Why would you buy ASIC from Bitmain? if it could make money they would be using it as they are in business to make money. What you are buying is used end of life product as they bring the next generation online or fear or POW fork to recoup their investment no one sells mining specific hardware if they can make more money using it. The Zcash developers are naive (Pollyanna) these people are criminals if Zcash where to go to US$1000 tomorrow you will see network hashrate double from no where due to ASIC Bitmain already has they did this to Litecoin X3 network hashrate in short period of time. This kind of monopoly should be fought otherwise the coin will have a niche following until a truly decentralized coin emerges.
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Yes I know, that is why I have never and never will buy an ASIC of any kind
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GPU miners are a security issue.
This is pretty visible on this thread now.
You are hilarious. You won’t give your money to Bitmain…you are a security risk.
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The last of the Pure Land is gone???
Not yet…but the threat is real and imminent. The decision to allow it to happen or not hasn’t been made yet.
In a short term the team should give a priority to algorithm changes for ASIC resistance. Long term is another story, but without successfully surviving in short term there will be no bright long term.
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i know i know new user, but i’ve been mining zcash for 9 months, small farm.
i want to say that i had a choice between various hardware and i invested 40k eur in nvidia because of zcash statement that it is and will be asic proof.
yes, maybe stupid, but i think it’s reasonable to ask Zcash to try sticking to it’s own proposed rules.
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When I first heard of Zcash, I was excited because it is linked to Israel.
Zcash was developed by researchers at Johns Hopkins University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States and Tel Aviv University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Israel.
So I was excited, I promoted Zcash to everyone, even to Coinmamma, another Israeli based firm, who didn’t even know anything about the coin at the time.
I was so excited to think that an Israeli linked coin could do well and hoped it would help the GPU miners - US based GPU companies, AMD and NVIDIA, that has no direct stake in mining at this moment. Instead this coin has been a massive disappointment if it moves to ASICS. It will be a total surrender to Bitmain and ASICS and complete dominance of the coin by ASICS miners. What a disgrace this will be for Israeli linked startups. You fund them and help them enthusiastically and then they turn on you like a pack of wolves supporting complete Chinese control instead of the US and there’s no good reason. I can only think of corruption beyond anything I can imagine. A total and complete dishonor of ethics and founding principles.
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Just look at this thread.
Things are very visible.
Most people care about their profits only.
Attacking Zooko personally - trying to force a decision which benefits them.
The arguments are pretty weak - one of them is decentralization, however we have empirical data - flypool.
GPU miners don’t care much about decentralization, profit goes first.
The real value of Zcash goes far beyond the ability to make profits by building mining rigs.
Especially because of Zooko and the Zcash team because they strongly care about ethics.
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When it comes to money people word and mission get to change on the fly it is a reflection of their character; Zcash is going no where till they get ethical leadership, @zooko must go, he is a dumb ass programmer…I know because I have many degrees in computer science…it does not take going on 2-years to implement sapling.
Hey @zooko
Don’t know if youll read this since lots of ppl talking shit above but I thought I would also give you perspective of another zec user/miner.
While I agree w/ you on the fact that asic resistant in itself is not sustainable in the long run since newer more cost effective ways tech will always find its use, I don’t think you should accept the inevitable but rather find other solutions.
I find your idea of splitting mining reward between asic & gpu miners interesting but I dont think it is feasible in the long run because odds
didnt finish message lol sorry
because odds are zcash will most likely eventually change its algo whether due to better discovered mathematical problem etc, which would in turn render these asics obsolete irregardless thus if you accept asics now, it will in turn lower your incentive to perhaps move on to better algos in the future due to the substantial hashrates these asics now have on your network while the ideal decentralized miner probably wont be mining.
I think what is important here is even though you might see this as an insignificant issue for the zcash, many ppl are watching your actions carefully and will respond accordingly in the future so think of yourself as a trend setter or a trend continuer? Also, I have heard that even changing a small thing within an algorithm can render asics useless so perhaps it wont hurt for you to consider these precautionary measure incase something happens due to the introduction of asics. From my experience though, it does seem like asics lower price value of the coin —drawing from my observations of sia coin & monero though siacoin is a special case. The last thing I would want for zcash is for it to also fork like monero did into 5 different chains and making it complicated.
Personally, you may think I’m bias due to mining with gpus, but I do believe asics incentive centralization because for me at least, buying an asic was never feasible due to the insane noise they generate, I would have to have a place suitable for a mining farm before I’d purchase anything like that. Such a device in itself incentivizes a large mining farm where all these devices can make anyone nearby deaf. This is at least my inference or at least some reasoning for why asics are seen so widely as a centralized issue.
PS. Also I suspect the nature of needing to make back your money asap with asics due to their limited life working capacity (whether lost to potential algo changes, etc) will cause prices to lower in the short term. A day’s revenue payback on a gpu feels alot more safe than a days revenue on asics.
Hope this gives you a different perspective.
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Bitmain made $4bn last year. They are way ahead of anyone that enters this market. They are a world monopoly already. In CPUs AMD has been trying to catch up to Intel for almost 50 years, since 1 May 1969.
Guess what’s the current CPU market share?
AMD has 18% and Intel has 82%.
Once there’s a dominant market leader in any new business sector that earns billions, that business cannot be stopped, even by stock market listed companies. And notice there’s only 2 companies left !
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Mika,
Now look at Bitmain and Bitcoin/Bitcoin Cash…yeah it’s a utopia over there right? Is the current system perfect? Of course it isn’t, it was crafted by human hands…which makes it flawed by default. But don’t try to tell me that ASIC is the answer…we have already watched what ASICs do time and again. Don’t try to Vilify miners stating they only care about profits…there were no “profits” in the beginning, just hope and a dream it would catch on. Show me one person in the current ecosystem (miner, trader, whatever) that doesn’t keep a mindful eye on the bottom line and I will show you a fool and/or a liar.
Miner don’t mine to lose money, they mine hoping to make at least a little, if not a lot on their efforts. Traders don’t trade to break even or lose money, it’s all profit driven for them. Developers don’t develop for free, they are banking on a pay off at some point down the line. Yes, at the bottom of it all everyone is looking to make something from their efforts. You want to work hard for nothing, that’s your choice, but most people want to reap the benefits of their work.
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Also, I know it wasnt your intention to spread FUD & fake news with the whole asic resistace thing but that aspect was what drew me to this cryptocurrency and I can see why alot of ppl are getting mad over it. So if you are going to embrace asics into the network, you should release a public statement changing the stance of asic resistant for Zcash, although I dont think anyone would like hearing that news.
Why not have the foundation engage with hardware companies to work more closely with the community? Left to their own motives, to make money, miners and hardware suppliers will play for pure econonmies of scale/profit. Bitmain is an amazing company, truly awesome capitalists. They don’t care about the protocols any further than their value to be mined and sell others that want to mine hardware. Game theory is the only governorer on the Hashpower explicitly controlled by Bitmain and others. Bitmain is playing by the rules and winning, big time. The counter is for protocol communities to create incentives for hardware producers and miners to work with them in a way that creates financial alignment as well as decentralized Hashpower and governanance. To be censorship resistant you need to own the means of production. This can be done collectively but the economics need to make sense or it’s socialism which will centralize as well.
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One goal @zooko must consider is what to do with ZCash to ensure a stable value over the long term. Currently, no one will take any cryptos for the sale of goods and services. Sure, there’s small shops and whatnot, but that’s trivial. I can’t go to Walmart and use it.
Speculation is gaming the price. Why would anyone want to take any crypto when the value could be 10% more or less tomorrow. Why would the buyer want to part with it? What is @zooko doing to ensure a stable ZEC value over the long term so people will want to use it and know that when they do, the price today is likely going to be the price tomorrow.
Have ASICs helped Bitcoin in that regard? I don’t think so. I’ve watch BTC go from pennies in 2011 to 17 grand. What came in? ASICs? Does correlation imply causality here?
If ASICs drive up the price of ZEC to the moon, great! But does that work a long term good for consumers who cannot rely on it for a stable value over the long term if indeed ASICs only make the value less stable?
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Don’t forget the shenanigans last summer with TX fees. Mem pool was filling up and TXs were taking forever, some of the problem was maxing out of the block size (maybe), but you also had certain parties who were not processing TXs will a fee less than a target amount they wanted…effectively extorting high fees. That is the power of centralized ASIC mining…things like this will happen, and continue to happen in a ASIC dominated coin.
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We are all begging for decentralization, but we are all here begging one person to make a choice left or right. This is bulls**t. There is nothing but centralization here,
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