Not having 10k USD to spend on hardware that its value with depreciate in time, that only mines for one crypto (I find it risky after the GPU to asic story), that the yield will decrease over time since difficulty will increase over time, and 0,32EUR per kW as minimum price for electricity.
Iām pretty sure there is zero miners in this country, unlike some like to loose money.
This leads to geographic clusters of miners / centralization.
Small edit:
I can run a Tezos node and bake as any other big player (weāll both receive the same %age of what weāre ready to invest in (crypto investment should still be considered as quite risky).
I canāt mine for the above mentioned reasons.
I sold my old car at the same time as I bought ASICs. There was a quarantine and the car has not been used for 2 months. I tend to believe that itās all about faith and the level of risk that a person is ready to accept or not ready. I bought my new car on credit, because the level of unofficial inflation in Russia is not much less than the interest on the loan, but it is now cheaper than these two z15s. These are just patterns of behavior. Iām sure a lot of people on the forum have ASICs.
Many people underestimate the huge scale of investments in the cryptocurrency market through mining. Basically, the article is written about the negative impact on the price. I am absolutely convinced that the cryptocurrency market received the lionās share of investments not through direct purchases on exchanges, but through investments and burned electricity. All of these costs translate into value, whether you believe in the production pricing model or not. Iām just asking you to take a broader look at this industry. If you think that the cost price does not affect the price of a cryptocurrency in any way, then where do all these investments evaporate? How about the law of conservation of energy? Some of this is taken by miners as a return on investment, but not all of it.
Our discussion boils down to several components:
The developers see the discussion within the technical potential of the PoS.
Investors are thinking about personal gain in the form of ZEC (PoS allows you to accumulate more coins).
But I think more in the following vein: coins receive investments (that you believe in it or do not believe), but are transformed into its capitalization, or we will deprive ZEC of it.
For me, this is a dilemma about the nature of money. Is money an asset (gold bars), or is money a piece of paper endowed with the belief that it is an asset? Within our circle, we unconditionally endow Zcash with meaning, because we are already convinced of this. But does the big society believe in this? No and no again! We have not yet come to the point when Zcash is recognized as a valuable asset by a large circle of people. When you do not need to create capital investments so that the majority believe that it is money. Many people today mistakenly believe that Bitcoin is money, they believe that Ether is money. Just because they have a high price tag. I donāt believe it because these coins do not protect my privacy. I believe that ZŃash is money. And when we come to the phase when ZŃash will have a sufficient price, that most people will decide that it is also money (but with the correct properties of money), I will calmly take any choice of consensus.
Im trying to formulate a more critical response now that I got my disposition towards this clear in the open, I can be transparent about how I feel about proof of stake, as I was also a day 1 adopter of Black Coin back in 2014, which was the original proof of stake coin. Perhaps I will call on the blackcoin community to judge this decision from their angle.
Do any of you believe the climate science coming out of those who fear monger for the climate agenda?
Australiaās ocean levels are about what they were in the 80s from what I understand. To involve ourselves in the divided science that has been established at and since the Paris Accord, would be utterly foolish in all senses of development. We are trying to unite the world with privacy here, and this is absolutely the wrong dynamic for Zcash to involve itself with. The science community is so divided on the issue about carbon emissions, why even go down this route?
I would prefer to have this debate without bringing up the elephant in the room, which would also be a divisive fact as one of the worlds major GDP nation uses a awful lot of coal power and would be a more realistic concern, than a carbon footprint in general.
Many years ago I explored the Americas (North, South & Central) on a motorcycle, Alaska, Tierre Del Fuego, Amazon, all sorts of places over several years.
Some places Iāve revisited, glaciers & forests have gone, life is harsher and to generalise itās all going to shit.
Iām sure some reports get exaggerated & used as political levers (for both sides of the debate), but from changes Iāve seen weāre all gonna cook in a world of stupid.
So this is out of line with slow increase in average temperature since the ice age, or what exactly do you think is accelerated due specifically to carbon emissions?
Africa was underwater about 10,000 years ago, now its a dessert, just seeing dry land isnt science.
You can look at it any way you like - you asked if I believe thereās a problem & I do.
EDIT :-
Just for grins, yesterday we worked out that the energy used by The Pentagon to brew coffee was approx equal to mining 786 sols/s on Ycash (Equihash 192,7)
That assumes 2 cups per day for all employees, itās probably more during times of war.
To match the current network hashrate they would have to drink 27 cups a day, each, which would also dramatically increase the Alert Status.
Guys, I get that PoS is bound to bring up the climate change debate, but if you want to get really far into the weeds on the topic please make a new thread for it and Iāll link to it.
Iām trying to keep this from becoming the new āletās talk about ASICsā thread
So, how much work has already been done on this by the smart people at ECC, ZF etc?
It occurs to me that these sort of announcements are not made without thinking it through & having some sort of planā¦can we skip ahead & look at that ? Are there things we can review ?
We are in the very early stages of research on the specifics of how Zcash might transition to PoS and what a PoS implementation might ultimately look like. Weāve followed various PoS developments over time and I assume so have the folks at ZF, but I donāt speak for them of course.
I want to hear more from users of PoS chains and their experiences, as PoW users would choose the āsafeā side of supporting the tried & tested mining, even though there have been several major issues with PoW coins like reorgs, sudden hash rate drops, oscillations, ASIC unavailability, ASIC development centralization, mining centralization, etc.
Moving to PoS would not only decentralize the consensus from the mining pools, but attract several hundreds of validators as weāve seen in Avalanche & Cardano ecosystems. The new market of dev-ops and community driven governance is a whole new way to run blockchains VS the existing developer-miner-business-users cycle. And if Zcash is serious about adding basic smart contract capability something like Mina is spearheading, we need to start thinking towards improving the protocol spec with the competition in mind, or we risk becoming irrelevant in the this innovative industry of cryptocurrencies.
PoW miners will always have an alt to carry their business too, like ETC being revived after ETH progressed on ETH 2.0 staking initiatives.
The post of Zcash planning a switch to PoS stated that āWhile there are many who prefer PoW, I believe that PoS would make ZEC more valuable to more people! The benefits are great, and they far outweigh the drawbacks and risksā.
I completely support the bold decision of ECC/ZF to research and come up with a solid staking experience which will incentivize all existing holders to take part in the Zcash consensus, attract new users to accumulate & stake ZEC and make the Zcash chain very much efficient by leapfrogging and disconnecting with the bitcoin-core codebase to make a super fast zk-SNARKs backed money network possible.
Do you solo mine or join a pool? The mining pool centralization is an identified problem of PoW, even Satoshi did not expect the magnitude of ASIC pools that are set up today.
Congrats on longing the bottom and believing in the project. DPoS/Cardano supporter like Aleksandra also bought $10,000 worth ADA in March 2020 (couldnāt find her tweet) but the direct connection between globally diverse staking pool runners and delegators is an interesting phenomenon to witness. https://twitter.com/HukAleksandra/status/1392394381848629249
Letās wait and see the staking protocol that Zcash proposes, Iād like to see the possibility to stake & earn Shielded ZEC directly. One more point I like about staking is the direct action of buying/investing in the coin to stake VS buying the coin, then sending the coin to ASIC manufacturer for order+delivery and then mining the coin with the ASIC/electricity for a ROI with variable network conditions, hash rate, etc. which all feels un-necessary.
Note that some Staking Pool Validators/Operators have a concept of minimum stake/pledge, which is a substantial investment, and many such pools have stated that they will continue supporting the network till the last block has been mined.
I for one have mined on Dual core CPU, Radeon GPU, ModMiner Quad FPGA & ASICs fresh from Bitmain.
As a small scale miner, the math for me has almost always worked out to have gained more by buying the coin directly than mining it with a variable future ROI. e.g. As you mentioned in March 2020, if you had bought ZEC at $23 instead of ASICs, you would have had 434+ ZEC for $10,000. Now what would be the timeline for the 434 ZEC+ ROI with paying electricity & maintaining 24x7 operations? Staking decentralizes the block creation to several hundred validators VS < 50 mining pools, all whilst benefitting holders.
Keeping hobby mining aside, large scale mining has become highly specialized with multiple warehouse level deployments, publicly funded companies entering the space, complex future contracts lock in for securing profits, reselling mining hash to cloud miners, auto switching mining algorithms which sell one coin for another based on market rates, etc, all this disenfranchises majority of the holders and supporters of a coin as the large scale miners treat mining as a pure business. So if thereās a way the holders can contribute to the consensus and get rewarded, itās a win win for the Zcash ecosystem.
Note that Zcash will not be the first Staking based project, there are several projects formed after Zcash was created that have risen several times in market cap of ZEC like ADA, DOT, ALGO, etc.
There will always be large wallets in every cryptocurrency. The staking consensus can be designed in a way to provide similar ~% ROI for a 0.1 ZEC holder or a 100,000 ZEC holder. Additionally, the rules can be made such that the large holders will not be able to delegate their stake directly as a max delegation cap on mining rewards per pool can be set, so the % rewards go down if the delegation amount exceeds specific numbers. In Cardano, this has made large holders to delegate their stake across various small validators via multiple addresses which has further increased decentralization of block creation.
