Let’s talk about ASIC mining

Mining
558

Just as a follow up after reading some more recent replies, I think what @zooko is saying makes a lot of sense.

ASIC miners have single-use boards, which means they take a bigger risk and depend on Zcash succeeding. GPUs are mutli-purpose consumer graphics cards. They can be repurposed, sold or can mine something else.

A publicly available ASIC would be a benefit, where a privately-held ASIC would disproportionately distribute coins to a small few.

I think it actually makes sense to either change the mining parameters every N months - to prevent private ASICs, or to make a publicly available ASIC (Bitmain, whoever) that is open source and free-to-build for any ASIC manufacturer (many ASIC developers all competing for consumers).

It makes complete sense that GPU miners here would be afraid of having one less coin to mine. ASICs do very little to hurt mining decentralization as long as anyone can buy them. Zcash hashpower is already centralized under flypool, but that’s a different thread.

If ASICs are inevitable as many here think then we should get ahead of the problem, accept that they are real and see if they can be made widely available instead of private. Disclosure: I own a bunch of GPUs that would need to be repurposed so this change would hurt me as well, but it could be best long-term.

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559

In such a scheme, unless there is a PoW with strong ASIC resistance, there is no place for GPU miners.

You can buy a MyriadCoin ASIC miner here, for $2700 : http://www.baikalminer.com/product09.php

560

Here are some open-source designs for SHA256 mining.

Nice projects but the designs did not prove competitive. Bitmain is the market leader with its proprietary silicon.

What incentive is there for Bitmain, or anyone in their position, to open-source their design?

561

I don’t think this supposition holds.

While cryptography can help protect against the censorship and surveillance of individual transactions, it doesn’t help the system survive against total censorship i.e. blanket denial of service.

A blockchain where many independent decentralized miners can produce the next block, to keep the system functioning, is far healthier than a blockchain where only a single centralized miner can produce the next block.

A single centralized miner is vulnerable to third-party force and coercion, as well as short-term motivations (profit from short-selling) and resource challenges (power cuts). Surely it is anathema for a cryptocurrency to place so much trust in a single entity to not disrupt or destroy the system?

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562

Yes, I see your point. Interesting change that would block a known issue with Bitcoin miners.

563

Other groups are actively discussing this option as well. However, a point that has come up here and elsewhere is that task specific hardware CAN be regulated, while general purpose hardware cannot. This is a serious issue that cannot be ignored.

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564

There’s no incentive, It’s competition, if you don’t care about the coin itself.

The threat I’m thinking about is gang of fiat money distributors on coins like bitcoin. What if china, US and EU decided to heavily regulate miners. Which force the miners in there to get more information about transactions through another protocol. “Power Corrupts”, If that happens probably wallets too will integrate that protocol in their program.
You might say what’s the issue with that. That’s fungibility. There’s incentive for governments to keep fiat money fungible. But crypt-currency, We should protect it.

But if we have more distributed mining this threat will get weaker. Since there’s always war in this world and conflict of interest can save us.

Good news is all of these hardware have lifetime. So There’s still time to help decentralizing mining.

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565

right on target @bitcartel !

566

I was laying in bed when i thought of it, i know its probably a band aid and really isnt viable until “unsolicited” or previously unknown asics begin outperforming gpus or maybe not even at all
It would keep gpu mining relevant, as asics hashing strength grows, gpu difficulty would decrease to keep up
and doesn’t lock us out of changing that when gpus do eventually out-date (it is inevitable) (or is it?)
Just brainstorming
Edit- if anything it could just buy some time to maybe spread out the zcash developed Asic chip to as many other manufacturers as possible

567

Until now , I am not convinced of usefulness of asics at all to justify making two different algorithms . the arguments put forwards so far doesn’t even come close imo .

main arguments I see so far is
1 -censorship .
2- 51% attack

as for the first, current zcash netweork hash rate amounts to around 1 million gtx1080ti ! its not feasible to overcome such power . and i think we all expect this power to grow to more than double that in a year or less.
as for the 51% attack , common ! flypool already has more than that. We should be worrying million more time to address that issue if we are seriously talking about preventing the 51% attack.
those two arguments sounds to me as an excuse to allow asic rather than a legitimate concern.

if I will vote , I will go to only one POW and no asic whatsoever . ay least till many reputable companies enter this niche of a market . ie samsung,sony …etc . and are easy to get to the average Joe.

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568

These two arguments are not the only one for allowing ASIC. Upgrading massively distributed software’s specially the one that need all to update (hard fork) needs a lot of effort and takes very long time.

569

those are the only arguments put by zooko , I dont see others putting any additional arguments.
it will be more helpful if any one would put the pro arguments in a list .

570

I will give it a rest when people like yourself give it a rest. I would not have said another thing if someone (like yourself) had not said something else about me, such as, “…give it a rest.” If you and/or anyone else would simply “rest” from responses to me such as this, THEN I’ll give it a “rest.”

I have just as much right to defend myself against accusations as you or anyone else.

571

This is a very important point, that is not being discussed enough!!

Task specific and specialized hardware AKA ASIC’s, can very easily be regulated simply by placing them on a restricted and or regulated technology list, like International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), or an environmental regulation list. How about a large Carbon tax imposed on ASIC’s miners?

But wait! You say, cryptocurrency is not a weapon! Well neither are most ITAR controlled technologies. They are classified as “Dual Use”. So it does not need to be a weapon, it just need to be a security threat or could be used in a way that is. I don’t think I even need to make the environmental argument, everyone here should already know that ASIC’s are raising serious environmental concerns (correct or not, it does not matter, the deck is staked). Making the environmental argument stick will become even easier if multiple cryptos start going ASIC friendly.

China and India are already regulating Bitmain ASIC technology. Why do you think Bitmain moved to Switzerland and is also opening shop in Washington State in the US?

Zooko’s Zcash only ASIC is the worst of all. If all an ASIC can do is mine Zcash, and Zcash needs to be controlled, or is seen as a threat to the financial industry, or the environment. Then the ASIC will simply become regulated, no economic consequences, does not prevent innovation in any field, just imposes strict control on Zcash. Zooko just handed absolute centralized control over on a silver platter.

However, regulating general purpose hardware that has multiple uses in multiple industries is nearly impossible without severe economic consequences and crippling the innovation in those industries (AKA GPU & CPU). Who thinks any World Gov would risk their AI industry just to regulate crypto? Its much harder to regulate something that is a core technology in multiple fields, representing trillions of dollars in GDP.

ASIC’s In their current form can be regulated and can quickly lead to centralization. Until I can 3D print or otherwise fab an ASIC in my garage then it does not matter if its open source or not. I still don’t have open access to the ASIC, it can be regulated, game over.

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572

I have no problem with this PROVIDING the components/hardware required to do so is easily accessible to the average joy (like myself) and easy to build. If it’s something that requires a lot of soldering, that’s simply allowing BIG guys to come in (including BITMAIN) to make these to benefit themselves while squeezing out the small guy, like myself.

My farm is rather large (From home mining standards) at 400 Amps. I’m hoping to get to 600 or 800 Amp service in an external two story (16 feet x 32 feet) structure behind my house around this time next year. What you’re talking about could potentially squeeze out someone like myself if what was required for this idea of a new mining rig specifically for ZCash required a lot of soldering of components to get it done.

It would simply create more big guys while squeezing out small guys. Which means longer time frame for adoption of ZCash. Most adopters (at this point in time) is by miners. If most of them are squeezed out, there will be less adoption. That’s my opinion…

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573

There are companies in most developed countries doing board integration (you can hire them, it creates jobs near you). If the asic chip has designed and is open to order. Then you need to get the other pieces required which are not specific to crypto so should be available.

Though i don’t think cost for ordering chips from fab is something that one person can pay. Crowd-Funding can help at this.

I want to mention i read an article saying bitmain is selling their hardware nearly twice cost they pay to their suppliers for each miner.

ASIC’s are the most efficient hardware for searching for PoW. You can be at top if we have an open-source community to drive capital cost of manufacturing down while be competitive to propitiatory products, open-source projects can be used at enterprise level like linux.

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574

I could be wrong. I’m very optimistic. This is not a simple task.

I read about OpenCellular. Thought this is similar situation.

575

If a coin has two or more ways of mining it with equal # of blocks being solved by ASIC’s and GPU’s, I don’t see how ASIC’s have an advantage. Unfortunately, yes the Myriadcoin algorithm is now solvable by ASIC’s, but if a more ASIC proof algo like LYRE2REV2 was used, this wouldn’t be an issue. There must be a successful way to implement this strategy.

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576

There’s possible attacks to find who is mining. No matter what you use GPU or ASIC.
Miners are mining 24/7 with relatively fixed rate of power usage.

If we get to what you are describing. Probably It’s time to do political action.

577

The problem with “most efficient” solutions, is you end up adding more “efficient” miners to keep up with the difficulty/nethash, leading to just as much power usage you would have used with a less efficient strategy. Meaning we all are going to push our electricity use to the max, no matter how efficient a box is, to compete with everyone else. As someone has said, it really doesn’t take more than a few miners to actually process all the transactions on a blockchain. It’s not like we need this hashpower, we are just competing to solve blocks.

When LTC went ASIC, people still used as much power as they did when using their graphics cards, and didn’t really make any more money than they used to…it’s kind of a fallacy that more efficient miners are somehow better. They just replaced rigs with ASIC’s using just as much power total as their graphics rigs did.

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