Just because you fork the coin…doesn’t mean it is going to be supported. Only the coin ZcashCo deems to be Zcash will be Zcash.
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Interesting reading, thx for sharing.
2 Hardforks in 2 - 3 months, this will be a hard one for Zencash, but doable of course.
Interesting that they reduce miner reward by 18%, wasn’t aware they are planning this.
Zencash has an advantage when forking to asic resistant, the co-founder has it’s own mining facility with 600 operational systems (rigs?). So at least they always will have a network, no matter what happens. 
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Absolutely correct. What miners will stay with ZEC after NINE MONTHS of ASIC running the show? Then they will ask in December “who wants to fork and get rid of ASICs?” but by that time there won’t be any GPU miners around to voice their opinions anymore.
At that point they risk even more damage removing the only source of Hashrate (ASICs) and hope GPU will come back soon enough to carry them through.
I firmly believe that putting off dealing with ASICs that long will make it irreversible. (likely what some people are hoping)
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I completely agree.
There is a bit over a month b4 the z9 gets shipped. And with previous machines, they actually shipped earlier than stated.
My opinion is once ASICS are released to the general public. And these places like Bitmain and Halong are mining away on them. It won’t take more than a month before it’s all asic.
The coins don’t get mined any faster due to the hashpower increasing. Instead, the difficulty increases, which causes the rate of coins getting mined to come out the same (approximately one block every 2.5 minutes).
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ZenCash intends to change equihash params to 144,5
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Nice, I thought they might fork. I guess Zcash will be the only one not to fork.
That is very true.
I doupt there is any real intention to fork off ASICs now or on the future. I would respect if they say it clearly rather than giving unrealistic plans.
I guess ethash is really inspirational their algorithm has an increasing memory requirement as you go.
And I see also ASICs are greatly failing in such an algorithm.
They have have made ASICs but its size so huge and very electricity consuming and just has the hash rate of roughly 4 ~ 6 GPUs mining rig.
I see no reason to think this way from now on.
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Thank you so much for your thoughtful post! I liked everything you wrote, and I agreed with most of it. It seems like you’ve really put a lot of effort into reading this whole thread and thinking about it and writing that post. Thank you.
I’m really interested in whether a dual-mining system — half GPU-friendly, half ASIC-friendly — would both:
a. Keep both kinds of miners engaged, and
b. Provide more robust defense against some sort of error or attack that disrupted the consensus algorithm
Also, if we had a dual-mining (GPU/ASIC) system, then it would be a natural step to progress to triple-mining GPU/ASIC/Proof-of-Stake!
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I really like the economics and computer science of masternodes — anyone can put up sufficient stake to get the “master” flag on their full-node and then we can do more efficient and reliable distributed protocols with this smaller number of higher-quality full-nodes.
What I don’t get are the computer security of masternodes — there’s no way for the consensus algorithm to verify that the masternodes are performing their job correctly and reward them, so that means it would be possible for someone to cheat the masternode system and get more and more of the reward without actually providing more and more of the service.
Since the consensus algorithm can’t detect this, then it would be up to some organization to watch the masternodes and that organization would have to have the power to kick out masternodes who it thought were cheating… Overall, not the direction I want to go.
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Yes, I agree with everything you are saying, except Bitmain is selling their packaged ASIC’s to other manufacturers, not their ASIC designs (If I understood you correctly).
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Who is mining? Bitmain right. They are batch testing their ASICs.
So I will tell you what happen when you fork.
You will simply drive out stealth mining and if they are the half of the harh rate then you will get ride of a big centralization threat.
What happened to monero when they forked? Nothing they actually got ride of a big threat.
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Bitmain is known to use TSMC, GlobalFoundaries, and Samsung as their foundry. Either way the foundry just produces the silicon for Bitmain, the ASIC is 100% owned by Bitman. So exactly what Myth are you trying to correct?
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Why don’t you have a rotating POW where two different POW schemes can be running concurrently on the network where one is set to expire when it as been ASIC compromised (ASIC’s are a cancer to any crypto network) and a new one introduced with the other one already there if it is possible…can be researched. Your network will then be ASIC resistant and will not experience sudden drops of hashrate when transitioning. Can think of POW schme as an ongoing network security issue where ASIC’s are a compromise of the network POW scheme. i.e. I could create the best ASIC and not sell to anyone and will in effect control you network, if the network gets valuable enough this is what ASIC’s will do so companies with best ASIC fabrication processes will own your network if the POW scheme does not adapt.
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Texas Instruments does not fab ASIC’s for Bitmain. As bitcartel posted for you, Bitmain states they clearly use TSMC.
Yes this is true, but that is not how this industry works. The are quite a few open foundries around the world. Some are better suited than other to do ASIC fab. So why would anyone want in house foundry capabilities??
So you have been involved with ASIC development? How many ASIC’s have you developed? I have only been involved with 9 so far, but recently started on my 10th.
So what are you saying? You believe TSMC owns or in some way contributes to the Bitmain ASIC’s? I thought you knew about ASIC development??? Do you not understand the difference between the ASIC design and the foundry? The foundry does nothing but fabricate the customers design, in this case Bitmain. Bitmain owns 100% of the ASIC, TSMC just converts the design into silicon. Yes the design and masks need to be tailored to TSMC processes, but other than that they own nothing.
This is how most silicon chips are fabricated. Nvidia uses TSMC and Samsung, AMD uses GlobalFoundaries and TSMC. Intel will almost certainly use TSMC as their foundry when they enter the discreet GPU later this year as their in house fabrication is tailored to CPU’s and they don’t have the expertise with GPU fab that TSMC has.
Edit:
Samsung on the other hand with certainly use their in house foundry for their ASIC’s and discreet GPU’s.
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Thanks, if that keeps ASIC’s out then I know which project and development process I will support in the long term over ZCash. I spend mining from day 1, I even specially got into mining because of ZCash (you can find my post before launch). I spend the last year building my small GPU farm in favor of ZCash ad helping out locally for people to get their own GPU’s running. At this point I am very pessimistic about the stance ZCash is taking, and will take a deeper dive into ZenCash and their approach.
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I like the idea of a multi GPU/ASIC algo. It could work like a early bird (community) reward and you would get the best out of both worlds. But how to build that? Is there a proof of “I mined ZEC for the last block with a GPU”-proof? Could you create a ZEC corp mining pool, where you can proof that and or distribute >100% to early birds?
Anybody, is there a possibility for a pool to distinguish between ASIC hashpower and GPU?
well yes, we have every reason to be pessimistic right now, even after foundation taking action to investigate and get the result, it is back to the company to decide not foundation, and i’m personally only hear zokoo ‘decision’ so far, he seems didn’t take any ‘feelings’ or ‘loyalty’ value into his calculation and it is set even before the ASIC shown up, and no other team member give statement as loud as zokoo yet. But i will personally wait for more ‘sign’ before i take a step and not going back.
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The ASIC’s and GPU’s would use different algorithms to distinguish them