When Monero hard forked to maintain ASIC resistance (aka Fair Mining) and its hashrate fell, there was skepticism from some quarters that 50% of Monero’s hashrate was due to secret ASICs. Some argued that secret mining was due to botnets, that manufacturers would not engage in such activity.
However, several months on, we can clearly see that secret ASIC mining was indeed responsible for 50-60% of Monero’s hashrate, leaving it vulnerable to centralized mining.
In response to Monero updating its PoW, some forks were launched anonymously in an attempt to provide a lifeline for Crytonight ASIC hardware. These forks now appear to have failed.
The pickup in May/Jun of 17 was due to the favorable news with JP Morgan. Though seeing as nothing more than hand wringing has been seen from the ZCash peeps, I’m going to expect that only the front side of the two graphs will ever look similar.
Monero’s successful fork shows that all of the arguments against an ASIC resistance fork are wrong.
There are no secret ASICs that have been created for CryptongihtV7 already.
There was no secret firmware update that magically made the Cryptonight ASICs compatible with CryptonightV7.
The fork was not technically complicated.
The fork did not disrupt the ecosystem – I doubt anyone other than miners even noticed.
The fork did not lower Monero’s value. Instead, the ASIC chains are the ones that are heading to zero because ASIC mining does not add value to a cryptocurrency.
I’ve said many times that GPU miners have the upper hand against ASICs because they can adapt to any new algorithm. ASICs need to start over the development process. If a coin forks enough, they will lose money and give up.
I wish @zooko would reconsider his beliefs about the feasibility of an ASIC resistant fork. The evidence from the successful Monero and BTG forks does not support some of his major claims.
This is precisely why ASICs are important for the security of the Zcash network.
If an attacker launches an attack with GPUs that crashes the price then they can easily move on to other coins that can be mined with GPUs at a profit. However if an attacker launches an attack with ASICs that crashes the price then they will have fewer or ideally no other options for profitably mining with their hardware.
As a result, ASIC miners will be much less likely to attack Zcash since they rely exclusively on stable income from Zcash to cover their mining costs.
The reason that Monero forked to remove ASIC miners from their network is because their specific mining algorithm makes non-ASIC miners vulnerable to DoS attacks by ASIC miners. To the best of my knowledge, Zcash does not have this same vulnerability. (Source: https://twitter.com/openstreetmath/status/981526511399424000)
This is just off many false ASIC excuses…before ASIC network was around 400 msols …that is equivalent off 1000 000 Nvidia 1070 …so to attack you would need 500 000 or 100 000 Rigs with that cards.
There is no way that anyone in the world and criminals even less could have that much cards and rigs.
Was Zcash ever attacked while on GPU …or Monero ,or ETH …no so its just false excuse…maybe some smaller coins but they have same risk and on ASIC…now single entity can attack with ASIC ZenCash no problem anytime
You still dont understand that your answers are all false and that write just to write.
Most ever that nicehash had on Zcash when GPUs was 70msols…if nicehash worked how you imagine there would be 50% attack on coins every few minutes .
Yes they were successful…mining still decentralised ,Bitmain is out off story and want earn they billions on that coins.
And you are looking the way you want.
A year ago 20 avgust 2017
Monero was worth 53$ …now is 103$
ETH was 295$ …now is 310$
ETC classic was 13.5$ …now is 13.9$
Zcash was 230$ …now is 147$
Dash was 310$ …now is 162$
BTC cash was 810$ …now is 584$
You see that from year ago Bitmain coins lost value
You still believe that attacks were carried out by rented hashpower, lol. Amazing…
After you can see from a graph that shows how situation was with coin that were in similar situation than those coins. You know that you can buy ASICs without need to tell yourself lies about their manufacturer? They can be scumbags. I buy randomly stuff from Nestle and that fucking company is a real damn monster.
To clarify, I’m not saying that there aren’t attacks that are done by using NiceHash or similar services, but those that got most fame definitely were conducted by ASICs.
I for myself as well have no proof but common sense, logic that nobody needs to buy whatever hardware, no matter if gpu/asic/cpu if you can buy the needed hashpower for literally cents at nicehash. Only a total idiot would waste millions for something you can get for $1,000 per hour…
Actually the nicehash “theory” is backed up even by projects like BTG that claimed that Asics hit their network with an attack by now…
My proof is graphs and you have literally zero proof for your rented hashpower claims, other than it is easy and low cost? Why the timings of the attacks happened before shipping dates?
How about, you manufacture ASICs, mine in secret with them as long as you can before getting detected, then announce selling them and before shipping do the attack? Literally zero cost to you and your double spend coins are fresh ones with no one having ability to track them back to you. Much safer than having a third party like Nicehash, where you could be at least somewhat tracked by hashpower renting times and Bitcoins used to rent them. Also the double spend coins have to come from somewhere, mine them also with Nicehash or buy from exchange?
My point is that for ASIC manufacturer, doing a little double spend attack to a coin that you don’t really believe is just a way to maximize profits and push people towards coins that you want to flourish.
Why attacks happen bevor asics are released? Could be simply because later it gets more expensive.
Now if you really believe that a manufator with 2.500 employees, 4+ billion revenue company gets involved in a hacking attack than it’s just the most NOT plausible one. And the most plausible and logic one is greed by hackers, easy and simple as that.
Doublespend some 500.000 or 1M dubious profit for a company that makes 5 billion revenue? Come one mate, no company is risking financial reputation for some peanuts additionally. If you get 5 billions yearly on your account you aren’t going to robber a bank for 500.000$. Not that in theory it could not happen, but it’s about a 0.000001% chance and i personally don’t believe something to have a <1% chance to be real.
Or people run their ASICs with nicehash and renting price stays pretty much same.
It’s not really a hacking attempt. It’s just a thing you can do. When your ASICs run order of magnitude faster than GPUs, you can generate enough hashrate in a single warehouse with those machines and keep circle of people knowing about it very small.
Have you looked any other shit that Bitmain has done? They have actually burned pretty good sum of their profits (which I think were calculated at a point where crypto was very close to peak of its bubble and large part of their holdings were in form of cryptocurrencies) to power grab attemps with segwit2x and BCH, and have pretty hefty BCH bags currently. These attacks provide good information to them about how fast they need to be ready to shift hashrate to BCH to combat double spend attacks that may otherwise damage its reputation and how severe those consequences to reputation and value actually are. It’s just pure win-win-win situation for them with very low risk.
To clarify, I’m not here trying to say ASICs are bad and bla bla bla, I’m just saying that these were things that I would do if I would be in situation where Bitmain is.
There is no evidence that Zcash was ever at risk of a 51% attack when it was mined with GPUs. The coins that have been successfully attacked had low block rewards, and they include both GPU and ASIC coins.
Second, the Equihash ASICs are so cheap for Bitmain and Innosilcion to build that a 51% attack with ASICs would actually be very profitable for them. I suspect they don’t attack because it is illegal and because they’d rather make their money honestly.
Third, I believe Monero got rid of ASIC mining simply because they want to preserve fair, decentralized mining. I see no mention of protection against DoS attacks in their official statement: PoW change and key reuse | Monero - secure, private, untraceable
That is actually true if you look at the report that showed Nicehash hashrates. There was not enough to rent to attack Zcash. It all boils down to value. The higher market cap coins attract more miners to secure the network against attacks. It is only the lower valued coins that get attacked. Survival of the fittest.
Actutally that report only shows the direct immediatly available nicehash hashrate. It can not, obviously, include the hashrate that gets shifted if there is demand.
For example: If there have been 50 MH/s available free hashrate for Equihash and let’s say (just fictive) 75 MH/s for lyra and someone buys these 50 MH/s Equihash than automaticlly the nicehash miners software get’s triggered to put more hashrate from other algos that have free hashrate to equihash.
This is just a logical procedure, as the more demand for a given algo is, the higher the price gets, triggering the nicehash software to put more hashrate this algo. Good example have been the continous XVG/Verge attacks on the lyra algo. There have been hours on nicehash where you got up to 30 USD per 1080ti/hour for putting traffic to nicehash lyra.
In short, the live report page about nicehash traffic and available traffic gives only an idea about current immediatly available traffic, but not about possible maximum traffic. If i remember right i once did the calculation if nicehash had enough traffic after shifting all free traffic from algos and i would have been pretty borderline to get enough traffic for equihash. But than again, there are other services out as well, which could provide the missing hashpower, in theory of course.
On the other side, having in mind that with more demand the price as well rises, a possible attack than would have raised mostly from 50.000 USD per hour to up to 100.000 USD per hour as the more hashpower you demand from nicehash, the higher the price gets for the shifted traffci from other algos.
Just a little correction to your statement and that the real time report about available nicehash traffic doesn’t include possible shifting of hashrate, nothing less, nothing more.
