Its just good Chinese business practice
We think its bad
Confucius says otherwise
Edit - maybe instead of complaining about bitmain and you should pool all of your zcash together and start another chip company to compete, because that’s the problem right?
(Sorry that was rude)
Readed every post and it’s amazing how many things are just written without proof, just on rumors, and how aggresive some people are trying even to blackmail the Zcash devs/team. I will just comment some, not that it makes any change to the hardcore hardliner gpu miner protecting his business, but still, just for the for sportmanship 
About Asics being delivered used:
Everybody has heared that rumor so far but how many have evidience about it? So far i have purchased for my little mining farm 58 Asics and helped others to install about 100 and none was used. Most of them first batch. I won’t go as far as saying it did not happen, won’t happen, whatever. BUT it has not happened to me, 0% used Asics. Nothing important anyway, but as it was mentioned 20+ times in this topic …
About Asics mining secretly long time ahead:
While i’am pretty sure my own that some testing must be done and a given quantity is used in their mining farms i doubt it’s such a high percentage as often mentioned. All these data about the spikes after November 2017 perfectly fit into the everybody and his grandma bought gpu cards and began mining. Every coin community affected claims it’s the asics hiddenly secretly mining since november. Fine, but than i wonder where all these tens of millions of gpu are gone that have been bought mainly from november 2017 until today? Come one guys, we all know that the boom after November is the main responsibility for the difficulty increase. I’am not saying Asics are not involved as well, but never ever on such scale as the anti asics are trying to suggest.
Monero Example:
Many look up to Monero and i personally would be a bit more cautious about it. First of all not much time has past since their Asic-away hardfore. If somone says it was good for their gpu community, sure, but the XMR price does not way reflect the same. Looks even bearish since than. The price is not dicated my miners and their opinions, it’s dictated by investors and real case uses (again investors). Our mining holdings all together have nearly no impact on the coin price. It’s the big investors that have way more influence.
Ethically i personally do not like Monero, not because they moved away from Asic, that’s ok, but supporting/tolerating large criminal bot nets mining on hacked devices should not the way to go. Many seemed even to underestiminate the hashpower of these botnets because after the fork these huge botnets have been added to the so called “that was asic haspower” category. Some even say due insider information, that Monero regrets the hardfork nearly begging for more hashpower after the fork. It’s a rumor i have read and heared, but as everybody hear seem to like rumours and such, just another one.
Asics not profitable after some months:
Not sure where many got that info from, but even the D3 is still profitable, enough you are not in a country with high electricity costs and not forced immediatly to sell the coins in the correction phase Februar until April. Not even talking about the S9 which has huge Asic competion by now from many factories. A profit from 3 - 5 USD after electricity is ok for the not so greedy miners However, when someone buys a miner, no matter if gpu or asic, he should make his calculation upfront with his local energy costs, just normal. I know many miners from germany that sell asics and gpus on ebay, it’s not profitable for them with their high energy costs. Damn, if BTC goes just a bit higher even the very old S7 are still profitable. But in case they becom no more profitable, that’s the game. It’s not so much different than gpu’s or i wouldn’t see mass sales for the 2, 3 and 4GB cards as well, especially in the correction downtrend after january.
Competition within Asic:
There is competetion. The cryptonite miners have shown that allready with bitmain NOT being number 1, neither by release date, nor by hasrate nor by anything. Baikal the first that mined cryptonite followed by Innosilicon and just than the Antminers that are just now shipped. So you have 3 company competetion on this algo with bitmain the last and worst so far.
I’am personally all for competition, but sometimes someone has to face reality and that a given company is just better at something (saying that just generally!). Intel is one such example, Microsoft with Windows another one, and Nvidia the same. There are a lot more where a company gets some kind of monopol in it’s tech niche, and mostly with tech reason behind it Bitmain is the all over leader in Asics right now, no doubt, but than again, they produced and delivered most of their projects, just normally they are the leader for now. I do not know how the partner for the new Samsung chips is, but it’s possible that if the partner is another company that theire are good chances that bitmain will lose it’s leadership overnight. However, the point is that a company that goes first ahead and delivers a product that is good and used by main it just becomes the leader, not much anybody can do about that. I as well would like to see 10 equal Asic and gpu producers, but … it’s not the case right now. The chances for the Asic competition is even higher thinking about it as there is even no rising sun when it comes to GPU.
Loyality Asic/GPU:
Asics are allready by design more loyal to a given Algo, if they want or not, they can not jump to another Algo EVER. This makes them at least securing a given algo and network by design. And this IS a huge advantage for a given project on the given algo. I know, i doubt many of us admit the hop daily, if not hourly, with their GPU’'s from coin to coin and from algo from algo only interuppred by checking what to mine. 99% of the gpu miners give a sh…t about loyality, only thing that counts is the profit end of the day, be it being forced to pay for electricity, greed, high price gpus or roi for the mining rig, doesn’t much matter, because the effect is the same, hopping around. Even in this thread many said they switched allready, sold their coins, whatever, even not waiting for a final statement from Zcash. That’s the average Joe gpu miner …While you guys switch hourly i even con’t remember when i last changed an asic to another coin … I even will get so far as accusing many to be that agresive out of greed and fear to lose some income and being forced into a smaller and smaller getting gpu friendly mining algo with more and more competition by other gpu’s. No bad feelings, just pure human instinct with a good portion being hypocritical.
P.S.: Just remembered the monero/ethereum guys discussing after the fork. Both camps switched for and back trying out the new cryptonite algo after the away asic fork to see if it’s more profit now …So much about loyality, nearly not excisting with gpu miners that are able to mine EVERY algo and coin. At least the Asic is forced to stay eleminating the human desire to make more profit the next hour…
Technology:
This Z9 is a big jump in crypto technology. Making a devicce that is 7x cheaper, mines 10x more and uses 10x less electricity is new technology and better technology. If Nvidia tomorrow releases a gpu with 50W and 20.000 sol it would be even more advanced but it won’t be happen as a gpu is not designed for a mining job while this Z9 is designed to do just this. Mining equiqhash at low cost, low price and with a high hashrate. I know, many will try to turn it around, saying it’s nothing special, junk, whatever, just the reaction to seeing that their gpu can NOT compete with it and there is no logic it should from a technical point of view. A common device/utility can NEVER compete with a special made device, easy as that.
Investements:
Sure, everybody made investments after we mine, no matter who with Asics, who with GPU or cpu or android. But everybody in our mining business is well aware that time, rules, everything changes in lightspeed. Hence the very good slogan “do not invest more than you are willing to lose”. I begun mining even with a new high end cpu i bought than back, realized fast that a gpu is superior to the cpu and begun mining with gpu’s, just to realize that special asics are superior to gpu. Seriously, since december 2017 i daily ask myself if i should not build another 12 rigs with 1080ti and i had planned and even bought some of the parts allready. And each time i come to the conclusion that not only the cards are way overpriced the last months but that it makes no sense. Each time an asic gets released gpu mining gets tougher and tougher and there is nothing that can stop asics getting into most algos one by one. Impossible. The result is just that more and more gpu’s are being forced into less and less algos and coins by more and more gpu’s resulting again in way higher difficulty and less profit. While gpu had, has and should have it’s place in crypto the aera of being superior is over and this was visible long time ago. Even the lack of availability of gpu’s the last months has driven a lot of miners to investing into asics or switching from gpu’s away. Many of my gpu friends even sold their whole hardware, no, not for asics, but just to quiet mining and investing direclty into crypto without mining feeling that the armed race is going to be too tough for them. This said i just want to say that whenever new hardware comes out, the previous one is fuc…ed up, part of the game we are all aware about.
Pretty sure the next hit for gpu’s and asics will be FPGA’s which will the most superior hardware being able to mine everything with a high hashrate at low electricity. Nothing can beat that combination soon, that’s it. Until that Asic is superior on a given algo when it comes to efficiency. Nobody can stop technology.
I’am even pretty sure someone some day will come up with some kind of adpopter/catalysator/convertor (no idea how to name it correctly) for Asics, in the meaning that a given algo/blockchain gets convertered temporary, mined, and converted back to the desired algo/blockchain … We will see…
Wishes for Zcash:
I personally wish Zcash all the best, no matter what the decision will be. Hopefully they will make the correct decision having the best of the project in mind. This coin has good potential in any aspect and only the success of the project matters. Without sucess and developement of the project it doesn’t matter if it’s mined by gpu, asic, whatever, it will go down like 90% of the coins.
Good luck!
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Put it to a vote and let it all play out. My guess is that the GPU miners will dump all their zec before it goes to zero and move onto another coin anyways. Don’t fool yourselves… Each and every miner will look out for themselves first at the end of the day, GPU or otherwise. Think hard on that fact when you make your decision. Ain’t nobody going to fall on their sword for the coin at the end of the day, not when there are thousands to choose from.
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How do you make sure that they were new? Miners are not the containers but instead they are the chips inside. Did you check the components inside?
You are also missing very important point. The dropped hash power out of monero network is 600Mhs which is worth almost 2 millions of high end servers or 10 millions of mid/low end servers. Are you saying that there were 5 ~ 10 million botnets running for monero only?
That is really some thing huge to go unnoticed. Anyway then we should expect they are updating currently to follow the forked chain and monero hashrate will start to go up 5 folds like before.
Also are you trying to say that bitmain was not trying to making any miners for the ASIC resistant coins for almost one year then out of no where they designed, manufactured, batch tested and sold miners for cryptonight, ethash and equihash almost at the same time?
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Does anyone have any business information on these organizations i.e. are they resellers, white-label, IP licensees, contract manufacturers, funded by Bitmain etc?
Edit to add:
At the time of writing, upto ~60% Bitcoin hashrate distribution is related to Bitmain:
- 24.9% BTC.com - Owned by Bitmain - Bitcoin Miner Bitmain Acquires Data Startup Blocktrail - CoinDesk
- 14.6% AntPool.com - Bitmain’s original mining pool
- 10.3% ViaBTC.com - Funded by Bitmain (largest investor) https://www.ccn.com/viabtc-open-bitcoin-exchange-raising-200000-funding-led-bitmain/
- 9.8% BTC.TOP- Bitmain denies any equity relationship (but this is just one of a multitude of possible business arrangements): https://twitter.com/JihanWu/status/853669868696027136
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I read before that Halong CEO for example is a former employee at bitmain. I do not know about others.
But anyway looks like it is not by chance that all ASIC manufacturing are based in one country they must be somehow related. The only exception is Sia’s Obelisk maybe.
If Zcash turns their back on the GPU miners, after stating very clearly on day one that they would remain ASIC resistant…yeah I can see some of them dumping their coins. It would pretty much be a slap in the face and a kick on the back side while being shown the door for their efforts to support this network. I wouldn’t blame them even a little bit.
But if you think all miners would never put effort into a coin when it had no value then there wouldn’t be any coins except non mineable and POS coins. That obviously is not the case is it. Some have no value right now, or very little. I’m mining for some new promising projects now besides Zcash because I like what they are trying to do. There is no profit in it, just the potential of it being “something” someday. That’s good enough for me, and I’m not the only one. It may pan out…it may sputter and die away accomplishing nothing. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. And yes…it’s another coin that has straight up said NO to ASIC today, tomorrow, and hopefully forever.
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This thread is getting bigger and bigger and i doubt member of Zcash is going through all these comments its been lot of time and still no clear cut decision just make it clear, if you people decided to go with ASIC let us know because you know very well as soon as ASIC comes we will be worthless in this network so we need to plan according to that if you are still in decision phase make it clear that on this date you will be announcing to be with ASIC or not atleast do this fovour.
As final note once ASIC become available for Zcash and become established ZcashCo team will never be able to change POW again without heavy resistance. GPU can be reprogrammed to use new and updated POW do not lock Zcash into these scheme.
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We will not allow that to happen.
ASIC-resistance is central to our mission. Bitcoin Gold, BTG, was conceived while watching the struggle between ASIC miners and the rest of the Bitcoin community. The fundamental reason for BTG’s creation was to help wrest back the crypto space from the relentlessly monopolizing tendencies of ASIC mining. How? By returning mining power to commodity hardware that is more universally accessible to people around the world: GPUs, or “graphics cards,” which nearly anyone can acquire and use.
This idea lives on in the original “code name’ for the project – BTCGPU – which is still the name of our GitHub code repository: BTCGPU.
We chose the PoW (“Proof of Work”) algorithm Equihash for the launch of BTG – an algorithm that Zcash first worked to develop and implement – because it was designed with the express intent of achieving a high degree of ASIC-resistance. The retail emergence of an Equihash-specific miner demonstrates that Equihash, as implemented today, is not as ASIC-resistant as necessary.
The Bitcoin Gold dev team is now working to fix this.
We’ve been planning to do this for some time – either by modifying how the Equihash algorithm is implemented, or by changing to an entirely different algorithm. Perhaps we’ll do each, over time.
The Monero team recently demonstrated that this works. When a Monero-mining ASIC was being released by Bitmain in March, the Monero developers changed their code to make those miners ineffective. We applaud their actions – and their success!
We’ll be releasing an upgrade to Bitcoin Gold in cooperation with the many partners in our ecosystem – including not just our own open-source projects, but also working with the developers of third-party wallets, mining pools, mining software, exchanges, various businesses relying on running full nodes… we’re even working with ASIC researchers who are assisting us in understanding the problems and how to best address them. Our solutions and code will be, as always, free and open-source to the crypto community at large. We’ll be releasing a more detailed plan in the coming weeks, providing plenty of advance notice so that none of our partners are taken by surprise.
The goal is to have no (or minimal) impact on the users and current GPU-based miners of BTG, apart from the need to upgrade certain software. We believe the BTG ecosystem will be ready to switch over to the upgraded version in approximately two months, and there is no expectation that this will result in an unintentional stray blockchain fork or alternate version of BTG.
We know this may not be a “one and done” solution. Our upgrade will make the current crop of miners useless for mining BTG, but this does not prevent them (or others) from trying again. Like the Monero team, the Bitcoin Gold Organization is committed to repeating this process as necessary. (The Monero approach is currently to plan a change of algorithm every six months. Our current plan is to make changes as the need appears.)
In time, anyone buying BTG-specific miners will learn that their investment is always lost, and the producers of this hardware will see that huge spending to develop custom hardware doesn’t lead to the profits they’re hoping to grab.
We’ll ensure that the ability to mine BTG is always available to anyone with access to a GPU – staying true to our mission, and keeping our promise to the BTG Community.
Carrying the torch forward, we are
The Bitcoin Gold Organization
When is the time Zcash will do something???
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Interesting. Do you know for how long Equihash miners have been used privately?
how many people can access Antminer Z9 mini and mining
so Bitmain ships to China? Taiwan? Hong Kong? Macau?
NO THEY DON’T … SO THEY ARE NOT AVAILABLE FOR EVERYONE TO BUY
decisions, decisions, decisions… which exchange will I send my ZEC to today?
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obviously not me, ASIC been years away for each my place , too much to pass to get one and a lot of fee to pay. zcash letting ASIC to take over will kick ke out for good from zcash even if i want to switch my gpu to ASIC, but the fact how bitmain operates all this time , i won’t bother trying to buy, it is double pain for me with huge risk for small benefit.
For me, mining supposed to le teveryone easy to access. Is not everyone can afford ASIC miner to do mining.
Are you really thinking it’s impossible to ship z9 to whole world:joy:?
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hahah good point…
not impossible, but it will take years until we can compare it with how easy GPU can be reached.fully accepting ASIC now will be still equal to kick majority of the miner
z9 mini… Buy or not buy? give us the answer ZOOKO 
@zooko you will lose a lot of supporters if you do not go through with forking away the ASICs. your loss is going to be much more than your gain… think about it. you have already lost a great deal of peoples trust… you dont want lo lose more… you need to get the community back together… not divide it further apart.
be the hero that people want, not a villain.
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