Let’s talk about ASIC mining

The worst of it we are stuck at two bad extremes now: the ones who blindly defend ASICs, the ones who blindly defend GPUs and worst of all, zooko, who spills blatant public posts without consulting his PR/marketing staff.

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I think there are very few actual ASIC defenders here.

There are some people here who either think they are smart by being contrarians or think they will make a few bucks by getting the first batch of whatever ASIC comes out. Those who actually buy ASICs will make less money in the end than if they bought GPU rigs and these coins stayed ASIC resistant.

If there is a fork to get rid of ASICs, I think the vast majority of the community will be happy. The issue, however, is that ASIC manufacturers are the ones with the money to influence the developers.

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May I ask what your paying per kWh?
$.80 seems… off.

I was using Whattomine with a difficulty of 12M.

700 h/s, 250 watts, 10 cents per kWh. Most hobby miners will be paying closer to 15 cents.

Doesn’t increasing the number of confirmations give exchanges time to blacklist coins mined on the blocks that were found during the 51% attacks so the attacker(s) can’t profit from it?

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Here’s the most interesting picture I found, courtesy of ZEN team member blockops on discord, with one of the four heatsinks on a board removed:

The Bitmain BM1740 is a single-chip Equihash miner, presumably with around 128 MB of memory. An open question is whether this is eDRAM or SRAM. This chip is very likely to work for (200,9) only.
A (144,5) miner would not be able to fit all required memory (over 1.6 GB) on-chip.

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An interesting signal is that Bitcoin Gold have already committed to (144, 5), their code is up on Github and they will have a testnet up soon. I presume Jack Liao (founder of BTG and LightningAsic) was able to get his hands on a unit before committing. https://bitcoingold.org/a-brief-update-on-the-pending-upgrade/

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Actually I’m fairly confident they could 51% Bitcoin if they wanted to right now, but there isn’t currently an incentive to do so. They personally control 30% (known) of the hashrate in their own farms. It has been estimated they control close to that amount by proxy via their pool. So technically they could do it, but that would be bad business sense as Bitcoin is a major cash cow for Bitmain.

Instead they have done “other” things like the empty block debacle last year that created quite the profitable mess for some.

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I think on this time hard fork to A(144,5) 704MB and ready for next hard fork in further future A(192,7) 4.2GB plan is better strategy.

Innosilicon also produce Z.

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Antminer Z9 mini, 1st Batch = 10 ksol/s, $1999 = 1 ksol, $199.9
Antminer Z9 mini, 2nd Batch = 10 ksol/s, $850 = 1 ksol, $85.0
ASICminer Equihash = 40 ksol/s, $15,200 = 1 ksol, $380
Innosilicon A9 ZMaster = 50 ksol/s, $10,000 = 1 ksol, $200

Now I can kind of see why BITMAIN halved the price of Z9 mini.

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I think a key element to your philosophy is incorrect and it’s one which your conclusions are dependent upon.

Centralization is not inevitable. (especially in proof of work)

I understand the thought process that would make one think this. But the same sort of argument would say “Democracy cannot last, people desire authority”…but here we are 250 year later going strong for reasons that the original critics could not have anticipated. I believe (and many other like me) the philosophy of a decentralized currency is the same.

Is it possible to create a perfect solution that will last the test of time? Absolutely not. Whatever that decentralized model is now, will need adjustments and improvements along the way to ensure it remains such. However, I can say with absolute certainty that of the current options available, PoW is the ONLY one that promotes the philosophy of decentralization (while it is far from perfect, it’s better than the alternatives). There has been a lot of writing done on Proof of Stake and that it actually promotes centralization. Hybrid systems are really just a different flavor of Proof of Work (hybrid is kind of misleading of a term for this).
A major issue with centralization and why it needs to be avoided, is that when it occurs it makes the impact of laws passed in the centralized areas far more significant. Much like we have seen with China’s actions against crypto in the last year.

Is the 51% problem actually an issue? Absolutely. It is probably the #1 problem that needs to be addressed with crypto right now. In five years we should be looking back and saying “remember when 51% attacks were an issue?”. But ultimately, I believe the solution for crypto falls somewhere with PoW.

I also understand where people like Vitalik Buterin are coming from with their philosophy and pushing PoS. However, I don’t think these people (those who really do know what they are talking about) aren’t actually promoting for cryptocurrency but something else entirely. Something more akin to an interchangeable security (and some countries have started treating them as such). This brings you back to the centralization and local laws problem.

Should all currencies be PoW? Nope. They inevitably will start phasing out one at a time for other systems (like PoS) but the trust and support of PoS systems will be dependent upon the strength and security of the few PoW networks that will effectively form the backbone of the market with all the hashing power directed at those few currencies. This will mean a dependency on those market leaders (much like we see with Bitcoin’s influence on the market today) by the other “subordinate” coins. The market leaders will each be rather unique from one another, likely by filling a specific niche (like privacy being one such niche).
I chose Zcash because I see it as one of those primary market leader coins. Right now, I couldn’t imagine the other privacy coins filling that niche. Dash doesn’t seem interested in focusing on privacy and Monero’s methodology of privatization will likely fail to keep privacy vs. quantum computing processors in the future.
ASIC’s and Bitmain aside, the main thing that would change my opinion of Zcash be THE privacy coin would be if it were changed to Proof of Stake.

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I’ve mentioned shortly.

“I think on this time hard fork to A(144,5) 704MB and ready for next hard fork in further future A(192,7) 4.2GB plan is better strategy.”

It means now Asic miner is so abrupt and miner provider’s are almost monopoly,
So, Now We need a time , for 1~2 years.

Finally, Zcash also move to PoW and POS hybrid mode or any newer fantastic consensus algorithm.
But, Now most of miner’s and other’s not ready to adapts newone.

Basically, make strategies for Preventing ASIC first way. until complete more good way of mining decentralization and miner provider decentralizations.

if PoW will go on, We never preventing ASIC or FPGA. but several provider’s on the market.
then GPU is migrated to ASIC / FPGA Slow slope. and It will prevent centralization of mining.

I think OpenSource / Open Specification , any who provider mining devices who run company sell miners.

But, Now, ASIC miner providing company is so dominant and Stiff change to GPU investors to failed to get reward for PoW blockchain security contributions.

So, I mean make a some time. until newer good ways comeout.

actually if the teams from all cryptonight coins combine work power and figure out a way to fork out the asic efficiently from their algo without harming the coin and the system itself they can in theory all fork at the same day .

this is profitability for your above mentioned 10 Asic D3s on 0.105USD per KW/h . Revenue is calculation before u pay electricity costs . 8.13 : 10 = 0.813 after electricity cost

Actually i don’t mine DASH with mine, but even than it wouldn’t be too bad by the way even if it’s DASH.

First of all i sell only once per year some of my coins, you know, December/January when prices are raising so the current daily 24 profit/lose calculations have no weight in my calculations.

For a more precise calculation we would need the price in 6 months of course as i keep ALL my coins. It’s risky and it could result in theory in a bigger lose even, or in a way bigger profit of course.

2 Sidenotes:

  • Dash by way isn’t the most profitable coin on X11, there are all over about 150 coins, projects on X11 and many are much more profitable than DASH which is somewhere in the midfield…

  • A new D3 costs right now 310 USD, with a coupon bought anwhere you get the price easy down to 200 USD, let’s say 300 USD with shipping, the D3 for someone with cheaper electricity woud still ROI in 1 year without exchange price raising… But no doubt, it’s none of the Asics i would nowadays buy again…

Not every coin is driven by a gpu community and some projects are just fine with Asic power. Not sure if the Electroneum devs not allready regret the fork, lol. 8th day without working network, not enough gpu miners, devs must purchase all the time hashpower from Nicehash to keep some blocks mining, bugs over bugs, not working wallets …

Why wouldn’t they pre-mine ? What stops them from doing it ? Morals? At the end of the day its business no ? Double , triple , x10 the profit depending on the price of the crypto . And if someone goes and says yea but if it was used its going to have dust . All they need is an air compressor and they can blow all the dust off the mining rigs inside and out then just box it and off to the new owner it goes as if it is brand new . It is possible the air compressor has enough power to remove the dust . If i can think of that why you think they cant think of that ? As i said at the end of the day its extra profit and the other thing almost all mining software has a developer fee . Do Asic miners have developer fee as well ? They could have so that still gives some money in bitmains hands after they pre mined and after they sell you a second hand without even blinking . The other thing is no one has gone deep enough knowledge of the asic miner than bitmain how do we know that there is not a trip switch or some code that they can use to kill half the power and do an attack if they want to with a current upcoming batch . How do you guys know how good and secured the protection will be with the ASIC Miners ? If they pre-mined and continue pre mining before distributing batches doesn’t that mean that they will be a major share holder at ZEC and with that become like bitcoin where only a few ppl in the community are calling the shots ? Lets see what the future holds for you guys . Oh and FYI if i get caught by the police and they are accusing me of something that i know i did but they don’t have a lot of proof to pin it on me i would pledge innocent as well . You know i am innocent until proven guilty . In the same spirit why would bitmain go and announce yes folks we pre mined on all of your hardware rejoice for getting second hand mining equipment which we made for 200 bucks but were gonna sell to you for 2000 because we can . No one in their right mind would go public and say that . That would be a major red flag for that company .

I really don’t see the point in this argument tbh.

We keep mentioning the resale value of a GPU. Are you going to be mentioning the 24/7 365 2 years running of your GPUs when you put them on ebay.

“10x 1080ti for sale used for dota2/pubg gaming only, I swear!!”

I don’t believe you.

GAMING RIG, only for the pros