Releasing mining rewards over 50 weeks

Then it seems like I misunderstood the proposal. If the time-lock system is paying out every week where does the 50 week hold come in? Is it just the initial period of 50 weeks, thereafter paid weekly?

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I guess the inflation you have to deal with your fiat payments are around 0.5-3% at most per year, just a guess as this is what i would consider in the normal inflationary fiat range.
If there was a chance the inflationary could be +/- 100%, 200%, 300% or even 500%, how comfortable would you be? For me it would be highly uncomfortable feeling, comparable like enforced gambling in the casino with my paycheck…

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OK, I can see that argument might be valid - that the compeition for coins will be more amongst “long-term” miners, and thus if you’re one of this crowd you have an advantage. Still I’m a bit uncomfortable with it, as I felt the idea of this second algorithm was at a high level “to be friendly to the less-resourcsed”, e.g. non-asic holders, and this would make it inaccesisble to someone who can’t operate at a loss, at least for almost a year (or half a year or something - depends on the exact ratio between costs and reward), (in addition to operating at a loss at the start almost surely, you’d have to be financially comfortable enough to risk a long term loss if coin price goes down).

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As cypherpunks we should promote and create technologies that enhance freedom, liberty and privacy. The maximum of each of those as possible. That in turn will maximize the prosperity of the user community.

Promoting time-locks, enslavement, difficulty of use or anything that creates concerns and worries the user, goes in the opposite direction of the cypherpunk ideals and is in detriment of the coin and its community.
Forcing a mining time-lock will just direct freedom/liberty/privacy lovers on the look for freer coins to mine and use.

The user should make the decision to hold or sell the coin based just on its merits, not necessarily having to wait 50 or whatever number of weeks to make a decision. And that decision should not be imposed.
A mining time-lock with no market interest rate paid on the locked amount will likely just (in addition to reducing freedom and creating user concern) reduce ZEC price in proportion to the annual interest rate as perceived by the market.

[Moderation edit by @daira: the use of “enslavement” as an analogy isn’t appropriate. Please refrain from doing that.]

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Sorry to be unclear! I wonder how many other people on this thread are objecting to “lock up all coins until 50 weeks later” when the actual proposal is “lock up all the coins and then each week for 50 weeks, 1/50th of the coins unlock”. Make sense?

Earning the time-locked mining rewards is opt-in. If someone wants the time-locked mining rewards that the users/holders are offering them in return for mining services, then they can mine and they’ll receive those rewards. If don’t want that, then they can choose not to enter into that deal. That’s voluntary, consensual cooperation. Note that in the the next Network Upgrade (NU2 — Blossom, activating in the fall of this year), the new time-locked-rewards feature will only apply to the newly-introduced alg-B mining, not to the current miners.

Indeed, I think that is a big point of misunderstanding in this thread.

Perhaps rather than calling it a 50 week Lock up, calling it a “50 week GPU friendly slow start” or “12 month ramp up” to full GPU mining returns would be more explanatory.

When optional and unfair and competing on a dual POW with a fair alg-A, alg-B looks like a security hole as Daira said needs more investigation.
An unnecessary risk which just creates complexity and user concern.

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Old miner here, still believe in Zcash, although the trust keeps declining.

I myself would never let a Pool hold on to my coins, same as I dont leave my coins on a Exchange.

Mining for me allways was non commercial, let me explain this,
( because in the end, I need to get some money back for Power and Hardware ) I mined Zcash at times at a loss, same with Eth. Why ? because I have / had trust in the future.
In a market that’s stabil, you can follow this path, depeding on how deep your pockets are, or on what price your wiling to pay. If you needed money, you just could sell, with the price nowadays, A GPU miner allways mines at a loss and sells at a loss. I payed 500 euro’s per month on power ( hardware I wrote off the moment I bought it, I am aware some people ( and you should ) also take this in considerration ) without selling any coins, A real Hodler.
Thats what I mean with non commercial, mining at a loss, because you believe in the future.
I saw a lot of miners that had to sell on a monthly bases, just to cover the powercosts, they are gone, because since asics, that’s no longer doable with a price that keeps declining.
For me it was more intresting to instead of mining for 500 euro per month, to buy coins for 500 euro.

If I would mine Zcash again, there should be some major changes, 1 is that the price should be a lot higher, so I have at least a break even point, because non commercial mining is done for me. ( no one controls this, maybe with a tinfoilhad on, ok, but dont wanna go there )

2 I would never accept that my rewards get locked, as long as the coins aren’t on my wallet, they aren’t mine. So this proposal would make me say, No, I am not willing to mine under this conditions.

And to @daira @zooko, I can only speak for myself, but a lot of trust in Zcash on my part, is that people like @daira and @bitcartel are part of it. I strong believe in their knowledge to get Zcash forward on the road regarding the technical and core issues.
But hey, that’s just my 0.00000001Zcash :wink:

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Is it also because it seems he is against your changes?

Having him try and tell you that you are making a huge mistake with Zcash, that isnt beneficial? Why CANT you listen to other people Zooko? Everyone on here is against the change, there is zero proof you will get what you are even trying for. “But the community is more than the miners”…EXCEPT you keep making decisions that effect the miners the most

What you “appear to be neglecting” is you have no concept/proof/study/research to support your claims. And infact, I belive the opposite will happen. Why would I continue to mine a coin that is just as profitable as another coin, HOWEVER the first coin locks my rewards for upto 50 weeks…Why would I want to mine it? Sure, if Zcash becomes 5 times more profitable you might have people jump over to mine it, but was this because of time-locking or the price going up?

Please explain yourself, How does me mining for 1 year with NO locking, vs me mining for 1 year WITH locking, increase my rewards? The only way this is true, is if you are forcing other miners off with this change, thus reducing the difficulty.

Is reducing the amount of miners your goal? This is the only way you would make more coins in the same amount of time, how can you not see this? Maybe I am missing something? Please explain how I get more coins with time-locking

How does forcing people to lock the coins, change the mining at all? I dont understand. If Zcash is making me $1USD a day mining, how does locking my coins increase the amount of coins I will get? It does not. It reduces my choices. It reduces my freedoms.

It does not incentivises miners, it punishes them.

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I agree with everything you say here Shawn, This is why I am losing faith in ZEC.

Sapling was the priority, “because we need more adoption”, “we need more people USING the coin”, “Sapling will allow mobile devices to work with ZEC, and will increase the adoption and use of the coin”. Sorry we dont have time to do other things the community wants, because we are so invested in Sapling right now.

Now we are being subjected to a proposal that PREVENTS the use of coins. Wasn’t adoption the main reason you guys were rushing to get Sapling out? Trying to get more people USING your coins? Now you turn around and try to time-locking freshly minted coins so we CANT use them?

With talks of dual mining, trying to bring back GPU miners, WHILE protecting the ASICs, it seems you are just trying to please eveyone…

I dont see how time-locking rewards will do anything that Zooko has proposed. He has nothing to backup his claims. And infact, the more he talks about the reasons why, the more holes in his arguments. He has not made 1 valid reason for time-locking, even tho I could think of a couple, he seems to miss them.

Once again, the “majority” of people are against time-locking, but guess we the “community” voted on this too.

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I am very sorry to hear you might have lost money trying to help out ZEC. I was very vocal when ASICs were annouce saying they are a scam and you have a 90% chance to lose money buying them, UNLESS you are first or second batch owner. They have done nothing but fracture the community and removed 80+% of the GPU miners that were mining at the time.

This is what I dont understand. ASICs are the ones dumping. We never had this problem with GPUs. GPUs keep alot of value for upto or more than 3 years. I dont need to dump coins trying to make my money back in the 3 months that my ASIC makes money, before it costs to much to run.

Why would you not time-lock the ASIC that are the ones dumping the coins? There isnt even any GPUs on the network right now, so why GPUs getting punished for the dumping?

Zooko makes zero sense. And has no proof/evidence/facts

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Chill dude, havent you read his post

He says he will ignore the posts and replies that do not suit him :smiley:
Also people will use Nicehash to GPU mine Zcash, and receive rewards in Bitcoin instantly if they go through with their suggestion. He will accomplish nothing.

Now think of this. Would you still take your check like you did before knowing…

You have no idea who pays your pay check.
There is no legal recourse for you if they dont pay your check.
There is no way to find the guy that didnt pay you your check.
Plus the other things Boxalex said.

Alot of miners use a pool, trusting a pool with 1 years worth of money seems very risky to me. You dont know anything about the guy running the pool.

I will give you that one benefit that you mentioned, it FORCES you to be more responsible with your money. But you also lose the freedoms you had with money that is YOURS, you could of had that money invested for 1 year and made alot more money with it, like your boss is doing.

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@Lisfin that’s a really good point. If this setup incentivizes scammy pool operators outside legal recourse to setup a pool and run off with a year’s worth of miner rewards, that would be a bad consequence.

I won’t trust a pool to hold the keys that control my funds for a year. I also think that we’re getting ahead of ourselves by making a decision on an important matter such as this so soon without more debate.

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One consequence of this might be that larger farms and centralized mining pools could have trouble supporting Zcash due to their larger immediate costs. In my opinion, that would be a good outcome.

Smaller miners would be more able to handle delayed rewards (less rent, smaller electrical bill). For a medium sized miner like myself, it’s somewhere in-between. If pooled mining could be decentralized, P2Pool style, that would be a massive win. Mining pool centralization and mining centralization in general has been a problem since the start.

As others have said, the introduction of this may actually increase the price, making mining more profitable under these new conditions. It’s really hard to project what might happen with an idea like this. I’m going to keep an open mind before solidifying an opinion.

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Agree with you there Root.
But still curious what Daira brings to the table, it is a good idea, but it has to be solid and safe.

And I follow Daira on that 1, since I think she is knowing what she is talking about. ( The technical issues that is )

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Thank you for the input, Ariel. I, too, want to make Zcash mining accessible to a variety of such people — teenage gamers, Venezuelans and Iranians, hobbyists with an in-home small scale mining farm, etc. And contrary to what most people have posted on this thread, I think that the time-locking of mining rewards will not bar those people nearly as much as people seem to think. People aren’t understanding that if you have the willingness to mine steadily for awhile, then this gives you an advantage against bigger, more well-funded miners who would otherwise push you out. So this may exclude certain groups of people, but it may include others, and in fact potentially more.

That said, I consider aligning incentives between miners and users+holders to be an even more important goal than the above.

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Your right Zooko, it will not BAR anyone, it will make them choose to go mine another coin that has the same reward(profits), except they get the money up front. Why would I mine for the same amount of money to have it locked up for 50 weeks? I could be using that money to make money.

You keep repeating your opinions as if they are facts, you are just making up examples that have never been tested or have had any studies.

Please help me understand. I haved asked again and again, Show us anything that supports any of the claims you have made. Nothing you keep repeating is based on any facts its all YOUR opinions.

Show us why you are so sure this is the right way to go for Zcash? Your right, I dont understand how you have come to this conclusion, can you please show us any information backing your claims.

Is this how Zcash is going to be run now? All I am asking for is some substance that proves what you keep repeating. WHY do you believe this will have the effect you are looking for?

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