Let’s talk about ASIC mining

Mining
1949

It appears ZcashCo want to make Zcash a corporate coin like “Ripple” they should clearly come out and say this as the community have no say and are slow walking any decision (which means they are not forking due to …(insert reason you can think of), even though their initial mission statement claimed ASIC resistance for their Equihash POW.

The community is responding by delisting Zcash as it is a money grabbing scheme, Changelly and ShapeShift no longer exchange it, not sure if it is permanent yet.

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1950

the Myth that they are a chip producer/manfucator. There is a huge difference if you design a chip or if you produce and manufactor it, at least for me. Obviously not for you.

1951

Thank you. Changelly kept telling me they were having a problem with Zcash and would not say what it is. And that’s why they pulled it. But I don’t believe that, over a week later and nothing. Been exchanging it there for year or so now I cannot. zooko keep the good work up. In time Zcash will be worthless!!

1952

@chucky732 @bentusison and others if you want to speculate about future value of Zcash there is a thread for that: Price Speculation

Otherwise the speculation that “Zcash will be worthless” or “the value is going up/down/whatever if they don’t fork” are off-topic for this thread.

And there is no evidence that Shapeshift or Changely have paused thier conversion services for anything to do with ASICs or otherwise.

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1953

Hi Zooko,

Thanks for posting that link. I understand that this must be a very hectic time. I am a bit confused as to why you replied to my speculation post, in which I was just thinking out loud, rather than my post where I asked direct questions, and responded to your request for ideas on what would be a good example of the potential of forking away from asics when you onlu have asics on the network. electronium will be the closest. I will ask my questions again and hope for a response.

The landscape has changed in the past few days and I know that the foundation will be checking this stuff out, but both your opinion and that of and zcashco’s is still important and relevant.

Regarding the link you posted, do you still stand by that report? It seems to have a different tone to the one the company is portraying now.
The report outlines and ignores a number of risks, which was my point. I was asking for the follow up risk analysis, but this is for a different thread, I don’t want to get side tracked with it here. (I am not knocking the report at all)

Would you please answer my previous questions:-

  • How is zcash going to cope with a need for protocol changes after gpu’s stop mining the coin and only asics are on the network?
  • What incentive is their for the gpu miners to come back to your coin to prop it up after a hardfork?
  • What incentive is there for someone to buy a next gen asic when you made their last asic invalid?
  • For the coin to be dynamic it needs miners that have the ability to make changes as the coins develop. How do you propose to keep this flexibility whilst having only asics mine the coin?
  • Are the ideals outlined in the zcash-evolution blog post still the ideals of zcash co?
  • Are the concerns raised in the conclusion of fixing-zcash-vulns still concerns? How does this align with asics?
  • How is zcash going to mitigate the issues caused by asics to bitcoin? specifically the issues I outlined in my previous posts.

I am not just trying to bring problems to the table. This I guess is more for the foundation. I will type this up properly and submit it for evaluation.
[does this belong here? should I chop the post up into two?]

I am sure this has been thought about/brought up, but maybe it is time to think about it again.

this is very over simplified for brevity

  • Get the algo audited by a company that has knowledge of ASIC’s, FPGA’s, cryptography and cryptocurrency. For example, bitfury.
  • look to embrace FPGA’s - work with a major crypto related bitstream producers. Go back and look at the old bitcointalk posts, bitstream developers are as plentiful as gpu miner developers.
  • Open to tender the contract to develop the inital bitstream for a Xilinix/Altera/whatever fpga. - There are methods and incentives for this. open source the results.
  • Open to tender the contract to develop the board layout. - again there are various incentives for a company like bitfury to do this. - open source it.

Work with “board manufactures” and develop a list of “approved manufacturers” A bit like the way ASUS design their own GPU boards, but there is also the reference design (which in this case would be the open source one)…

Heh, this just reminded me of an old bitcointalk forum thread where people were making their own fpga boards by using a skillet to attach the fpga to the board. when was the last time someone did that to make a gtx 1080ti.

But this is all speculation. It needs to be investigated. There are disadvantages to this and I have made quite a few assumptions.

full disclosure, I am in no way affiliated with bitfury. However, 5/6 years ago one of bitfurys founders helped me with the board design and development of my sha256 fpga. These guys really know what they are doing. They are by no means the only people with this ability/capacity, I am using them as an example because of their proven track record in the fpga/asic crypto space and their commitment to the ideals of crypto. Also at this time mistfpga has no intention of developing an equihash fpga.

Thanks for your time.

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1954

About first thing, yeah I always feel it’s such an abuse of terminology to consider a pool as one entity the same as a mining farm.

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1955

Shawn,
Where this thread go? It’s not on the front page and under Mining.

1956

@chucky732 I can still see it fine, Mining category?

1957

Nope no where to be found! The only way I can find it is because I have a short cut on my desktop! It’s like you hiding it. Serious.

1958

No idea what you are talking about @chucky732 try clearing your cache.

Screenshot_2018-05-10-08-55-43

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1959

It seems foolish to broadcast the specifics of the change, strategically speaking, as I would think that paves the way for Bitmain’s immediate commencement of focused contingency planning.

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1960

Some hours ago i readed the whole Zencash post about the Asic issue and them discussing about future in their gifthub channel: The partner instant exchange SimpleSwap.io · Issue #142 · HorizenOfficial/zen · GitHub

Seriously, it was a good read. Balanced, fair, every pros and cons analyzed, no insults, no offending, many things explained as they are and not as someone wants to be and whatever not.

Makes me think that the higher the price of a coin gets the more agressive and the more poison is involved in a discussion … i might be wrong though…

3 Likes
1961

Hi!

I don’t agree with an idea that I’ve heard some people say that having ASICs on the network makes it harder to change the protocol. Protocol changes are accepted or rejected by the economic community — people who accept other people’s money as valid money based on one blockchain or another. Miners (whether GPU, ASIC, or something else) will follow along with whatever the economic community decides.

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1962

omg, why can’t this thread be like that :persevere:

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1963

Have fun playing whack a mole with ASIC’s. Is the plan to fork every time bitmain releases a new ASIC? How long until ASIC’s can take firmware updates to negate parameter tweaks from forks? If you up the memory requirements, how long until lower end GPU’s start being ineffective, and ASICS just ship with more memory? You can rotate algos, but how much time does that buy before bitmain catches up with multi algo ASIC’s? People seem to really underestimate the pace of innovation when your company is making billions of dollars a year.

I have a small GPU farm (85 gpus), and instead of kicking the can down the road with forks and introducing possible security vulnerabilities, I’d like to see an actual long term solution. A fork will not make ASIC’s go away.

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1964

Well 85 gpu’s small. I know I have over 150 rigs with 9 cards each. And no Asic in my farm. I been mining zec for a while and when ever another coin was more profitable I did not jump to it. That’s why you build more rigs.

1965

I think there’s a lot of people watching zcash right now to see what happens

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1966

This looks completely fake. What miner has a handle like that?

Edit: I don’t know for sure if it’s not real, but it seems very unlikely to be real.

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1967

What are the safeguards to a dual method mining approach? Won’t the ASIC makers just try to take over the GPU portion in time?

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1968

One great question that nobody is asking here:

What price does Zcash have to be in order to make it worthwhile for a manufacturer to develop and deploy a private ASIC for a gpu-only coin?

At a certain point, there are huge economic incentives to build one without the community knowing and taking over unsuspecting gpu miners. I don’t know what that price point is.

I don’t think any large-value gpu mineable coin is exempt from this issue. That’s probably the largest reason that I’m not against ASIC mining. Others have said this but ASIC resistance might not even be possible.

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