Sapling, Winterover, as well as all other technical and other product upgrades should be allways priority.
I have said it in another topic allready that my strong belief is that the more resources are put into the product itself, it’s technical advance the better the product will become and the more and bigger chances there are to be better than the competition.
The Zcash competition is and should allways be the most important part with the highest priorities. There are so many competitors and projects working on privacy coins that a delay and wrong redirected resources like nothing could give a given competitor the chance to overtake Zcash.
Second, the secondary focus should be to put value into the Zcash, including point 1 i wrote and second, every other value possible, this includes but is not limited to a stable, minimum network it can build up and rely on.
Third, and just than, and after the research about the short, mid, long term impact of ASICs and possible Asic resistant ways/directions/changes/forks/you name it should be considered. I personally think, there is nothing worse than shooting and guessing in the blind and alocating valuable resources to something that might or might not work out. IF at some point/time Zcash decidest to make an asic resistant fork, so it be, but than at least one that ensures that Zcash, after the research is done, makes one that is at very least 2+ years reliable so no further resources have to be alocated again in case new asics show up 3 months later just with an improved Asic update or something like that.
This would be the worst case in my opinion. Alocating resources for nearly nothing.
This is like saying “development and progress should always come first, we will be concerned about IT security after that”.
These should be tasks that are performed at the same time. Separate but connected/informed teams should be working BOTH projects at the same time. There should be people dedicated to monitoring network health, market trends, and risk assessment at all times…and doing nothing else (believe me, it’s more than a full time job).
That is the sort of team members that should be already researching and addressing changes in the market (ASICs) that will impact the network (for better or worse). Not waiting until September to start looking into it or punting it off to a 3rd party organization (Zcash Foundation).
There are threads to discuss the ASIC issue directly and the list of “reasons” on both sides are extensive. To me the choice to use equihash is enough to consider development concept to be “ASIC resistant” from the start (otherwise there were other algos better established they could/should have used).
But the dedication of team members has to do with product stability. “What is the current health and status of our network?” should be a topic with a dedicated technician (and whatever elements come with that, like ASICs).
This would be a technical position with programming capabilities, business intelligence, and market research. I know many other, more established coins have people exactly like this on their teams. Most of those teams are ASIC coins so this is not an “ASIC vs. GPU” argument but such a role in the organization would be directly involved in that discussion instead of “we will look into it after September”.
Makes all sense what you wrote. 99% of all the posts here and other topics are emotional and i’am missing most expert views of market research, business intelligence and the technical possibilities, options and so on.
Someone can only agree to what you wrote!
Zcash network performance , security , stability and integrity is always first periority to me .
I believe my position against asics is well established .
And i believe that the zcash foundation have heared the community’s voice and they pledged to act on it .
So those few accounts that joined the forum after the asic has been introduced, and post every 15 minutes an article to personally attack others and defend asics in a pathetic way shouldn’t intimadate us .
Billions of dollars at stake from a scumbag manufacturer in china . So its no surprize to me and many others to see some of its tentacles spread .
That being said ,just ignore them and let us continue on the track . And those asics will be worthless in few months .
So far , I trust the foundation will honer their pledge and statement.
People should throw in their vote on the 3rd post of this thread. Only 76 respondents so far while various threads on this topic have over 200 people responding. I’m sure there are more people who can add to the survey.
so that us means gpu miners that are on the forum for longer. Was just curious to whom that us is referring to exactly as it’s important to know when someone speaks up for many …
There is no decision to “wait until September” to make preparations that would be needed for a PoW change; the decision is rather than a PoW change can’t be activated before Sapling is activated. I can assure you that this will be a vigorous topic of discussion at Zcon0 in June, for example, and that if technical specs for a PoW upgrade are needed, it is possible to write them well before September. On the other hand, more information about the capabilities of ASICs is a necessary input to the design decisions needed for any such specs. Zcash Company engineers are unlikely to have time to reverse-engineer Bitmain hardware, just as a practical matter, so I suggest someone else does it.
I have seen posts saying the fork is more important…and posts saying overwinter is more important. I don’t think this topic lends itself to the actual truth though. From reading through them it seems both are important. The question should be how do you we get from where we are right now, to a point where we can accomplish both?
I think Sapling then a potential hard fork is the right course for now. There may only be a couple of batches of Z9 mini’s in the wild at that point and it still should be possible to do it. I think increasing the memory parameters would make the Z9 mini obsolete since it would be a huge change to go to 2.5 GB from the current memory usage. For the longer term though if Zcash were to go back to ASIC resistance they obviously have to ditch equihash and come up with a better PoW algorithm. I don’t believe they will go to a 100% ASIC resistance stance however. The best I think they would do is multi algo.
That’s exactly the point I was at. This is not a job for the development or engineering team. Much like my example for “IT Security”…it’s a separate role that is still vital to an organization and needs someone full-time dedicated to it who is not part of the development team.
Business Intelligence, Market Research, Business Analyst, Blockchain Analyst…whatever. Just someone separate dedicated to building out and monitoring KPIs and alerting when something comes up. That person is also responsible for a high level response plan to address the issue.
Also something to consider, this is something that in a small way every member of the organization should be doing a little bit of just to keep up to speed in the industry. Which makes it easy to think “oh we don’t need a dedicated person for that” but I assure you it’s night and day without vs. with one. Most of the top dozen coins (which I hope ZEC becomes soon) have a role like this in the organization.
Let’s take the current situation for example:
We have heard two weeks ago now that “someone plans to research something related to ASICs”. Were has this gone? Who is heading up that effort? What’s the next deliverable date on this project? Are there any goals of said research?
These are all things that the role I mentioned would be responsible for managing the response for.
I agree, this makes perfectly sense and in my opinon should be a must for a coin that wants to enter the top 10 someday and even more important, to stay there.
Seriously, while we all on various topics can discuss forth and back over weeks about whatever, it’s different when a real unbiased person does a research with analytics how what when impacts, influences, and so so.
I have seen in the gifthub channel that “foreign” projects at sponsored/helped, that’s ok, but in first place everything Zcash related should have priority, not? Positions like Market research, PR, IT security should indeed be filled inhouse or outsourced, whatever is better for Zcash.
But the plan and issue Tonic1080 mentioned makes perfectly sense and at least is worth thinking about it. I even think it would give Zcash additionally value and professionalism.
Bitcoin is Bitcoin, there won’t be soon another coin like Bitcoin, no other coin should compare itself to bitcoin. BTC has the advantage to be the first one, the most popular and so on … It’s a mega bonus it has.
