Not a scam. Same company that makes the nano 8.
Nano 8 is a 40TH BITCOIN ASIC
They do the same noise cancel and watercool
Not a scam.
I invite them to go ahead to do it, waste the money already. Unlike Zcash, Ravencoin has made it very explicit they will do whatever they have to to keep ASIC out. I applaud them for that.
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One could argue that ASICs are coming in because of a lack of change.
By that I mean that the proof of work algorithm has not changed in the 1.5 years since Zcash has been around.
Perhaps the proof of work algorithm should be periodically adjusted to become memory harder. To me, this this is a much better sort of change because it lowers the risk of someone being able to develop custom hardware that can control 50% or more of the network hashrate.
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Aw, come on , we can all afford to pay for and import 40,000 sol/s, water cooled, Equihash ASIC’s from China - Sounds fair and distributed to me 
I agree, if you are going to support specialized mining devices, at least provide an opensource design/algorithm that people around the world could actually compete to build.
Who is the competition?
Who is ASICMiner?
Is this a company we know?
Where are their R&Ds?
Where are their fabs?
And from how long they are operating?
ASIC manufacturing process requires a huge infrastructure and takes long time to design and fabricate.
Without any of this they are just resellers, rebranding etc…
Give me proofs to show me I am wrong.
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I myself am a GPU miner, but trying to be neutral in this case. So far this is what i have gathered in this long thread
Pros:
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Zcash hashrate will shoot to the roof. Is this really bad? Investors like a coin with a healthy hashrate. It doesn’t seem so bad from an economical point of view.
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Zooko and zcash team seems unphazed about quickly jumping into changing algo to be asic resistant. This isn’t so bad either from investor’s point of view. It shows that Zcash stays true to its promise to make the coin better ( although not from the comment mentioned about being asic resistant, but hey you can’t please everyone!)
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Zooko and team are still replying on this thread. It shows that they do care about the miners. Not in a way that we imagine though, they are given a choice to protect gpu miners or not. There’s no math there, gpu miner gets ousted by asic and network becomes healthier plus 300W being pulled by asic?? Isn’t that good for the environment as well?
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Zcash is gaining attention because of this. Free publicity is good
Cons:
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The company made a choice. Its not ideal to gpu miners but its clear we are being pushed out of business. This happens in business where risk eventually catches up with us. I guess thats tough luck. One of the reason I chose to buy nvidia cards (I got 60 1060, 12 1070 and 11 1080ti) is because of zec and its promise to be asic resistant ( which is what they said in their site!). I guess what was not mentioned here is that bitmain became smart with this launch to time it with sapling deployment. Someone with knowledge of system integration knows that its difficult to change algo when you are in the midst of a big project like this. I also am sure that they learned somthing from monero after it forked. What makes you think that the new z9 asic can’t have its firmware updated to accommodate the algo change of equihash?
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Centralization of mining. Even Zooko agreed to this and the only thing he said he can think of avoiding this is pos. The point here is even if they shoo away asic miners, what makes you think that there are no big gpu farms out there controlling a high amount of hashrates already? If one has a big enough capital, its easy to set this up with a gpu farm. Yes to the argument that its more decentralized because small time miners can mine with a gpu they can easily buy. But do you think those small time miners stay long mining? A little dive in zcash price and those small time miners floods carousell selling their gpus. With this argument, its difficult to say that what gpu miners put into the hashrate of zec is stable or not.
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Why in the world are there no discussion about masternodes? @zooko, do you think we can get that as well after sapling? If this has been mentioned already, pls advice.
Just my 5 cents…
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Right! 2m$ worth of ZEC being created every day. Guess which company will try to rake in 90% of the profits! We are talking about ~700mln dollars per year. Profits which will get redistributed from the current community (the GPU miners) to one company. I will switch to another project because I won’t support that.
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To all the gpu mining members. zooko is just stalling for time like the end of June.
Statement from ZenCash team ZenCash Statement on Potential Equihash Algorithm Change - Horizen
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Thanks for sharing the link. I hope zen fork the asic away!
Interestingly enough, you say you are GPU miner and you say again you try to be natural but you praise ASICs as much as you can while not mentioning nothing of the real cons of ASICs.
How can GPU can be centralized?
With current zcash hash rate there should be over 700K GPUs running for zcash alone.
Can a company operate 100K GPUs for example? Wow this is huge investment.
In ASICs bitmain will never make or sell 700K ASICs.
So there is no comparison actually we know what centralization is.
Other thing, you never mentioned bitmain.
I would like to hear your “unbiased” opinion on giving them the highest hand in zcash by allowing them to have monopoly over the network.
I am thinking that is a pure scam. The “miner” looks like a drawer on it’s side (see the handle on top lol). Water cooled?? Really? built in power supply supposedly. Doesn’t look legit, domain registered in 2013…but first became active in February this year. Assume it was bought from a scalper. Go ahead, someone pony up the 15k+ and lets see if they get taken for a ride. LOL
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They said they will be assigning resources and will fork within 4-6 weeks after ASIC’s arrive.
"Based on the conversation of the community, and the threat of centralized control by one entity, the ZenCash development team intends to Hard Fork change the hashing algorithm to Equihash-144-5 in order to optimize for higher memory mining hardware such as GPU’s. "
Nods I had heard Zen would, Bitcoin Gold will, Bitcoin Private will, etc. Not sure on Z Classic though…didn’t they make a statement?
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Well asics for equihash for sure got deployed last december. What makes you think its not happening right now already?
I said it can be centralized if there is an investor with a big enough pocket money to make it happen. This is difficult to monitor from the pools. I can create 2 address to get my mining reward coins and people will think its coming from 2 separate miners. There’s no data to prove what is happening and whats not happening.
I can’t even buy asic because bitmain’s site is stating that Singapore is in China lol… I didn’t say I am pro asic I just summarized the pro and cons.
Thanjs for the reply.
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Zcash is now the last major Equihash cryptocurrency that has not committed to fighting ASICs and preserving decentralized mining.
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Zen cash’s response is BS
They are going with sapling upgrade in July. They won’t hard fork for 4-6 weeks after sapling. ASICS will already hold that coin too.
That’s zcash way of putting on a good front to the community. But darn well know once these ASICS hit the polls for a month…THERES NO GOING BACK
[Edit by @daira: Sapling activation on the Zcash network is planned for September. Overwinter activation on the Zcash network is in June. ZenCash are doing an upgrade in July which I think includes the Overwinter changes, but I’m not sure about that. ZenCash have stated that their PoW upgrade (if plans do not change) will be after their July upgrade. Please note that any upgrade of a Zcash-derived coin has to include sufficient delay from the release that sets the activation height to the activation itself, to allow users to upgrade. For Zcash this is typically around 18 weeks, although other Zcash-derived coins may choose a shorter period if they have reason to believe their users will upgrade more quickly.]
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If these hard forks don’t happen before the ASICS are deployed. That’s it. Then you defiantly have 2 chains from one. And which will be the real.
No fork before=ASICS 4 EVA
Why do you think that ? Hard forking would reset difficulty …
You are correct.
But the point is how is it feasible to buy and operate 100K GPUs? I am giving rough estimates so numbers are not important.
Just think of how is it feasible to buy and operate 100K GPUs compared to much lower number of ASICs.
Other way to look at it, ASICs are not accessible to most countries even you mentioned you can not get one in your country.
While GPUs are available every where.
This means GPUs are accessible to wider population.
You know bitmain, they already monopolizing bitcoin mining operations. Without their ASICs they would not even be one tenths of their current share.
I gave you one example of ASICs centralization now your turn to give me some example of GPUs mining centralization.
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