On 7 July, 2017 we became aware that the cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex had disabled their Zcash wallet. We are not currently aware of any issue with the Zcash network. We monitor the Zcash network ourselves by running a few full nodes (out of the many [full nodes currently running on the network] (Zchain Network - Zcash Network Visualization)). We are also constantly in communication with the Zcash community — the many markets and wallets , miners, developers, and users. We’ve reached out to Poloniex to ask if they are having an issue that we can help with.
We’ll post an update if we learn anything about the performance of the Zcash software or network.
This is awesome. I hope Poloniex will re-enable Zcash’s withdrawal/deposit soon.
Also, miners - take note - do not use exchange wallet for mining. Use desktop wallet like Zcash4win or web wallet like cryptonator, if you do not like download gigabytes of data.
For the record as the developer behind the Windows port of zcash (all of the full nodes listed as “BeanStalk” on the network map link @paige linked above), I have not had any reports of issues with the zcash network itself from any of my users.
For the record, I think that mining centralisation is a serious problem, for Zcash and for PoW blockchains in general.
Note that choosing an ASIC-friendly PoW has its own problems: if you choose SHA-256d then you’re at the mercy of huge Bitcoin mining farms who are in a position to do the same kind of attack @ZC93 points out for ETH miners, and if you choose a different ASIC-friendly PoW algorithm then no-one starts out with any ASICs, which makes the security in the early stages very questionable.
In any case this thread started with the announcement concerning Poloniex, and drifted into the topic of mining centralisation because of @Kulla’s speculation that the reason Polo had disabled ZEC was because they were concerned about 51% attacks. I see no evidence for that speculation – and if Polo were actually concerned about that, wouldn’t they be motivated to say that was what it was about rather than leave everyone in the dark?
Well that is a long maintenance for sure and had detrimental effect on its price. Earlier today, litecoin wallet was disabled as well but it was fixed 30 minutes back.
That’s a horrid “standard notice” I would say. Quite frankly, I would pose that there may not have been such a drastic drop in price had it been simply “down for maintenance”. For weeks our price has been aligned with ETH and almost always higher than ETH even with drops, this time we fell well below and are struggling to close the gap with ETH again.
Just an observation of course. Personally, I would have a chat with Polo about their “standard notice” to ensure something like this doesn’t happen again in the future? You know…if you can get a hold of them