Let’s talk about ASIC mining

why this post got flagged?

Hi guys, decision is made, just simple accept or leave ZEC. I think the market/people will decide ZEC future soon.
I still hold 35 ZEC and waiting for sell it at $500, hope big boys like Bitmain and Inno… will dump it after releasing some batches

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How about we have a comprmoise:

Let’s support ASIC resistance while Zcash is young. Wide and fair distribution is a top concern right now because 80% of the coins have yet to be issued. Security, meanwhile, is a lower concern because very few people are using Zcash for business transactions yet. Most of the transactions on the network are from mining pools.

As Zcash matures, the benefits of a wide distribution will attenuate, since the unissued supply will become relatively smaller with time. Security might become more important, since Zcash will likely be used for more business transactions.

So how about we agree to ASIC resistance while Zcash is young and needs to prioritize wide distribution and then switch to ASICs (or PoS) when Zcash is more mature? I think setting the end of ASIC resistance to the first halving would be a natural choice.

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FWIW: Gordon is not a board member, and Zooko didn’t participate in the Community Governance Panel. Maybe @acityinohio can speak to whether Zooko would have been accepted if he had applied.

share proof or please consider your words before posting. Anyone can come in here and throw the same sentence, with no information to back this up: it’s words in the wind.

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GPUHoarder from Squirrels Research Labs has uncapped one of the 12 Bitmain BM1740 mining chips in a Z9 mini generously provided by greerso (Greerso) · GitHub

big

The chip has 8x8=64 blocks, with with each block featuring 96 half-stacks of what looks like SRAM. Each half-stack is estimated to contain192Kb, giving a total 144MB per chip, just enough for Equihash (200,9) with negligible solution loss.

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@zooko will you implement the Multi-Faction PoW idea?

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Where do you need more proof then that they choose initially very low memory parameters but sad in initial post that it will be only in the beginning but will rise it soon…but that rise NEVER happened…they stayed with parameters that heavily favor ASICs …just changing few memory parameters would make ASIC much more equal with GPU in efficiency but like i sad then never did it even promise it years ago …and its a trivial thing so only exponations is that is was their intention to favor ASIC.

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I still see no proof on what you are accusing.
You said

they always intended to go ASIC

based on what? Non optimal parameters that any given coin that forked could’ve as well changed?
You’re accusation are too far fetched and pure conspiracy theory.

EDIT:
Innosilicon A9 ZMaster sold out.

The next batch will come soon!

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Zooko Wilcox and Jack Grigg | Apr 15 2016
"WHAT’S NEXT?

The next step in our use of Equihash is to write an optimised implementation. Once that is done, we will reset the testnet with higher-memory parameters.

Further down the track, our goal is to have the Equihash solver optimised for running on smartphones. We hope that this will greatly aid the decentralization of mining — users could mine Zcash while their phones are plugged in and unused overnight!"

DID I WRITE THIS OR THEM ?

THIS WAS MORE THEN 2 YEAR AGO AND THEY STILL DID NOT USE HIGHER MEMORY PARAMETERS witch would make ASIC much much less efficient and on pair with GPYS…Bitmain Z9 actually use ancient prehistoric SDRAM for GPU memory.
So dont accuse me that is conspiracy theory when its obvious …or they did on purpose to favor ASIC or they are totally incompetent DEVS that cant change few parameters for years …you choose what is from that 2.

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Hehehe i think its Both :smiley:

I think he would have been (since his would have been one vote of ~70+). But he didn’t apply and I didn’t proactively reach out to him to be a part of it.

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Oh come on please stop with this,

Most of those are tokens, tokens that run on ethereum so how is that not proof of work…

PoW and PoS solve different problems. I don’t care about the problems with Proof of Stake, my day job requires me to care about Proof of Work. I will be writing this up as its own thread. but proof of work is to solve trust. At the moment banks, for example, use Hardware Security Modules (well lots of them) to have a provably fair ledger [1] they then use Datacryptors (think modern day enigma machines) to replicate this data to several secure facilities (mr robot, whilst a bit tacky, was kinda right in how things work, in the same way breaking bad was right about meth)

An example of a crypto currency use of a HSM is in Hal Finney’s hashcash. RIP Hal you are missed. where the blockchain was secured on an hsm and published its ledger. This is a direct predecessor to bitcoin.

All of this though leads to you having trust in the persons with the access to the HSM’s (believe me they are superman 3 style stuff) They are the 100% attack.

Satotshi solved this trust problem. this is normally what people mean when they say “blockchain technology” rather than cryptocurrency. I like to think that bitcoin itself was just an Proof of Concept for blockchain technology and satoshi just decided to show it as an example of disruptive technology by using “coins”. (yeah I know, I know.)

PoS does not address this problem.

[1] hashcash and reusable proofs of work. using an IBM HSM.
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/rpow/

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Thank you so much for posting this. I really appreciate it.

I have been looking for the original images, I cant seem to find them on his GitHub. Are there any board layout images that you know of?

Oh btw the link to his GitHub you put a : at the end so it 404’s - his website seems dead at the mo too.

Thanks,

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I have been looking for the original images

I took them from a private discord channel where GPUHoarder shared them.

Are there any board layout images that you know of?

Like this?

PS: I fixed the github link.

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Ah, I see. I can stop looking. :slight_smile:

thank you for sharing. I really hope they do a full teardown.

and the people who are waiting on this :D.

Hey @root. I remember you talking about how unsecured the network is when the gpu miners jump back and forth to different coins. Well I was on another forum and came across these guy’s talking about jumping from Zen to Zcash and back to Zen because of profit. Now there where at lease 10 different people talking about doing this.The best part to me was they all had several Z9 Mini Asic’s! So blaming it all on gpu miners when you have Z9 Mini’s out there doing it to!!! I even have guy’s in the same city I live doing coin jump with Z9 Mini’s.

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You can see this behavior clearly in the large increase in difficulty variance over the last 2 weeks or so. As I’ve said to @root before, ASIC adoption does not necessarily equal improved stability/security as he had claimed in other posts. Even ASIC operator have a choice to switch to another equihash coin if ZEC becomes undesirable.

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@chucky732 I agree this is happening with ASICs, but to a smaller degree than gpu miners. Hopefully these smaller coins will change their Equihash parameters, leaving ASICs with just Zcash to mine.