The same can be said for your comment. You say what you need to say to get the doors open for ASIC. Saying it raises value is easy…but can you actually prove that ASIC leads to higher coin value…and I don’t mean point to the top 4 ASIC coins, they were well on their way BEFORE ASIC showed up. Show me how SIA suddenly became more valuable as a coin…it went down. It is a crap shoot. You either make it, or you don’t. It has nothing to do with ASICs making them “better”.
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Bitmain has no real competitors. Their miners are faster and cheaper which means they dominate. If anyone comes up with a faster cheaper ASIC they will simply ramp up their game, undercut their price and put them out of the game. They won’t tolerate any real competition.
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Well, that really depends on where you are and their capacity. Plattsburg NY currently has a halt on any new mining facilities and is enforcing it strictly, they will literally disconnect your power if you try to build and existing mine out further. The same is cropping up in other areas in Upstate NY.
so fork it and see what happens. miners will choose what’s most profitable for them, in the short and long run.
you’ve got a choice to make. Industrial scale miners that have alot of money to throw into the game will only do it with ASICs. You want to reject that money for the sake of keeping some garage scale miners happy…well then do it.
as far as i can tell though, you don’t know who you’re competing with. and you’re willing to cut off your nose to spite your face.
time will tell though. few people here are likely able or willing to be enlightened, for the simple fact that they’re overly committed one way. not the best group to be asking for opinions from atleast from the perspective of the coin and what it wants to achieve over a 2 year outlook.
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And mining can be done in remote areas of the world, where people don’t want to live, but there are abundant natural sources of energy. Mining also requires a low latency time to report your found block and propagate this information to the nodes. 20 miles off of the Las Vegas strip is a large desert where you could pop up a solar farm miles long and wide. With an average sunlight time of 14-16 hours. The internet backbone runs straight through it to Los Angeles. Home miners are not moving there, but a large data center operation will. I’m sure there are other areas of the world like this.
LOL. That’s because the people of Plattsburg got pissed that they had to start paying normal prices for electricity like the rest of us. And the mining companies offered to pay the difference in price to compensate. If I recall correctly, energy prices went from $0.04kw/h to $0.10kw/h in Plattsburg. The rest of us pay at least $0.13kw/h.
I pay .06kw/h here in Florida. I believe in Rochester and Syracuse (proposed) they are looking to do the same thing. They have the hydro damn in Plattsburgh, and national grid only give them a small allotment of the actual power it produces. The rest gets sucked down to NYC…of course. So no, it’s not exactly “right” for them to pay .13k/wh (oil/coal/gas prices) when they have the natural resource that’s cheaper. Same as ridiculous rates in Saint Lawrence County. They decided that the power suddenly came from Utica, NY. The Line fees costs MORE than the power usage does…ridiculous.
How long we are need to leave a massages here? When we can see the positive or negative results and answers from ZcashCo? 95% of users wants to make the fork against ASIC. They gave the arguments and facts for it. Asic will destroy the community, increase the difficult, all of miners with the new asic miners also will lost there profits and motivation to mine zcash if it will unprofitable. And it will, in first 1-2 month after connecting first thousand asics. All gpu miners change their rig’s to other currencies but zcash will be one of the many other asic coins with a small profits and very high difficult.
Investor’s interest in zec will fall, because there are many other better “asic-currencies”, and asics will be more profitable with mining of bitcoin and bcc, and zec will remain with nothing: there will not be gpu-miners, there will be thousands of asics with an income of $ 1 per day with million watt electricity using.
I repeat: the uniqueness of Zcash is the ability to mine on gpu Nvidia first of all and then AMD . It is the network of the gpu-miners from around the world who support the system, the market and receive revenue. This is a new and new investment and interest in Zcash. Asics will come, there will be a monthly increase in interest to the currency, and then everything will go down. I used and pay by Zcash, because I was in it system but now with this asics I don’t need zcash anymore, because today there are a lot of better coins with better transaction speed and other functions including gpu-mining mode.
PS: GPU’s much better than asic. Because this is a power PC-system, you can sell the parts, create gaming PC-system and more and more. But with asic you can only use it for mining, often with small profit and then it becomes a garbage.
PS2: about electricity. Wen thousand asic comes even with 300w all of them will increase the difficult as I said early. Often the asic-miners take 4, 6, 10 and tens of the same asics. The reason is the profitable, which goes down, asic prices goes down after and people take more asics. So, for example, I have 1 asic, which gives me 500 usd by zcash per month, in second month this asic gives me 250 usd and I wants to buy one more, and do it than again and again. Finally I have got 10 asic Z9 with 3000w and 1000 usd profit from all of them total. With GPU I have one 6x1080ti rig with 1600w electricity using.
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The most important thing that any cryptocurrency needs is hashpower. The hashpower must be enough that not one, a few, or the entire world’s governments can break it. Just because mining on my cpu for bitcoin is not profitable, doesn’t mean I will ever quit doing it. A couple more hashes to secure the greatest invention ever. I don’t need to profit from mining, I need the network(s) to ace out bankers, wall street, and the government enslavers that do not allow a man to raise his position in life. I can’t save, pay taxes, keep up with inflating prices on goods and services, and die without giving those slavers 50% of what I had left my family. I need a solid currency that appreciates with age and privacy to be my own man.
Interesting story of another municipal which has ordered power companies to ban “unauthorized” Bitcoin mining:
Bitcoin belligerence is on the rise, according to Chelan County PUD staff reports, prompting a boost in employee safety and security measures that include bulletproof panels and security cameras at PUD headquarters.
The reported bad behavior stems from two cryptocurrency-related groups — unauthorized miners whose power has been disconnected and high-density load service applicants denied because of the current moratorium.
Washington Utility Boosts Security After Bitcoin Mining Moratorium
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Guys, Bitmain is not the problem.
ASIC mining is the problem.
ASIC mining results in a very unfair distribution of hashing power, since some miners are using equipment that is orders of magnitude more powerful than others. This has the effect of squeezing out smaller miners, which further concentrates hashing power in the hands of those with the most powerful hardware. This in turn puts the network under the control of a few people and allows them to engage in destructive practices, such as forcing users to pay exorbitant transaction fees. This happened to Bitcoin and it has permanently hurt the perception of the coin.
Another problem with ASIC mining is that ASICs prevent new miners from entering the community by changing the risks of mining. With GPU mining, newcomers have a major hedge in the form of their hardware if cryptocurrency collapses. ASIC miners do not have that luxury. This means that ASIC mining is riskier and will therefore attract fewer people. The Zcash community will not grow as quickly.
A third point is that there are no real benefits to ASICs. Block times don’t magically become faster when the network hashrate increase, as some here mistakenly think. The network does not consume less electricity because the ASICs have higher hashrates per watt. Instead, miners just add more ASICs until it is no longer profitable, which means power consumption will be exactly the same.
So there are no benefits and a lot of downsides.
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You completely misunderstand what’s unique about Zcash, it’s almost frightening.
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ASIC mining results in a very unfair distribution of hashing power, since some miners are using equipment that is orders of magnitude more powerful than others. This has the effect of squeezing out smaller miners
ASICs are available for anyone to buy. There are already larger GPU mining farms taking the majority of mining power. I don’t think your statement is true because there is no evidence to support it.
Further, ASIC mining makes it easier for non-technical individuals to get involved because it doesn’t require the hardware/software skills to setup gpu mining. That will mean more people can mine, which could increase mining decentralization.
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That’s not even remotely true. There are multiple barriers to access to ASICs for the hobbyist, and small miner. First is availability of the devices. They pop up for sale by Bitmain, and are gone twice as fast. Months pass before the next batch are announced. They are cost prohibitive as difficultly rises. If the coin doesn’t threaten a fork, price goes up on the equipment, and they can raise/lower the price at their whim. Unless you have a bulk purchase agreement (IE deep pockets) with Bitmain, your not going to get your hands on them in any real quantity. This mean you get forced out because you simply can’t even get them to even try to compete. So no, they aren’t “available for anybody”. ASICs ensure job miner, or the small farm get pushed out. It restricts mining to the big fish, and they all have to bow down to a single company to be allowed to play in their world.
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ASICs are not available for everyone to buy. They are available when the ASIC manufacturer decides that they are.
For instance, Bitmain likely has a newer Equihash ASIC miner that is not available. Halong is likely using their own Equihash miner, just as they were using their own Cryptonight ASIC and didn’t offer them for sale until Monero announced the fork.
Here’s another example: Don’t you think it’s a bit odd that Bitmain is still selling a two year old Bitcoin ASIC as their flagship product? Do you think in two years they haven’t developed a better ASIC than the S9? They are mining on their latest products and giving customers the scraps.
Second, ASICs are not for home use. So even though they are “available” in a literal sense, they are not available in a practical sense.
Comparing a GPU farm to a miner at a home is misleading because they both have nearly the same efficiency. An ASIC user does not have the same efficiency, which is precisely the problem.
And again, since GPU miners can do just as good a job and not create a huge amount of physical waste in the process, it makes no sense to even entertain the introduction of ASIC mining. The coin should tweak the proof of work regularly, just as Monero successfully did.
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As I stated before. ZcashCo can help smooth the edge with the first batches until competition catches up. Why would Bitmain listen? Because they can fire up the community and fork off!!
This is a strong pro-ASIC argument.
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It sounds like you don’t actually know and are just speculating whatever you think is true. I know people running ASICs at home and I know people that have GPU farms that aren’t at home - the home vs not home doesn’t decrease decentralization. There are miners at every scale.
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It’s not.
It’s a strong argument for regularly tweaking the proof of work algorithm to prevent people from even trying to develop ASICs.
Equihash is supposed to be memory hard. It makes sense that the memory requirements should increase over time.
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Yes, there are some people who are willing to put up with the extreme noise and possible health effects of ASICs at home. (Look up reports of the Antminer A3 emitting formaldehyde.)
That still doesn’t mean that ASICs are for home use. In fact, Bitmain specifically made a product called the Antminer R4 for home use. Why did they have to make this specifically for home use if all ASICs are for home use? The truth is they are not. Go ask Bitmain themselves.
Your second point is illogical. If people can engage in a hobby at home vs. a very similar hobby that requires a warehouse, then the former is probably going to become a lot more common. More hobby miners means more decentralization.
It should be telling that every argument for ASICs is either uninformed (higher network hashrate makes transactions faster!) or dishonest (ASICs are for home use!).
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