That would delay Sapling and/or endanger the safety of users. I tried to explain a little in Let’s talk about ASIC mining - #1197 by zooko about how there is already a massive group effort by our whole core engineering team plus many other companies working together to make Sapling happen. If Sapling works, it will be an historic breakthrough. But it is very complex and requires sustained focus by a lot of people working together. When people are doing something like that, it would be very disruptive to shift priorities or to ask them to also do other things at the same time.
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Zooko - “Sure, but this has nothing to do with how much hashpower they have, and it doesn’t seem to have harmed Bitcoin. I don’t see what the risk of that has to do with our decision about changing the PoW. If the worst case scenario here is that we end up like Bitcoin, that doesn’t sound too bad.”
Can someone with some technical knowledge (and some guidance) mine bitcoin (and Dash with some sort of profitability) today? Yes we (the zcash and the mining community to an extent) have issues, but asics are a real threat
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my amd rigs already switched to XMR 
nvidia still on ZEC while it profitable 
i think every GPU miner do same
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GPUs are a waste for resources IMO also fighting ASIC is in the end is near impossible. They will be created, and I prefer to have the cat out of the bag, then a company secretly running ASICs in the background.
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Exactly, the GPU miners mined 3.8mln ZEC and created the status quo. Now you sell the remaining piece of the cake to Bitmain? For what reason? Let’s focus on the real value drivers which are (1) usage of the coin, (2) distribution and (3) security.
The future will be decentralized. With or without Zcash.
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Ok, I’m glad you still have a way to make money. Presumably when/if the difficulty of Zcash goes up, you can switch your Nvidia rigs to some other more profitable coin, too. (Maybe XMR!) But hopefully you’ll stick around and become a part of our community.
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But does it take so much effort just to make a slight change to the PoW? Can’t you just hire someone just to make the change (maybe GPU miners would be willing to donate by some kind of fund raising to pay for this new employee).
Sorry I have no idea how much effort it take exactly to change the PoW.
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As i read between lines, ZEC team going to change algo after Sapling update. After that, GPU miners will be back to ZEC
Why do you think ZEC became popular? Your leadership skills ? Technology ? No, it was the community mining it and make it popular with all their acquaintances.
If you say to regular people, hey man go and buy this coin it has cool technology, their response is that its all a ponzi scheme and a bubble. But if you tell them you can mine it with your own GPU and earn it, they will try, might like it and start buying and using it.
The point of crypto-currencies is decentralization, and it doesnt matter to me if the government makes money or a corporation (BITMAIN), its still centralized.
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BitcoinZ - Will Fork
Bitcoin Gold - Will Fork
Bitcoin Private - Will Fork
Zcash wants ASIC, why? because money.
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I guess there will be upcoming collaboration between zcash co. and bitmain.
Here is some inspiration for the Zcash team (I just wonder why the Bitcoin Gold team can do it within 2 months and the Zcash team can’t…:
The Bitcoin Gold dev team is now working to fix this.
We’ve been planning to do this for some time – either by modifying how the Equihash algorithm is implemented, or by changing to an entirely different algorithm. Perhaps we’ll do each, over time.
The Monero team recently demonstrated that this works. When a Monero-mining ASIC was being released by Bitmain in March, the Monero developers changed their code to make those miners ineffective. We applaud their actions – and their success!
We’ll be releasing an upgrade to Bitcoin Gold in cooperation with the many partners in our ecosystem – including not just our own open-source projects, but also working with the developers of third-party wallets, mining pools, mining software, exchanges, various businesses relying on running full nodes… we’re even working with ASIC researchers who are assisting us in understanding the problems and how to best address them. Our solutions and code will be, as always, free and open-source to the crypto community at large. We’ll be releasing a more detailed plan in the coming weeks, providing plenty of advance notice so that none of our partners are taken by surprise.
The goal is to have no (or minimal) impact on the users and current GPU-based miners of BTG, apart from the need to upgrade certain software. We believe the BTG ecosystem will be ready to switch over to the upgraded version in approximately two months, and there is no expectation that this will result in an unintentional stray blockchain fork or alternate version of BTG.
We know this may not be a “one and done” solution. Our upgrade may make the current crop of miners useless for mining BTG, but this does not prevent them (or others) from trying again. Like the Monero team, the Bitcoin Gold Organization is committed to repeating this process as necessary. (The Monero approach is currently to plan a change of algorithm every six months. Our current plan is to make changes as the need appears.)
In time, anyone buying BTG-specific miners will learn that their investment is always lost, and the producers of this hardware will see that huge spending to develop custom hardware doesn’t lead to the profits they’re hoping to grab.
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Well they don’t want to and because of greed. Very simple.
How log bitmain have been stay mining zcash? the price never rise but the difficult grow up every month, big miners dont mine zcash if there are other crypto with more profit.
Zcash is going to die, how wants buy zcash if there are Ether, Bitcoin now Ripple, Tron got more future than Zcash.
But the devs got profit and go with their Ferrari, the only thing that need Zcash to be a great scam coin are the master nodes.
I love to see countries start banning Asic’s in there country. That would solve everything.
- bitcoin gold takes others work. they’re not developing anything original. being said, they have time to work on this. mebbe if they actually develop something useful zcash could adopt it.
- bitmain already figured-out how to mine equihash via ASIC; why would they believe bitmain couldn’t find a solution to a quick hack?
they would most likely need to develop something new.
Equihash ASIC seems to be a rig with a lot of VRAM.
Well kudos to you with your asics 
. I think I know what I will do when the time comes.
FWIW - you basically sold @ the bottom.
good luck!
zcash co trying minimize or eliminate any risk for the planned and worked upgrades, but the current solution still obviously not minimize the risk, they just transfer the risk to the future by forking after sapling.
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