ZCG funds should be allocated to create a robust Community Accountable Mining Initiative.
Concretely ~ $20_000_000.00 USD is a reasonable price tag.
This would align with the purpose of the ZCG in the following ways:
increase hash power and hence network security
align ZCAP members with miners, since they would be granted a vote share proportional to mining revenues
incentivize ZCAP participation
force ZCAP membership to be revised and audited
distribute mining capabilities to include a publicly accountable participant
In general I believe that more options are better.
This approach to the problem space proposes a novel solution to several difficult issues we now face. Rather than attempt to shoehorn obsolete processes into a new reality, we should adapt and innovate.
I have been brief and concrete in this proposal to catalyze argument, an essential ingredient in a healthy empirical process.
My guess is that both might increase the likelihood of a chain fork?
And of course a fork would decrease the hash-power dedicate to a particular instance of consensus. So that would work against the goal of increasing the security of the network.
You seem to be under an impression that miners decide about a fork, that’s not the case. They will not mine on a chain that cannot be cashed out.
Or to put it another way - there is a chain fork every time there is a consensus change as it is basically impossible to get everyone to update on time. It isn’t a problem, people update as soon as they realise that they have been wasting their hashrate.
For reference please research Bitcoin fork history from 2017 onwards.
Security of the network is proportional to the number of devices mining it, not to the total hashrate.
PoW that does not need a high upfront investment is much more secure because it is easier to find 100 people who can buy a 1k gamer PC than 1 person who will spend 10k on an ASIC miner.
Not sure how reasonable any of this is, but such money could also go towards Zcash community IaaS or self-hosted compute. Reasons:
Not all teams have access to, or can afford, Mythos or similar unrestricted models.
Regular, restricted models are useless for things such as adversarial review. Going forward, every PR in Zcash should be adversarially reviewed.
Compiling, testing, benchmarking, and formal proving (ideally of every commit) have become a computational bottleneck since machines can now iterate on code and tests orders of magnitude faster than humans.
Open, unrestricted models have become on par with the frontier restricted ones.
Instead of adjusting the block-reward proportions between miners, developers, zcash adoption pool, zcash community grants or retroactive coinholder voting, create a community mining collective. The revenue would be used to advance zcash adoption, development and research.
Initiatives with broad consensus and ecosystem-wide benefits can still be run through coinholder polling, but smaller grants, and adoption-focused grants can be funded by a smaller group of zcash advocates that is decoupled from investor & government influences
Advancing miner decentralization would also be a key goal here since the community mining pool needs to be able to resist government coercion, and must not be vulnerable to a single sheriff or grid-operator in Texas. One of the areas I want to think about more is how this would play out long term. A decentralized mining operation will inherently be lower margin, and the revenues of the mining operation would also go towards community projects, etc…
I like @Marek’s idea of generalizing this idea as well… decentralized community operated compute for internet freedom and privacy. Install AI compute, nym exit nodes, redundant backhaul, etc… Reduce the single points of failure in Zcash!
Thanks for running the numbers and sharing the data.
I was thinking about this last night.. and I think that a unique benefit of this proposal is the publication of miner information.
If ASICS were ousted in favor of low-cost decentralized mining that would certainly be significant, and at least to the first order, and in my opinion, positive.
But, that wouldn’t increase insight into miner behavior.. which has been problematic in the past.
I think that the Community, has specifically sought information from miners in the past (for mutual benefit) and had difficulty obtaining it. @aquietinvestor and/or @pacu could likely provide insight on this topic.
So, there are several problems.
One is that understanding miner intention is (a) valuable and (b) difficult.
Of course, this proposal would only provide a biased sample.. but a sample.. a sensor, nonetheless.
I am attempting to crib an argument from @fabacab here --^ .
I think framing it as “its easier to find 100 people with a 120v/20a outlet and a closet for a quiet computer than 1 person with 240v and a room that humans dont live in” is largely correct
You mean 110-120V as opposed to 220-240V? The latter is actually more common. Especially if you take population density into account. This makes it harder to find a market for low-voltage miners. But it’s not like they don’t exist.
