The final NU2 Blossom Network Upgrade Goals

I’m a miner who has literally “supported” the network since the Genesis block, but I put the term support in quotations because there seems to be a misconception that miners deserve some sort of compensation or recognition beyond what they receive in mining rewards. Unfortunately that’s not true for any cryptocurrency and all miners receive fair compensation for their work.

The NU2 goals seem to be an attempt to skew the rewards towards people who want to be invested in Zcash for the long term, which seems to be more in line with the idea of “supporting” the network. I’m not suggesting the goals are good or bad; I think everything about Harmony mining should be evaluated properly, particularly in terms of security vulernabilities. However, for anyone to claim that this is somehow a slap in the face to GPU miners seems misguided. The purpose is to attract people who actually want to “support” the network.

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Just closed the pool, if anyone wants to check it.

@zooko Would it be possible to decrease the amount of time for the release of coins for alg-B, to say, six to eight weeks? Putting it over a month will exert stress on larger mining operations and pools that have larger monthly fees, which is great. However, if the length is too long then it might weaken the network if small miners decide not to pick up the slack at the start of or during a bear market. It’s fully possible that there is something about +1yr that I don’t fully understand, making that timeframe better.

The argument that the time lock attracts loyalty is not conclusive imo, because it’s not that you have to mine continuosuly for a year to get coins. You could in theory mine Zcash for 2 hours based on your current assesment of the value of the locked coins, and switch back and forth to other currencies according to changing assesements of what is more valuable per time & electricity.
What makes it feel (much) more like a slap in the face to GPUs imo, is restricting the timelock to alg-B

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The term “slap in the face” is an expression of physical harm. I think we should move away from that sort of language @arielgabizon.

The time-releasing mechanism is intended to change GPU incentives where ASICs don’t necessairily require those incentives. Zcash is the main cryptocurrency on Equihash. The vast majority of Equihash ASIC purchasers are securing Zcash.

GPU miners (alg-B) across all cryptocurrencies switch en masse based off of profitability. As I understand it, the incentive here is designed to persuade GPU miners that zec will be worth more in the future than whatever current coin they are mining.

The main flaw with the time-release incentive is that any GPU miner could just auto-convert to zec after mining another coin at the current more-profitable moment. That way they would get all of the zec now and have more zec than they would even after waiting a year.

This might actually incentivize Zcash miners that were not switching at all to mine a different coin and then buy zec rather than profiting directly via zec issuance. This does incentivize holding, but it doesn’t incentivize mining for the purpose of holding.

Further, adding GPU mining of any kind will open Zcash up to security weaknesses as Zec isn’t the largest GPU-mined coin. A 51% attack on Zec would be very bad. Also a dual-PoW seems to have a larger attack surface. Sticking with ASICs seem to be the least-worst option.

Taking a step back, I believe that the Zcash Co & devs should be rapidly moving towards opaque addresses and transactions (by default) rather than spending time thinking and implementing changes to manually balance the PoW algorithm. I don’t see the current mining situation as Zcash’s #1 problem.

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Agreed (I was just quoting from previous comment)

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For this reason, in the long run I am in favor of the whole world converging its hash power into one merge mined time stamping service, that all coins/ledgers will use. (Unless some good enough PoS comes up along the way, but who knows if that’ll happen)

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This seems like a centralized weakness. Maybe it would be like P2Pool for all coins?

That is something to consider whether it would increase centralization, but I think it’s possible it won’t increase mining centralization. The advantage of it is that every distributed ledger would require half the hash power in the world to be attacked.

That’s a fair argument.

I also agree that it’s completely unfair to limit the timelock to alg-B, and in my reply to @zooko I suggested that expanding the scope of the proposal to both algorithms was probably necessary.

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The reality is that there will be some pools that will implement the PPSa(pay per share in advance) at 15% fee

Isn’t this somehow allready happening on various occasions?

First that comes into my mind is Komodo. While i didn’t dig so far deeper on their technical details i think to remember that they use POS + equihash + notarize them on the BTC blockchain. Isn’t this allready very near to a timestamp service?

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Yeah one natural path would be for more ledgers to leverage BTC chain

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Is this something that ZcashCo can do on its’ own or does it require setting up the blockchain through Komodo? This might be necessary for dualPoW to be more secure, but it seems like it would take even more work and delay the upgrade by at least 1 cycle.

Just in case it helps someone preparing and or for some network calculations:

Equihash 150,5, testing it for some days now with BEAM with 1080ti’s.

Hashrate per 1080ti 17-19 sol’s @ 170W, still testing different settings but these seem to be allready good.

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This sums up a large amount of what I was thinking. It’s entirely possible I’m missing the point, but seems Blossom isn’t really doing much to increase the availability of shielded addresses on light and mobile clients. To me that’s the most important thing holding adoption back. Then next would be removing transparent addresses altogether.

When I look through the features for the Blossom release, I keep feel like I’m missing where the substantial improvements are.

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definitely agree with this. think zcashco should concentrate on fungiblity/usability.

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Are you one of those miners? You registered your account four hours ago, and thus haven’t had any involvement in the discussion since October 2016 until now. Yet your first post is an attack on the time-lock rewards?

Well thank’s for the accusations. I came here because of decision to the PoW change. When Zcash stated they’re not concerned about ASICs I had already given up on Zcash. Their stance was set. Little a community of GPU miners could do besides buy an ASIC miner.

No I wasn’t a miner from the start, but I started in 2017. When it seemed there was plenty of decent, profitable GPU coins to mine with an “ASIC-resistant” Algo. I felt invigorated again like I did in 2013 mining LTC. Now I understand Asic-resistance is a fallacy, but to build a computer with couple GPUs and earn a reward for it. I enjoy that!

I say its a slap in the face because Zcash stated Asic-resistance creating the equihash algorithm, hence only GPU miners could directly support the network(secure it) and in turn receive a reward. So those early adopters and anyone who mined in 2016/2017 happily mined away on Zcash. When the Asic’s are announced. Anyone who was GPU mining looked to the official “Asic-resistance” stance only to be told by Zooko that he never committed to it. That’s fine, I guess the party was up for us, to find another coin that ASICs wouldn’t dominate so heavily on(Z9 mini = 24 1080tis FYI).
Now we told he’s willing to Let us play again, but for a price, to time-lock coins. The Time-lock coins are only for the GPUs? That’s what I find a slap in the face. You kicked us off, now want us to come groveling back for pittance and time-locked coins? get the heck out.

How would that even work? Miners pay electric costs too, far more than most ASIC miners. Typically the coin we earn is how we cover it. So what’s the play there? How could anyone even cover basic electric costs to run the GPU rigs?

In all, if you want ASICs that are more efficient to secure the network that’s fine, but I’m hating the double standards coins are doing these days. If you like and want ASICs be like SIACOIN. There mission from the start was to make is ASIC mineable however they quickly learned their lesson from Innosilicon and Bitmain.

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You misattributed the above quote to me.

@Xazax we have a separate thread about ASICs vs GPU and what Zcash/Zooko did/didn’t do in the past regarding ASICs that you should join: Let’s talk about ASIC mining

Please try to keep this thread more directly about the proposed future Harmony PoW change and points regarding such.