You do not understand how the difficulty adjustment works. As the hashrate increases as does the difficulty resulting in a (somewhat) stable average 150 seconds per block interval so this perceived incentive simply doesn’t exist.
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I wouldn’t take a bet about this one. Having in mind that Baikal has a miner with 7 algos on firmware and some programmers claim that they have individually added some other 2 by manipulating the firmware and some code i could imagine that they are allready working on something like that or at least planning. Baikal is the leader here when it comes to Asic multi-algos though.
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Very good and rational post @boxalex !
I absolutely do agree.
Shifting the agenda because of the Asic release wouldn’t be professional.
Let’s keep on the road map.
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Lol, i’am forced all the time to correct you. You won’t give me a break, right? 
Corrections:
- 1x Z9 will use 300W, +/-5%, that’s it
- About the S9, i agree with the terrible noise. It uses a 1.600W PSU and draws 1.300W out of it to be correct.
About the S9 profit, 2-3US$ might be true for someone with real high electricity costs. Right now they make around 4$ and the other day with higher exchange rates it was allready $6, for someone with average energy costs like me. - Same goes for DASH as you mention it. It’s still profitable. Right now and the lower rates today it’s about 1.5$ - 2$. They have even a very good ROI at the moment. All someone has to do is to lower the Asic Voltage to lowest or at most 3. You sacrifice about 1/5 of the hasrate for 40% power savings. Not much different than power lowering/overclocking on some gpus.
- and last but not least, Bitmain S9 is by far not the most efficient miner.
[Moderation edit by @daira: insult toward another forum member deleted.]
GPU miners are already leaving. Just look at the high fluctuations in the hash rate
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Was better for you not to reply actually.
Do you know what you just proved? Bitmain makes 99% and gives you 1% so they keeps you following them on their next dumped batch. Do not you see? How is centralization different from that?
December 2018? not now? Although I have been eager to support ZEC and even invested heavily in buying hundreds of GPUs, I now give up. I have already turned to ETH. I am a miner and I must chase profit. Good luck, ZEC.
[Edited by @daira to put the quotation in a quote block.]
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Hum, hum, but Bitmain has released an ASIC for Ethereum as well…
And the Ethereum dev team doesn’t consider this as a threat.
More over, Ethereum is moving to PoS.
Your mining strategy is not clear to me.
After losing faith, only profit can be pursued
Dear @awen, keep mining Zcash until (at least) the ASICS are coming up. Then you’ll see.
Don’t make a business decision with your heart, it’s probably a bad one.
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in the end, FPGA will eat GPU’s, and there is nothing can be done about it. Forking only speeds Bitmain development of FPGA. By all means, fork away if you will, but know that you only hasten Bitmain financial incentive for evolution of FPGA which will without doubt depose GPU miners.
We are the Bitmain. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile
For the uneducated, FPGA is more or less a reprogrammable ASIC, capable of adapting to any fork or equation.
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I personally don’t think voting should have any impact on the final decision by the zcash team. It is their coin like someone said and they should do whatever they see fit. They are competent enough to decide what’s best for the coin long term. When they integrated the zk technology into a coin the rest of us didn’t even know such thing was possible.
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This thread has been my go to for my morning coffee.
Even if I was and still am a “small” gpu miner for Zcash, and have been for over a year now. I still vote for Sapling since it will advance the coin the most.
ASIC resistance should be a second thought when it comes to sapling and overwinter, IMHO.
If people care so much about their profit(and of course they do, the bought the gpus for this purpose, not for gaming or rendering or AI), they should switch to something else until zec implements asic resistance and just exchange the mined coin for ZEC if they truly support the coin/network.
Although I do understand the centralization aspect of Bitmain controlling the production of said ASICs is a bit worrisome to say the least… especially how fast they seem to be out of stock.
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FPGA are pretty old and I look at them since around 2014, I was thinking to invest in Xilinx (FPGA board producer) thinking it will do like finally Bitmain and Nvidia did. But it seems no one use those damn FPGA. I just found this article, maybe it’s the answer: http://www.eejournal.com/article/20161004-opensource/
It seems like it’s changing slowly but I doubt that the Z9 mini is an FPGA…
From wikipedia:
Historically, FPGAs have been slower, less energy efficient and generally achieved less functionality than their fixed ASIC counterparts. An older study[when?] had shown that designs implemented on FPGAs need on average 40 times as much area, draw 12 times as much dynamic power, and run at one third the speed of corresponding ASIC implementations[citation needed]. More recently, FPGAs such as the Xilinx Virtex-7 or the Altera Stratix 5 have come to rival corresponding ASIC and ASSP solutions by providing significantly reduced power usage, increased speed, lower materials cost, minimal implementation real-estate, and increased possibilities for re-configuration ‘on-the-fly’. Where previously a design may have included 6 to 10 ASICs, the same design can now be achieved using only one FPGA.[26]
Advantages of FPGAs include the ability to re-program in the field to fix bugs, and may include a shorter time to market and lower non-recurring engineering costs. Vendors can also take a middle road by developing their hardware on ordinary FPGAs, but manufacture their final version as an ASIC so that it can no longer be modified after the design has been committed.
Xilinx claims that several market and technology dynamics are changing the ASIC/FPGA paradigm:[27]
Integrated circuit development costs are rising aggressively
ASIC complexity has lengthened development time
R&D resources and headcount are decreasing
Revenue losses for slow time-to-market are increasing
Financial constraints in a poor economy are driving low-cost technologies
These trends make FPGAs a better alternative than ASICs for a larger number of higher-volume applications than they have been historically used for, to which the company attributes the growing number of FPGA design starts (see History).[27]Some FPGAs have the capability of partial re-configuration that lets one portion of the device be re-programmed while other portions continue running.
Agree,Sapling must be first.
But some people do not like ASIC resistance.
Maybe mining centralization has no harm to zcash.
From the specs available I would say it’s LPDDR2 (mobile ram of a decade ago). It’s the only feasble with 300 Watt
Current Ethash asic miners are so weak to be a threat to GPU mining. Even I can say a GPU has more value than it at least you can use them to do other things.
Maybe it’s your behaviour to post only IF it fits your agenda and hide an argument if it does not fit. But i will always try to correct a wrong statement.
Another thing. My grandma, a very wise women by the way, told me NEVER to lock at someone else pockets. This in mind i do not care how much Intel makes, neither NVIDIA, nor the dev team here from the dev fee, nor Bitmain from mining/selling. Every product has it’s R&D costs and a bunch of others. It’s not my work to do my investement on the pockets of a given manufacture. I’am doing investements based on my calculations (short, mid, long termn) and a given risk i’am willing to take and even a loss.
I even won’t comment your 1% argument, it’s so way obscure that it does not deserve whatever attention.