Really cool show on Pbs about electrical grid storage solutions, somewhat relatable
Edit- it was a nova, pretty cool, coming may 29, American experience - the Chinese exclusion act
Bitmain has also committed to investigate, invest and develop miners for Zcash that also he’s kind enough to sell them to you.
Folks, the Overwinter and Sapling trains have already left the station.
I’m absolutely committed to the Overwinter and Sapling upgrades and the accompanying ecosystem-wide deployment of shielded addresses as the highest priority.
I absolutely oppose any change to the schedule or the content of the Overwinter and Sapling Network Upgrades.
We’ve already committed to those ecosystem-wide Network Upgrades and we’ve already told the entire world-spanning, rapidly growing, diverse, sprawling ecosystem of Zcash-supporting projects that they have to upgrade their software in order to opt-in to the new system.
The entire Zcash Company is already hard at work implementing Overwinter and Sapling, including not only the actual implementation of what is in fact an unprecedented breakthrough in cryptography (the Zcash Sapling shielded transaction design which is at least ten times as efficient as the best previous design), and also novel and subtle improvements to the consensus protocol (e.g. replay protection and the new transaction expiry feature), but also crucial auxiliary functions such as network monitoring, emergency incident response planning, providing tech support for third parties, educating the public about the nature and the timing of the Overwinter and Sapling upgrades, managing the independent security audits, etc. etc.
Numerous professional security reviewers are already hard at work vetting the extensive cryptographic changes that go into Sapling. The last number I saw from my team said that we’ve now committed more than half a million dollars of the Zcash Company’s money to commissioning many of the best security experts in the world to double-check our work and look for issues that could endanger the money or even the safety of our users.
Numerous major ecosystem players (mostly not yet publicly announced) are already committed to supporting the Overwinter and Sapling upgrades and have already changed their business plans to prioritise it, allocated the necessary resources, and begun the necessary work to support it.
However the fact that the Zcash Company and the Zcash ecosystem have already made deep commitments to Overwinter and Sapling are not the only reason I prioritise them as the first priority. Even if we were just starting the Overwinter and Sapling processes today, I would still insist that Overwinter and Sapling are the most important things that our community can do today.
I have three reasons why I believe this.
First of all, because Sapling and widespread support of shielded addresses will provide real privacy to more users. This is central to our mission and it is the next critical stepping stone to reaching widespread deployment of Zcash to billions of people. The reason Zcash coins are valuable, and that it is worthwhile to mine them, is that the world believes that the Zcash community can and will do this.
Second of all, because this will mitigate (although not completely eliminate) the threat of counterfeiting in two ways: a. by allowing the public to see whether more Zcash Sprout ZEC was created than should have been, and b. by upgrading to even better cryptographic designs and tooling, even better parameter generation (the Powers of Tau Ceremony), and even more rigorous peer review.
My last reason to prioritise Overwinter and Sapling is that a successful deployment of Sapling and an ecosystem-wide collective upgrade will demonstrate that our phenomenal success at deploying the original breakthrough Zcash “Sprout” a year and a half ago was not a one-off, but instead that our dev team and our community are capable of repeatedly innovating on the fundamental technology while supporting a large and growing ecosystem worth billions of dollars.
I care a lot about the mining crisis. Zcash is worth two million dollars a day, worldwide, in mining rewards. That represents a vast opportunity to distribute Zcash coins to a wide variety of people. Both what we’re going to do about it and how we decide what we’re going to do about it are critical questions that will establish a precedent for our community. We’ll work through the crisis, somehow. A year from now we’ll all look back and say: we experienced loss, disappointment, anger, conflict — no victory was ever won without those costs — but that Zcash is stronger and is better able than ever before to provide economic freedom and opportunity to everyone in the world.
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Somehow you just can’t answer 1 simple question - tolerate ASICs or not
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I don’t think it is a simple question. What we should do, what we can do, what the consequences would be of various options, and not to mention whether I can or should be able to make that decision on my own.
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Well it’s simple for me. Tolerate ASICs=lose GPU-miners and all GPU community support, we cant fight with ASICs efficiency and will be forced to leave
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Governement can’t forbid regular GPU cause they can be used as well for gaming or 3D rendering and scientific calculation and maybe many other things. I myself have a GPU render farm to render 3D animation. Nobody can tell if i am mining with it or not. I use the same electricity to do my 3D renderings!
In the case of asic they can be forbidden for sale in an entire country easily. If they find one in your house they even know which coin exactly you are mining!
Japan started to forbid private coins at Japanese exchanges. Next step could be to forbid equihash mining and prevent the circulation of a specific set of ASICS like the Z9.
In my head ASICS are a very bad match for any real private coin. If Zcashco doesn’t do anythjing about it, Monero will prevail big taim and that will give a chance to any other private coin who will try (at least) to fight Asics.
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Mining operations are literally imposible to detect with ASICs
Hi Zooko, i have a lot of respect for you but I don’t understand the way you answer to this Asic threat at all. Can you at least answer another simple question: why was it easy (or at least it looked like it) for the Monero team to just fork and kiss Bitmain goodbye (so far)? And we saw the diff chart go down, so it obviously worked wonderfully. Why can’t you do the exact same?
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Well, it is simple, actually.
Do you throw away 85% of your current validators while being committed to other projects (Overwinter and Sapling) or do you do something about this?
Ostensibly, you would get validation eventually, but leave behind thousands of people who would feel betrayed, and rightfully so. Then, most of them ain’t coming back.
Not a good place to be, and, perhaps, if you only listened to the vibes from the Monero community, than you would be able to already incorporate new algo in Overwinter/Sapling by now.
Where were all (from zcashco) of you beforehand? Why was it not anticipated?
I have just one suggestion of what to do, but that zcash-lead distribution of Bitmain’s machines is lame, unless you want to pay for it from zcashco coffers and provide one Z9 per each surrendered GPU, or in some proportion, like this:
send one working 1080ti (to zcashco), get one Z9
send three 1080, get two Z9
send two 1070, get one Z9
send three 480-580, get one Z9
send four 470, get one Z9
then Zcashco recovers maybe 50% on GPU aftermarket, sorry, some funds need to be allocated here, no free lunch.
This, and only this MIGHT work.
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Go go go Zooko, this cryptography is almost magic…
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Not entirely true. Your ISP can tell what your doing just by looking at your internet traffic, unless of course your running it through SSL Stratum connection or TOR…and even then, who knows. The point being traffic analysis would make it rather easy to determine what you are doing unless steps were taken to mask it.
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Well if it can be masked, then it’s more difficult to crack down on it for governments. My point is that it’s easier to crack down on Zcash if it is mined exclusively by specialized ASICs than if it continues using a general purpose device like GPU.
The best would be a private coin mined by billions of people having a single GPU each! It would be unstoppable.
The one thing I find so fascinating with crypto currencies is that they can be made unstopable… even in the case or a nuclear war, the blockchain can continue to survive if at least one miner is still alive! And any action that can undermine this invincibility should be prevented with all possible efforts!
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I think you go a bit too far and see the issue a bit too romantic. I’am just discussing this with you, if you do not mind, generally, not necessary related to the topic at all.
Just in case you live in a country where crypto mining hardware will be forbidden than for sure the stages bevor had been: forbidden trading, crypto mining, crypto trading, crypto owning, crypto anything. In such case the hardware is the least problem a crypto fan will face in my opinion
After you used terms like “could/would” related to Japan i see this a bit different. But just in case a handfull countries indeed for example zcash, equihash, similars, there are some other 200 countries left it’s legal. WHY would somone indeed risk his head, life, status, family, income, future, you name it, everything, if there are more than enough safe places? I would agree with your scenario IF there are no other safe harbours, but neither this is the case nor will it be the case. There is even NO need for that much risk as long as enough safe harbour miners can do the job.
I would agree with your romantic scenario IF no safe harbour/countries excist and we all are forced to operate undercover but that is not the case.
You do not need a miner in japan to do an “undercover” transaction in japan, easy as that.
And just as a side note, i doubt that a democratic country will forbid mining. Different thing with a dictatorish country but than again, the whole mining process is dangerous anyway and i again bet, that the new asics are more difficult too spot than mining rigs. And i have serious doubts that in countries like Iran, venezuela, you call them, someone would give a fu.k while you explain them you use your gpu rigs for 3d animations whatever. In such countries the non plus ultra strategy is NOT to get spotted by power usage! Just common sense.
As said, just generally a bit off topic.
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I agree. Depending on the network setup, finding out if an ASIC exists on a network, and effectively killing it would be trivial for the most part. Thinking about setup for Bitmain products, you literally have to scan the network for it using their tool, wouldn’t take much to write a scanner to find such devices and block them from the network.
And with the new intelligent electricity counter that we have now (I’m in canada) they can possibly target some kind of device and make them unusable.
I agree in parts with you on this one. History allready has shown and proofen that mining operations get cracked down nearly always by suspect power consumption and/or informations/spies as these are the easiest ones for whatever governement. Internet traffic tracking, decoding would as well be an option, but it needs more resources than just checking who has increased power usage. Think about it and you will for sure come to the same conclusion.
Optimal in such case would be mostly CPU mining as you can just use one. The next thing, as you mentioned would be 1 gpu, but this will never be happen becaue always the majority of miners will make as much as possible profit, easy as that. The next secure thing nowadays is just the Z9 asic. Only including POW options here of course.
I don’t think that would happen, but it would make it really easy for them to identify you as a home miner just based on your power usage compared to the “average” household. Depending on rules, regulations, and even laws in your area it could become a problem.
I hope Zooko allow ASIC just for the hell of it. As long as ASICs don’t compromise anonymity I couldn’t care less what hardware is being used.
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I’ve said it before and I will continue to remind everyone. Zooko != “Final Say”. This decision and hopefully a imminent statement needs to be made by the ZcashCo and the Zcash Foundation (what actually exists of the board). No one person should ever have the right to make decision of that magnitude. I’ll leave it at that, I’m sure everyone is well aware of my opinion and stance on the matter already.
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