems a little weak.
While in the perfect world you are correct in that it would not matter if the network is secured by GPUs or ASICs, but in our imperfect world ASICs have proven to be the biggest driver toward centralization there is.
While there may be some large GPU miners, so far normal users can still get their hands on a competitive GPU so the centralization is no where near the scale it is with the ASIC market. With GPUs tens of thousands of college kids and gamer’s can still help secure a little piece of the network along side big farmers, versus a handful of well funded companies with ASICs.
Keep Zcash ASIC resistant.
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Please keep Zcash asic resistant!!!
Centralization by huge miners is not only dangerous because the mining company can get control on the coin but also because that same company becomes an easy target by governements and banksters.
And like bicartel said, asics themselves are also an easy target…
Decentralization IS the main selling point of crypto in my opinion. Without it the entire crypto is worthless…
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Bitmain is now selling a CryptoNight ASIC miner for Monero. Cost? $11999 USD for batch 1, $7599 for batch 2.
So the Monero team knew it was coming?
Didn’t the people at Monero affirm their promise to fight ASIC exploitation and abuse?
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Monero are changing their PoW to v7 with the scheduled hard fork on March 28th, [RELEASE] Monero Cryptonight variants, and add one for v7 by moneromooo-monero · Pull Request #3253 · monero-project/monero · GitHub and this change is being adopted by downstream mining software: Monero v7 PoW change status · Issue #434 · xmrig/xmrig · GitHub
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Since the the XMR peeps love the hate on ZCash, this gives them a foothold on the moral high ground over ZCash should the latter break weak on ASIC abuse and not prevent it. All the privacy in the world is worth nothing if only a few are mining it.
ASIC abuse is an enemy of decentralization. Centralization is an enemy of privacy. How does one hold harmoniously such conflicting ideas in the same mind without the use of mental gymnastics or cognitive dissonance?
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Do you consider FPGA hardware to be equivalent to ASICs in terms of their objectionable nature?
Xilinx ultrascale+ fpgas are getting so rediculously powerful I’m thinking of buying a development board and writing solvers for it.
But so far I haven’t seen any boards with the XCVU37P.
And it’d probably be $20k if I did.
Let’s give ZEC’s marketing team 3 months to show what they got. Then I’ll post again 
From the Zcash team…I’m curious to know what the estimated time required from affirmation of purpose to forked implementation might be to increase robustness of Zcash ASIC-resistance?
Also, opinions have been expressed by the community for almost 3 weeks now; I don’t necessarily care how long the public comment period runs, per se, but I’d sure like to know if this will ultimately result in an ultimate judgment/decision by the Zcash leadership and codified by memo, or if this is just going to remain a dangling hypothetical. It seems pretty clear which way the community, as represented by the members of this forum, feel about the issue…
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Surely this is not a formal process at all. If they are going to change their policies, first they need to have posted them clearly and not modify them in the middle of the night when no on was watching.
If they have a formal proposal, they need to announce it and then have a formal process to receive comments from the public, etc - ya know, all that good corporate governance and best practices stuff…
Just say “NO” to ASIC exploration and abuse! ASIC is an enemy of Privacy!
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Thanks for pointing out, really interesting.
[post update, removed wrong assumptions, thanks to Kahooli]
So gpu is still the king.
do note that that’s megabit, not byte 
There has been some speculation in the last week that Bitman and the ASIC development team has secretly been deploying ASIC miners that mine eqihash. They just have not released them to general public. They have been jacking up the difficulty and run the new Asics for a few months before selling them publically. thoughts? Could zec be mineable now by new Asics?
Could zec be mineable now by new Asics?
Probably not by a single-chip ASIC, since 128MB is more memory than anyone has ever put on a single chip together with computational logic. IBM’s Centaur companion for POWER8 has 16MB eDRAM per chip, and Xeons top out at nearly 40MB SRAM of L3 cache.
Equihash is mineable though by either an ASIC or FPGA connected to some DRAM chips, like the rumored Antminer F3 for mining Ethereum.
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So is some type of ASIC capable of mining zec possible anytime soon? Not ones that are released to the public.
The closest thing I know of are the Xilinx Virtex UltraScale+ fpgas with HBM in the package.