Let’s talk about ASIC mining

I like your last point - GPU mining bringing new people into crypto.

I suspect many here started with one GPU, basic tech skills and curiosity before their enthusiasm got out of control.

I don’t see it as a big problem as only 20% of ZEC is mined so far, so there are still 80% available for distribution on POS which will mostly be distributed more fair as currently with POW mining…
Just my opinion of course. I’am still a lot of experimenting and testing different POS setups …

A lot of people bought D3 for $3k+ cause it seemed so profitable till Bitmain produced ASICs with bigger total price than annual Dash emission. Right now I can see the same trend for Z9 and I think it’s important to prevent more purchases. The bigger problem in comparation to GPUs is that for each GPU bought network hashrate increases on this GPU hashrate: for each Z9 it may increase on 5-10 Z9s’ hashrates built for Bitmain in-company use. It’s unfair deal for customers.

Fair point and indeed it was like that in the past. Pretty sure Crypto mining has intrigued most possible miners allready that way, not left many that didn’t try it out.

The future, and even wider spreading now making it even more easy for interested people to get into crypto, is just installing a wallet, eventually even buying the coin from the wallet and let POS do the rest automaticlly. Every average joe and his grandma should be able to do this, even on a laptop or cell phone…

Actually it’s the main problem of PoS: richest get richer. It’s fair when we talk about real-world economy but it’s not good for crypto.
E.g we have 4000 PoS miners(some in pools) with 1000 ZEC stake each today one stake would gice (10*60/2.5)*24/4000=5760/4000=1,44 ZEC per day. With supply increase the “difficulty” increases so we should reinvest what we’ve mined. It’s not a problem at all if we believe in Zcash’s future. So we will continue geting 0.144% daily which is equal to 52,56% annually. Should I tell you why getting 52,56% stake increase is bad for coin economy?

Thats why i said with a tweaked POS setup. Currently i’am testing a lot of POS coins, all use different approaches. From a proportional share of your stake up to a fair share for time your wallet is oopen unrelated to the stake you have which makes it pretty fair to counter the rich get richer argument. POS isn’t just POS, at least that’s what i found out in testing about 10 POS coins so far.

POS leaves plenty of room for tweaking and different setups.

I have no idea on what your calculation is based on to be honest. How can you make a POS calculation for a coin that hasn’t a POS neither a project for it and even less a formula for it? How did you calculate that???

I’ve used current emission plan of Zcash: 10 ZEC per 2.5 minutes block till first halving. And using full PoS with same blockchain capabilities requires small number of big stakes: small stake will almost never get a block. And spreading coins on online coins - I can’t even imagine how to move Zcash on such spreading technically.

I agree with this…in the end market will tell …i am in crypto for 6 year…i remember LTC crasines when Bitcoin was already on ASIC LTC was still on GPU and everybody was crazy about LTC how it will be silver off Bitcoin …everybody mined LTC with even most pathetic cards,talking friends about it …but then ASIC happened to LTC and it started to go away from public interest and almost everybody stop talking about it.
Then comes ETH who promised what LTC failed to deliever…and everybody again start mining ETH and talking about it …and LTC is now almost failed China coin and ETH is far above any other alt coin.
Zcash was second most popular GPU coin (more people then Monero) but going to ASIC Zcash will be just one off 1000s ASIC coins and will be fail in the end.
Because you forget most important thing in business …and its MARKETING …and Zcash with GPU miners got free whole world marketing …1000s and 1000s and 1000s off youtube videos watched by millions and millions …there is no single my friend who did not heard about Zcash from me…and it was not Zcash developers who spread the word…it was GPU miners.
Going to ASIC community will be shrank by factor off at least 1000 times…and coin will slowly go to forgotten status.

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As said, you don’t take into account all possibilities of POS and all the diffrent setups. Just to mention some i think that are possible:

  • hardcap of stake high not rewarding more if higher to prevent big stake holders to expose the system.
  • time bases rewards. Stake holder get rewards on the time having the wallet open, this can include even empty/very small wallets to support the network. It could be a mix of time/staking high too.
  • it could also be used for voting, 1 wallet 1 vote or every 100 coins = 1 vote, whatever someone wants to setup.
  • it could be even like komodo, POS + notarious on another chain.
  • However, only these examples show that there are 1001 possible options on how to setup a POS and there is no need to have it as the current POW with rewards. Everything is possible with POS.

One more reason to go POS in short or mid term. As this would make it even more easy for the average joe to get familar with Zcash and spread the word on how easy it is to be part of Zcash.

Never forget, while for us all here mining, gpu, asic, whatever is a familar term, it’s not for the average joe at home or work with his laptop only! And just be sure there are more Laptops able to POS than mining rigs arounds!

Hardcap? Seriously?
Buying VPSs with dedicated IPs bypass it even if we use node-based wallet qualification not actual key-based.
Which is motivation for majority of nodes not to banlist minority of nodes just to get bigger reward?(they organise to pretend that that minority is offline)
If don’t have minimum cap and block finder, who will choose network state and based on what? It looks me vunerable to 51% of nodes attack. Each small wallet has vote and economical minority may win, which is not good. And if we use vote model instead of stake it makes share-holders co-operate to collect votes for blocks, which also tends to centralize.
If you show me coin, that changed it’s way from PoW to PoS with Zcash-like source it would make this conversation more objective.

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Actually i didn’t say it most run on nodes and again, there are 1001 options to setup POS to exactly what you need and want to do. Everything can be tweaked as you need it, even no need to go into detail here at this time.

You are too fixed on a given POS system/setup totally leaving out all possible options/setups/hybrids/whatever.

With POS you eleminate immediatly several points including centralization that currently are of concern:

  • Producer of Hardware: No special hardware is needed.
  • Mining Pools: No more concentration of hashpower on giving mining pools and 51% attac vectors.
  • Availability: Everybody has a cell phone, Laptop, whatever, availability really everywhere.
  • Cost: No extra cost at all. More people than now can use it without big investments.
  • Easyness: No special knowledge needed, again an argument for wider spread
  • Energy: Really energy friendly
  • Wallet use: More people will use wallets and less coins are held on exchanges if there is benefit to keep them in the wallets (minor importance).
  • more fair as now distribution of crypto currency. Right now the only thing we have is the bigger the investment the bigger the return favouring the biggest mining companies.
  • many more things, but no need to list them all.

With so many major improvements with POS someone can easy make a compromise here and there. I’am pretty sure that more and more projects, especially after the Ethereum POS, will realize the benefits of POS, expect the miners of course that have totally different interests, but that’s not what i’am talking/writing here and shouldn’t be a concern anyway.

Here we mostly discuss the future of Zcash mining and what developers, according to community feedback, should do. We also now that zooko and other devs are mostly conservative and prefer not to do something that is not properly tested. So that I’ve tried to find and explain the risks of possible Zcash PoSifcation. Even Ethereum’s hybrid PoS/PoW is in development and test during more than a year. And actually it will still be PoW but with something like “master signature”(not real name, just my paralel with masternodes) every 100 blocks as an additional layer of protection against 51% attack or so. Casper protocol would allow to decrease Ethereum emission without risks of low hashrate. But it’s devs are still loyal to GPU miners and decided not to fork just because of low ASIC advantage over GPUs. And I still believe that initial distribution backed with electricity but NOT additional hardware is better than buing coin to get more coins. For huge number of newbies it looks like Ponzi or so as well as buying ASICs. Using hardware part-time is much easier to try and understand it’s logic for unadopted. For Ethereum PoS means lower inflation(0,5%), for Zcash it’s impossible due to low current circulating supply. Right now PoW is UNEVITABLE evil but it would be less evil if it was GPU-driven due to marketing and decentralisation advantages. If you make users buy coins to get more coins their profit may be burnt by inflation(at least now) and it won’t give new users that may resist inflation by wider distribution and usage. E.g Uber offered free drives(with mile limits) to get installations on as much devices as possible and than users prefered to use it just because they saw it’s advantages. Giving “free” coins to home miners is not unfair coin distribution but fair pay for distribution among their society and GPU miners played huge role in Ethereum’s success and I hope they will be able to continue playing the same role in Zcash’s success.

we will see where everything goes. Having in mind that as today about 550 coins/projects use POS/Hybrid POs and most minor coins anyway would be more safe with POS than with whatever gpu/asic mining i’am pretty sure that from here things change the next 12 months pretty quick.
My best just goes on POS as i see more positives than negatives compared to POW mining and all these bad side effects it takes with it … but that’s just my opinion of course, future will show which direction Zcash will take mid/long term…

The only problem for PoS on Zcash I see is it’s age.

There is another problem.

It’s the Founders Reward. It’s meant to be 10% of the 21M ZEC of total miner rewards.

Notice the hidden assumption in there?
It assumes that all rewards will come from PoW mining…

In the worst case, If Zcash were to switch to PoS after 4 years,
then the Founders Reward will not be 10% of the total supply,
but effectively 20%.

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Why is this a problem? Maybe i miss something but i can not see a problem there. Where is the difference if it’s 2.5 Zcash from a POW block or a POS block? 10% are still 10%, what do i miss?

Making sure y’all see this, since I posted in the Foundation section of the forum: Request for Transparency From Mining Hardware Manufacturers

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True. But they can, and will, take it to the extreme to drive out their competition or push them into a corner. They have shown willingness to do this time and time again. Innosilicon will be no different, all that will happen is they will move up the release of the normal sized Zcash ASIC at probably $4-5K and beat them with volume, R&D, and market share. People like to point to the GPU and CPU companies and say…it’s no different then them. True, but not true at the same time. AMD and Nvidia, Intel and AMD all have Corporate HQ’s in the US, which means they have to play by US rules when it comes to business. Bitmain has no such encumbrances, they can pretty much do as they please. This in itself isn’t a “bad” thing. You just have to understand they have far more lateral movement to undercut and manipulate than any country tied to US rules would ever be allowed (read that as Anti-competitive laws).

In PoS, as long as all stake holders stake, everybody maintains the same share of the growing pie.

So the Founders stake of 2.1M ZEC after 4 years, will turn into 4.2M ZEC in the limit just by staking.

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true, i admit i didn’t think about that scenario. But again, just fictional, i’am pretty sure theire are ways to correct that, tweak it, adjust it, fit it, whatever. For example the dev staking reward could go 100% to the foundation just as an option.Pretty sure there would be a lot of ways to keep it fair.