Update of Network and Market Statistics:
The following are all based on the average from the last 7 days (so eliminating impact of daily/hourly volatility in measurements) vs. 30 and 90 days ago…
Difficulty:
- Difficulty has increased 25.3% vs. the same period 30 days ago.
- Difficulty has increased 5.3% vs. the same period 90 days ago. (much higher price, see below)
Market Price:
- Price has decreased 30.6% vs. the same period 30 days ago.
- Price has decreased 41.8% vs. the same period 90 days ago.
Price:Difficulty Ratio (Mining Earnings Ratio) :
- P:D Ratio has decreased 44.6% vs. the same period 30 days ago.
- P:D Ratio has decreased 44.7% vs. the same period 90 days ago.
The Price:Difficulty ratio over a period of time is an important measurement because difficulty changes have by far the highest correlation with market price. Price goes up, difficulty goes up, and vice versa. This measurement represents the general compensation motivation of the mining community to provide hashing-power to Zcash. It’s significant drop with the significant increase in difficulty is what is expected to happen when ASICs are announced and released on any crypto network. This period measured represents the period of time that public disclosure of the ASIC mining happened.
I believe we are already seeing our 30% increase in mining impact that was expect in month 1 following an ASIC deployment.
The speculative impact on longer term market/network conditions are that this will gradually encourage miners to seek “greener pastures” in other currencies which they will adopt for general crypto use (no longer using ZEC). Lower adoption will likely result in lower volume and lower market price. I think most/all of the miners currently supporting ZEC network are either speculators (dreaming of a better tomorrow in ZEC price) or ASIC miners (which each is equivalent of at least 4 or 5 GPU rigs).
Zcash specifically I believe has a real problem with user adoption decreasing at the moment. Gemini was a nice pickup and a perk to those of us already using ZEC, but I don’t think it really did anything to encourage new users to adopt ZEC vs. other currencies. I don’t think “privacy” is important enough to people buying into crypto with real $ (since more of them are doing so for an investment, not to make transactions).