Hi all. I am nowhere close to catching up on this thread!
I wanted to pop in here to point out that I’ve had multiple discussions with ZcashCo engineers about our POW, ASIC resistance, our users, governance, what Zcash is, and more.
The latest conversation was technical about potential changes to PoW. I don’t think we can reasonably develop a safe change to PoW prior to Sapling activation, and deploying Sapling safely is my primary priority.
Meanwhile, we already wanted to deploy equihash with a different parameter set which would make light-device validation of the block headers more efficient. I don’t know, at this time, if this would render existing Zcash ASIC products to become inefficient. We may try to schedule this in a post-Sapling upgrade anyway, regardless of the ASIC resistance issue.
I also want to voice my support for the “hobby GPU miners” who are into Zcash for Zcash’s sake, and not just because it’s the most profitable thing to mine at any particular moment. I want to keep those folks engaged as best as we can.
Don’t get too attached to GPU miners for Zcash though! If we want healthy decentralization, over the lifetime of Zcash the consensus system is sure to evolve radically. A prime example would be Proof-of-Stake if we became convinced a secure protocol exists that has the right properties.
Another thought I have about ASIC resistance is that there are two modes of thinking: one is about long-term steady state hypotheticals, and the other is about short term transient effects. In my opinion a lot of cryptocurrency design geeks overestimate “long term steady state” and underestimate “transient” effects. For example, a future with ASICS as commodity hardware with competition from multiple vendors and healthily low entrance barriers to that market could be awesome, if we get there. But we may never get there because the “transient” forces are strong and constantly shifting the landscape.
I agree that the short term transient situation is unfortunate when we have a single hardware manufacturer with a more efficient miner. Keep in mind though, we already have other (hopefully short-term transient) centralization problems: development skillset and funding, governance, and mining pool centralization all come to mind.
So I see mining decentralization is one front on multiple ongoing areas where we need to improve decentralization.