ZCASH without asics!!!
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Hidden because offtopic, this isnt offtopic this is the true, if zcash become asic i dont want loose my money, so the better is sell now, go go bitmain.
ok, you have sold. i’m happy for you
I say only a thing to other: HODL - easy way for profit
Yeah BITMAIN always pump their coins so they can sell more ASICs, and then they dump it 
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Hi Shawn,
Thanks. im glad my posts are helpful, just trying to work out what the future holds…
Yes I have seen the response. Although I did not realise he is the COO. I generally only look at coins from a technical perspective (except for metronome, that also has a devteam with a proven track record in crypto). which is why the “we could just be bitcoin” statement confused me so much…
Im glad that the question has sort of acknowledged, however it has raised a couple of points I find unsettling. I hope I am misunderstanding this, but I would like to get a direct answer to my previous points before I go down this road. Please note I am speculating wildly in the next paragraph. but I think they are legitimate questions that need answering.
Essentially it is this statement.
“The algorithm is currently not economically implementable in ASIC. We’re still evaluating whether we think it will resist custom hardware (“ASIC”) implementation long-term.”
This statement suggests that they have done due diligence on the algo and have come to the conclusion that it is not currently economically viable to implement asics. Ok this assumption on the surface seems innocent enough, but it also strongly implies that they have not done due diligence or at least a risk assessment as to what happens if their assumption is wrong (which it turned out to be).
zooko also states that he is very surprised that one was developed this quickly. This also implies that there has not been a risk assessment done on what happens if their initial assumption is wrong.
This can lead to the position where, because you did not acknowledge the risk in the first set of risk assessment, it is never seen to be a risk after that. Even though now it is very much a risk.
Can we at least see the results of the “long term evaluation” that they have done? Maybe this will contain the information.
Nathan-at-least also implies this in his message where he says
Meanwhile, we already wanted to deploy equihash with a different parameter set which would make light-device validation of the block headers more efficient. I don’t know, at this time, if this would render existing Zcash ASIC products to become inefficient. We may try to schedule this in a post-Sapling upgrade anyway, regardless of the ASIC resistance issue.
Again it really does seem that they have never asked themselves the question, What happens if we are wrong with our initial assumption of asic resistance? how does that impact the development and deployment schedule? can you even make the changes you want to make on an asic network?
If they have done this risk assessment, can they please make it public like the did with the asic resistance stuff. I think this would go along way to alleviate a lot of the current fears.
Another example of something that would have been a small issue before but now is a big issue would be the introduction of a protocol bug in sapling. What is the risk assessment if you only have ASIC miners rather than gpu miners? They have already spent 500k on it, can they make this particular part of the risk assessment public?
But I will ask these questions and once i get answers to my previous ones, it should clear a lot of this up. I don’t want to put words into the development teams mouths
Thanks.
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@spartan5v5 this is a thread about ASICs, your posts are off topic.
I can totally see proof of stake being the long term answer.
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he is in FUD MODE:ON 
Sorry i dont want to be part off Bitmain community…we get it…you received your ASIC for free to change what you wrote when this coin was new
Are you not ashamed off your post and why you talk now?
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I agree completely that disruption to Sapling must be avoided - however a clear statement on continuing ASIC resistance would restore confidence and is all that’s needed.
I’m disturbed this hasn’t happened already.
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All this banter… back and forth.
Other coins have already stated intentions.
Can we get a solid answer from zooko or the zcash foundation. Some sort of official release.
I think with a company of this size, something official should have been said by now.
The answer is very clear. ZCash is not changing algorithms anytime soon. Zooko is telling people to mine XMR and buy Zcash with it if they want to keep mining:
If you are a GPU miner, you have about two months to get some ZEC coins, before the difficulty doubles (or triples). There is no point in debating on this thread anymore. Other coins are discussing which new POW algo to use. Your time would be better spent in those forums helping other coin’s teams get ready for their forks (BTCP, ETN,BTG,etc), and let ZCashCo work on their Sapling and Overwinter.
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Why Equihash? – Zcash Blog
Equihash is a memory-oriented Proof-of-Work, which means how much mining you can do is mostly determined by how much RAM you have. We think it is unlikely that anyone will be able to build cost-effective custom hardware (ASICs) for mining in the foreseeable future.
Apologies for being harsh, but one of the requirements any good executive has is being able to foresee all threats to his or her business which can be expected to come “in the foreseeable future”. We’re only two years from when that blog was published…we’re in the foreseeable future now.
Any good executive always checks assumptions and monitors them for accuracy. If we turn the pages on the calendar back months, we can see the emergence of ASICs for Sia, ASICs for Dash, ASICs for ETH…did anyone at ZCash CO ever think that there could have been something for Equihash?
It was not an abstract idea that ASICs were coming and they did come for other coins. Did hubris alone allow this to happen without some sort of plan to act instead of improvisations guiding reaction?
I’m not implying that ZCash Co could have prevented an ASIC for Equihash, but they should have had a plan in place for what to do when it did - or may have - arrived. Such a blunder is disconcerting.
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It is perfectly reasonable for such a failure of planning, the field of cryptocurrency is entirely novel. Just like developers during the internet revolution, Microsoft and other innovators; they are all very poor at predicting other companies actions towards them. Microsoft faced an early lawsuit by IBM, Microsoft had no legal department at the time and now has a massive legal department.
We don’t know the potential long-term implications of a Bitmain mining takeover quite yet, there hasn’t been enough data to show. Personal opinion: I don’t believe any dealings with a monopoly business (if there is any substitute) to be a net positive and I doubt that Zcash will make it through this unscathed. Unfortunately, it looks like the developers had tunnel vision, they thought such a thing was impossible, and now it may be too late to change anyways.
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Just to follow up, I’ve published a statement on the Zcash Foundation’s blog on what we’re doing next:
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Just remember that if Asic is allowed then all it takes is one big Asic farm to get 51%. Then they control Zcash and your foundation is out!
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Wow, that seems a much harder stance than zookos.
Where is the best place to get involved with the discussion of this topic? I have a few questions I would like to ask. I have some concerns that a fork in December may not be possible. I would like to discuss the potential pitfalls of this scenario.
And the potential risk this could have on sapling.
Thanks.
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Exactly what I was hoping for at this stage - thanks!
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finally, a clear direction, even still not a solution but a clear statement like this will gain more support from the community, thanks
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“In the short term, we consider it critical to protect the community members who are building the ecosystem with us. If it’s necessary based on our evaluation of the ASICs on the network, we will hire a developer to construct and submit a ZIP to mitigate its effect on the network. If the Zcash core development team and community approves, it will ideally be deployed by late 2018.”
By the late 2018 you don’t have any GPU mining ZEC. But i like your intention
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