Hi all
I’ve been reading this forum and other sources about ZCash and coudn’t find a DEFINITIVE answer to the question:
Will ZCash fork to be ASIC resistant?
In this forum I found that (generally) old timers are anti ASICs and newbies are pro ASICs.
The Devs seem to be divided and I couldn’t find a DEFINITIVE statement on this important subject.
There is an official statement from the Foundation from May 8 but the text left me in more doubt that before.
The closest I got to an answer was a video on YouTube were a guy says the decision was postponed until 1st quarter 2019.
Is this correct?
Any news I’m missing?
I don’t speak for Zcash Co., but the definitive answer to your question is no, there will be no fork for ASIC resistance.
There will likely be a fork in late 2020 or early 2021 to change the algorithm to a more power efficient PoW algorithm (not ASIC resistant, but would still brick current Equihash ASICs). Zooko has also indicated that a switch to PoS is also possible once Ethereum has successfully migrated to Casper, but that’s far from certain.
Translating to practical terms, looks like it’s safe to buy an ASIC. Two years is an eternity in this field and a bricked ASIC in 2020 will probably be a paid ASIC.
Of course a lot of other unforeseen situations will probably happen in two years…
As I understand a decision to fork or not would be made around Sapling activation but it would be 6+ month lead time to the next network upgrade. There is some more detail here which includes discussion from the ZCon0 mining workshop Zeroing In: Zcash Sets 2-Year Course for Better Crypto Privacy - CoinDesk
While it’s true that the current ASICs won’t get bricked anytime soon, it’s far from certain that these will see any ROI. I would personally suggest buying ZEC outright as you’ll almost certainly get more coins that way vs. what you’ll be able to mine once you account for increasing network difficulty, which will likely double in the next month with the next batch of ASICs being shipped. Speaking from experience as I’ve been a miner for years.
Thanks all the many links, I learned more about the inner workings of ZCash and mining in general by reading these links than on weeks of wondering around the net.
Again thanks @vgm for sharing your experience, I will take it in my future decisions
+1 on this statement. Batch 2 of the Bitmain Z9 mini get shipped in abouot 2 weeks, Innosilicon is shipping as well their units and at some times the Asicminer Equihash asics will be available as well soon (if it’s not a scam). So difficulty will raise for sure.
I personally do not buy anymore asics after batch 2, batch 1 and 2 are ok, but you take a higher risk as you often do not know if a given coin/token/project forks for asic-resistance.
Doesn’t mean that an equihash asic from batch 3 ( i guess that’s what you are looking at) can’t ROI, of course it can, but it’s a harder task and might take way longer.
I don’t have any Innosilicons, only Baikals and Bitmains. I have no idea if these Innosilicons get shipped immediatly and at what price. I remember some USD 5000 per unit, not?
I bought 1x Z9 mini from batch 1, and due the low price of USD 850 purchased some 3x more from Batch 2 as the price is low and at least for my business plans and experience it’s not worth investing more in POW anyway. But some units with USD 850 is something i can take as a risk, with USD 5000+ it’s a different story by now.
Have always in mind that when you look up the current profit from various calculators you will get mostly way less when the unit arrives and when YOU begin to mine with it. I personally calculate about 10% less per month from first batch to get at least an idea. Even more with 3 producers on equihash, which is more competiton than on some other algos, means more asics as well.
You dont see a problem with this? This is one of the big problems with ASICs, if you are not the first or second batch buyer, you will probly never see a ROI on the machine. Atleast with GPUs they dont release a new machine every 3 months thats 10x more effective then the last, forcing people to buy the new one or be left in the dust.
Why would I want to buy a ASIC right now if I just started mining, compared to a GPU that has other uses, and can mine more then 1 algo/coin. This does not make it easier for new miners to start mining.
So you are suggesting that a “new miner” would start off with a gpu rig?
ASIC are much more simple, stable and you don’t pay any dev fee+os fee.
A new miner would likely start with ASIC nowadays…
Personally I suggest 100x bitmain ASIC.
I’ve order some in two different batches: the first ones suck very bad and hash around 48 Kh/s (not overclocking these crappy machines) and don’t run as stable. Once every 2 or 3 days the system freezes but consumption stays @ 620W. I’ve informed them of the anomaly but they only suggest “faulty PSU”.
The cost/quality rate is terrible and with 3x Z9 mini cost less than half for the same hashrate (note: double power consumption).
Second batch was bit better hashrate (49-51) but still freeze every once in while (i’ve also updated to latest firmware but no bueno).
Also on some machines I get 1% rejected shares (around 14).
My z9 mini’s all run stable, never crashed and always 0 invalid shares.
Wow way to miss the point. I never said anyone was telling me to do so, it was a statement saying what are the advantages over a GPU, Considering if you dont get a batch 1 or 2 order, your ASIC may never ROI.
And yes its much simpler to start and try mining with a GPU. They can do it with the equipment they have and 10 mins of time. Not have to order a item from china, pay import fees, wait 2 months etc…
Home hardware (one or two GPUs) wouldn’t be enough to see any meaningful ROI so it’s more for the curious and not something the network should rely upon for security. For new users creating mutli-GPU rigs with risers, overclocking and temperature management software, the setup is much more complex compared to just plugging in and configuring an ASIC.
Also, I would say that expecting the current ASICs to work for the next two years might not be accurate, depending on parameter changes and if the ASIC can adapt to those changes if they happen before then, which is unknown. Buying an ASIC right now is a gamble at best.
Actually i see the problem better than most here (no matter if Asic or GPU), hence i’am a POS supporter as POW is that flawed that it’s doomed to fail soon or a bit later.
While some asics may ROI or not, a gpu doesn’t look better as you need about 2+ years for it reaching the ROI at best. Actually it might be whole longer as when i made my last calculation on the ETH the price was double, so it’s possible it’s right now in the 3 years range at current prices.
While you debatte which of the worst is most worst i just realized that neither will be anymore profitable or successfull, expect for a short period like the Z9 mini, X3 and others like the B3 failed even 1 week after release, lol.
Hardware that has other uses, so its not all about ROI for them. Also if it makes any money back compared to zero its a profit. ASIC has 1 purpose, to ROI or not. That is the point I am making. Atleast with a GPU if it does not ROI or stops making money, it can be resold, or used for other purposes like gaming. An ASIC turns into a doorstop if it stops being profitable.
Im curious, how do you do a POS system without a pre-mine, or releasing most the coins at once? How do you get a good distribution with POS system? How do you prevent the rich getting richer with them buying up 90% of the coins? Looking at EOS as an example…
Wealth inequality on the EOS network sees the top 1.6% of token holders controlling 90% of the supply while the bottom 44% have to make do with a mere 1% of EOS.
POS system to me just looks like another rich get richer scheme.
No idea where that doorstop for asics comes from but it seems it’s a myth forever. You have several options with an Asic that is no more profitable. Their are companies that buy them off for their AI facilities up to selling them as spare parts. However, as i don’t care about this it doesn’t matter to much, just strange that everybody thinks that at the time an asics gets no more profitable it has 0 value, that’s just worng, false and total missleading as it’s not the case.
About POS. Fine, you have choosen EOS as an example, in my opinion one of the worst POS projects anyway, Now i could choose as an counter argument a given gpu coin that is no longer profitable or just messed things up, but that would be too cheap to make things up with choosen examples that are the worst case.
Neither i personally like the EOS nor the ETH POS, as both are unfair in my opinion, but this doesn’t mean that all other 500 POS projects are unfair as well, right? There are mass POW coins with airdrops of thin air, premines for devs, whatever not unfair “setups”.
For premine there are a lot of options how to solve this. Beginning form Hybrid mining up to notarious mining like Kommondo and everything btw. that. So there are options for a good POS system how the premine is solved.
While for you it looks like the rich gets richer for me POW looks like the first that came made it, closed community, limited access to mining and whatever not.
Actually the rich gets richer applies to POW even better. When you had the finances some years back to buy 100 gpu’s you made a lot of coins (no matter which) while the poor or the guy without technical knowledge wasn’t even able to enter the biz. How is POW fairer when 1 guy was able to mine 100 BTC per week while now you can’t mine 1 BTC for 10 years, lol. There is and allways will be some gap btw. the poor and the rich, but POW isn’t the medicine to make that gap smaller, actually it does absolutly the opposite in my opinion or we wouldn’t have a very limited miner community but allready a staking POS wallet on PC, Laptop, mostly at some point even cellphone and in every household,
Mate, whatever, seriously, most devs allready realized that POS, hybrid, or a POS like invention will be the future, so whatever we discuss here, has minimal impact, as the whole asic discussion had and it’s again just about business protection, nothing less, nothing more to say it just straight. Feel free to call me right now an idiot but remember this post in 12 months and tell me again that your rigs are doing perfectly, as for sure they won’t
Edit: Something i forgot about the rich get richer: Right now as POW miners we are just doing these things:
Filling the bags of NVIDIA, AMD, these are even not crypto related. (gpu monopols)
Filling the bags of Bitmain and all the other producers (asic monopols)
Filling the bags of all these energy companies worldwide, we must be like a christmas present x1000 for them, lol. (energy monopols)
Filling the bags of the centralized exchanges (crypto exchange monopols)
Filling the bags of the handfull big mining pools (mining pool monopols)
add some more here, just too sleepy to continue this list, but you get the idea i hope…
Now compare this supporting pure monopols to your rich gets richer argument mate. For sure with POS i can avoid at least some of these and support directly and only the project i decide without wasting finances on expensive hardware, electricity, mining pools, whatever… But than again, if someone is protecting his POW business than he is fine with supporting monopolists anyway and my arguments don’t matter. In this case, like most times, pure hypocrisy at it’s best…
In no event must not to implement ASIC resistance! We have before our eyes the accumulated experience of BTC evolution. Only complexity of mining increase the costs of the coin, and hence pushes the value of the asset. Please analyze graphs of the cost of POS and POW coins, especially in the bear market. Overlay graphs of complexity and price of POW coins and you will see this. Today Zcash and BTC are practically unique coins whose difficultys is on a rise. ASIC it’s the key to success.
Of course, you may argue that the Zcash price is declining today despite a significant increase in mining complexity. But you can’t deny that most of the coins were issued at a significantly lower mining cost. And be sure that there are no such fools who would sell newly issued Zcash at current prices. The current price is a balance supply and demand at a specific moment and only.
View please relation Zcash for Monero after implemented the ASIC resistance on XMR and you make sure again that costs of issue are very important.
