Good point, earthrise. I’ve thought through that one at length, too. Unfortunately I don’t have time to write my thoughts about that right now.
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Im not sure what Zookos motivation is, he has not come out and said this is why he is pushing this proposal so hard. I would like to see some proofs/evidence this will have the effect he is looking for. I didnt know Zcash just guesses at things and than tries to act on them, I thought they did research and tried to have proof the proposal will have the effect they are looking for. Not because Zooko:“talked with people and they agree”.
NOTE: ONLY GPU MINERS ARE TIME-LOCKED
ASICs are the ones currently dumping coins, Why is Zcash attacking GPU users over something they had nothing to do with, how does time-locking GPUs fix the current ASICs dumping?
I still dont see how this forces miners into being a stake holder? If Zcash is profiting $1 USD for my rigs, and another coin is making $1 USD a day, I would mine the non Zcash one knowing my money wont be locked upto 50 weeks. I could use MY money I have mined and use it over the 50 weeks to make more money than what I could of mined with Zcash. IMO this will only force people off the network.
You are losing huge potential with your money if its locked up for upto 50 weeks. I dont see how this incentivises miners at all. The only things that does is PROFITS. If time-locking coins increases profits, is it because the coin improved or because they artificially changed the supply limit for 50 weeks, if anything this is only a 50 week temporary fix.
Why not try and fix the REAL problem…Why are people dumping Zcash?
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Looks like there is now a ticket to have the same approach for ASICs but at NU3 i.e. 6 months after Blossom add time-locking-of-mining-rewards for Equihash-200,9 miners · Issue #3774 · zcash/zcash · GitHub
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This was put out in the open, giving a public view of what would otherwise have been private.
Zooko’s initial motivation was stated almost explicitly as “aligning miners and holders”. He thinks about the bigger picture and it’s a good reasonable motivation. I showed the problems.
I did not know the proposal was that GPUs would be time-locked and ASICs not. Yeah, that would not be good.
Assuming the only idea now on the table is both, it means fewer coins would be available for sale which should help price, but the bump effect in price would get smaller and smaller until the 50 week point has no advantage, except that someone who held for 50 weeks is more likely to hold longer than that.
OK, so yeah, if you’re wanting to support price for only a year while cashing out … looks like a good idea.
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Can someone give me an overview of how difficulty is going to be calculated for two different POWs?
(or a link)
They really need to be running in parallel to prevent some time span complications and by the memory less property of the poisson they can use the same time span and just use double the target solve time for each algorithm. But the cumulative targets must be kept separate.
There’s going to be a 50% decrease in response time to network hashrate changes and if you decrease the n=17 to n=8 or 9 to regain the speed there will be a sqrt(2) increase in instability due to not having as many solve time data points for the individual hashrate Networks.
I think both ideas should be dropped. The devs should use the extra time to do something like fee-votes to create checkpoints stored on BTC chain (simpler than KMDs)
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I strongly feel that the dual-PoW and time locking rewards are confounding and should be considered separately.
Time value of money predicts that a rational miner would always choose to mine where they receive a reward today, rather then tomorrow.
Or…
What about time locking alg-A to create an incentive for adoption of alg-B?
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While rewards are time-locked, could they potentially serve a PoS function?
As I described in great detail, it is a direct PoS attempt but it’s not done correctly.
Yeah, this concerns me. And I think we should view miners being mercenary as a feature, not a bug.
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Actually, delaying rewards prevents them from being mercenaries, but mercenary or not does not affect the security. Miners posting here are actually the only ones who should want delayed rewards, assuming posting here indicates you’re more likely to mine only this coin (you don’t like mercenaries) and want to hold it for a while. Delaying rewards is going to reduce difficulty for you guys.
I don’t mine for profit, assuming the security is sound it doesn’t really bother me, sorry
Assuming Asic Farms profits would be cut in half it really disincentivizes them to continue to mine it and would probably sell the rigs, it also disincentivizes them from buying up all of the Asics when they get manufactured which decentralizes that Supply
(The only other choice would be to reinvest in a bunch of gpus and be prepared to deal with negative cost valuation for a year which doesn’t really sound feasible at all)
Diffi can go down with say 50 % and I still not know where I am into.
What will a GPU make ?
what will my rig make , knowing I have EU powerprice ( lets say 0.25 Dollarcent )
As stated before, Still love Zcash, but not that much anymore, that I will mine at a loss.
That’s what I was saying, one of the reasons I’m against this change is that it will be unattractive to mercenary miners.
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It’s pointless. The market will find a price relative to expiry, just like a bond market. So there isn’t any practical lock-in and it just increases the cost base for miners. This is additionally centralising and short-term good for existing coin-holders as supply is constrained. But you’re issuing a security instead of money.
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REALLY dedicated miners would think of profit in terms of ZEC instead of USD so that a difficulty drop of 70% (judging by your replies) and price bump of 10% would be very attractive, except that they might not like its new difficulty-to-price ratio has dropping it from 20th best-secured to 100th.
I agree witht the effect being less and less until 50 weeks are reached and than we would be back to normality and normal daily new ZEC supply on algo-B.
I disagree with the comment that it would help price and less coins dumped. It’s simple not like this for several reasons:
- algo-B is creating additionally coins, i’am not aware that algo-A block reward will be lowered, means automaticlly more coins will come into circulation, no matter they are time delayed.
- With weekly more coins including the algo-B coins, i fail to see how this would have an positive impact on price.
- Having the previous points in mind, algo-A miners might or mostly will get more sell pressure due more coins released daily/weekly. It’s absolutly possible in my opinion that algo-A miners are dumping even more than.
- The effect would be only temporary for 50 weeks anyway, after that we would be back to normality that both algos can dump full weekly block rewards into circulation.
This said, i can’t see how this will help price, actually i see how it would hurt inflation and price. If i miss a point and/or made a wrong assumption anybody is free to correct me of course.
While i agree with you in principe you left the very most important factor out of the assumption: electricity cost.
Someone paying 2 cents or less for electricity has x times less “trouble” mining compared to someone with higher electricity, no matter it’s time locked. Actually i would even go as far as saying it favours the very low electricity miners as they have real low cost affilated to running the mining operation while waiting for the rewards coming in.
Simple calculation on 400W usage @ 2 cents per kw/h:
daily: 20 cents, monthly: $6, yearly: $72, means investment into electricity until fully paid: $72
Simple calculation on 400W usage @ 12 cents per kw/h: (worldwide average cost):
daily: $1.25, monthly: $37.5, yearly: $450, means investment into electricity until fully paid: $450
Simple calculation on 400W usage @ 35 cents per kw/h: (german miner for example)
daily: $3.36, monthly: $100.8, yearly: $1,209.5, means investment into electricity until fully paid: $1,209.6
In my opinion this indeed very simple calculation shows that the 2 -5 cent miners (where the big mining facilities are settled) don’t have to invest much at all, here another simple calculation representing 400W = 2 GPU units:
1,000 gpu mining facility @ 2 cents/kw/h = $36,000 per year electricity consumption investment.
10,000 gpu mining facility @ 2 cents/kw/h = 360,000 per year electricity consumption investment.
Actually the last electricity consumption investment calculation is wrong. With intension by the way. This would apply only if AFTER 50 weeks they would get the rewards. After they get weekly rewards their yearly energy consumption is allready paid by mining itself much sooner. Means again, the mining facility needs only a very small investment @ 2 cents per kw/h to begin mining and would be very soon allready hording profit after in no time the already weekly timelocked payouts would cover their electricity costs.
Leave alone the free bonus “remove competition” effect these mining facilites get by removing the “mercenary” miners.
P.S. and Edit:
As i’am in calculation mood today i just made some more for a 1,000 gpu mining facility @ 2 cents per kw/h.
I have to take some fiction profit as we have no idea what algo is choosen, neither on difficutly i use the Z9 mini stats and profitability for this fictionaly calculation, means 1x gpu = 1x Z9 mini in profitability on current equihash algo. Actually this example isn’t that bad as it would give some insight on how a time locking on algo-A and the asics would like like:
1,000 mining units: used Z9 mini profitability per day: $2.45 (Whattomine), without electricity costs!
per day income: $2,450
per week income: $17,150
per month income: $68,800
per year income: $823,000
compared to the to cover electricity consumption investment of about $36,000 i think it’s clear by now that this is NOT a burden for big mining facilities that are settled in very low electricity cost regions.
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What would be the gain here? Getting interest? Than it would be way smarter with directly going with a hybrid POW/POS design which i personally think would the best approach anway.
Introducing an POW algo-B that serves as a POS function doesn’t make sense in my opinion.
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Totally agree, hence i wonder why not a hybrid POW/POS was choosen but some totally flawed and doomed to fail algo-B approach. For all the thoughts and things behind algo-B POS would serve 10x better and mostly 20x more secure …
I don’t think this isn’t correct and there is no change to the emission rate, see the feature requests initially detailed here: Write spec for Harmony Mining · Issue #3672 · zcash/zcash · GitHub
- FR4: The immediate revenue for an active miner of Zcash at the block just prior to the activation height for Blossom should be almost identical starting with the activation height. (Subtlety: this includes GPU miners, even though their immediate revenue may be below their costs.)
- FR5: This immediate revenue for alg-B specialized miners will be 0 at activation height.
- FR6: Adjust protocol parameters in a linear fashion from the activation height,
Hto exactlyH + 210,000, such that atH + 210,000the immediate revenue for all mining capacity of alg-A is equal to all mining capacity for alg-B .
While the details may change (e.g alg-B may not start at 0) there will be a ramp up of GPU mining over the course of a year but alg-A % will go in the other direction so there is no overall increase.
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