There seems be a concerted effort at ASIC fear mongering and keeping GPU profits rolling in at insane levels.
Either give us +1 rewards or kick out ASIC. That seems to be the motive. Pure greed.
But leaving motivations/feelings aside, about the 51% attack FUD:
Has anyone built a complete scenario of how a 51% attack on a majority hashrate coin would be launched?
Doing it on ETC, or like, for which a magnitude more hash than their total hash is available on rent is one one thing. But claiming the same for ETH, with only a fraction of hash readily available on rent is another.
It is not feasible.
As I said earlier, during large parts of the last bear run, you could theoretically 51% ETH with less than $100k per hour. At times it was less than $30k per hour. NOTHING HAPPENED.
Because if you build the scenario for ETH, you will realize that it will not be successful.
Please leave the wild conspiracy theories off the board. The statistics on the public crowdsale and set asides are all publicly available and you can verify the total supply of Ethereum by running any full node and issuing a few RPC calls.
âGreedâ is an important factor in keeping blockchains secure. Incentives matter.
There werenât efficient ASICâs available in the last bear. This time not only are there efficient ASICâs, incentives have kept them from retail; its more profitable to mine with them than sell them.
Its Incentive driven when you play by the rules and work on your own efficiency in mining.
Its Greed is when you are actively trying to punch the competition in the face by FUD.
The Inno A10 ASIC has been widely available, for anyone to buy, since late 2019. And for most of the time it was selling for less $2500. Easily accessible, financially, to anyone who was considering building GPU rigs. I never heard anyone claiming centralization because of that.
The efficiency of latest A10 Pro 720m (late 2020) units is almost same as earlier A10 units. Nothing much changed.
Youâre figures are not disputed - historical facts are etched in stone. The environment in the past does project a level of confidence that nothing in fact will occur, if the start to retrace, mining traditionally follows that appropriately. My raise of consern now is highlighted in the Medium article. If the entire market retraces appropriately, no real creditable threat unless an obvious one was placed on NiceHash with some crazy buy order, I think everyone would be able to see that and act appropriately (hopefully)
The core of the concern rest on the size the mining industry has grown to around Ethereum and a change that adjust the dynamics on how things operate on a fee structure could have a unintended consequence on incentive structures. A lot of this is in the delivery as much as it is in an example of how technical debt has came back to bite everyone. IF 1559 was implemented before the DeFi hype, the total size of eth participation would of been held back some. As a miner, this is a conflicting situation, as a user I absolutely hate high fees, as a DeFi participant, it scares me we are getting into a range of uncertainty that this causes on the ecosystem as an investor going long on ETH I see the eventual pontential in the long run it will have for Ethâs Price Discovery. Weighing all of those factors I can not ignore the risk the size of this potential mining power has when some scenarios play out, thatâs where the risk plays in for me. This EIP was designed to lessen that uncertiny with the security that keeps Ethâs network safe while tailing off emission toward PoS integration. The total emission over the time is the same over the 2 year period. If PoS is going to happen much sooner, then this is just a risk reduction proposal, but no doubt its going to get casted in the light of bad for the hodl clause.
Maybe nothing is done and it works out (high likely-hood). Maybe nothing is done and an entirely different issue such as mining pools revolting and mining empty blocks (possibility). Maybe nothing is done and a catastrophe happens (much less likely). As a participant itâs an uneasy situation. We will talk past each other on risk and take a hit on social credit no matter the outcome. Having a tool case of options on the table should not hurt anyone in this. MESS, DGW and other protections are options too.
The A10 wasnât a very efficient ASIC, the V10, A11, Phoenix and a few others that youâve likely never heard of are.
There are ASIC, FPGA and GPUâs being manufactured for mining that will never hit retail. The recent massive increase in hash is unlikely to be GPU and A10 alone yet that is all that is available to retail.
Semantics donât matter, call it what you want. If network participants act in an undesired manner, incentives are misaligned. Crying about it and finger pointing at naughty service providers isnât going to solve anything, incentivize the participants to act accordingly and they will.
I never saw any V10 on sale. Phoenix only came on sale in December, and barely available then. Doubt any of these has any volume for significant hash to talk about.
A11 efficiency is not much over A10, and immaterial at current earnings.
There was quite a few GPU based boxes which came out early this year. The major hash as of now would be A10+GPUs.
No you didnât see the V10 or several others on sale yet they exist and shipped December 2019. That is one of the points Iâm making.
If you had fixed function hardware as efficient as the V10 IN December of 2019 would it have been more profitable to partner with a couple of large farms or sell them retail?
Nope, thats the thing about secret hardware⌠itâs secret.
Iâve seen evidence that I cannot share without betraying trust but if you spend a few hours digging youâll likely find same. Start with ASIC brokers, theyâll have strong Chinese connections.
No evidence that I can share, secret means just that. I said nothing about dominance yet. Many like ASICâs and welcome them, even to ethereum, even this late in the PoW game, even on ethash. Is not FUD, is just information that you can independently verify if you care to.
You couldnât get a V10 in small batches and couldnât get them outside of China at all, same for much other privately funded fixed function and general purpose hardware and software, you would not have been offered.
Iâm confident that your connections can bring you up to speed on the V10 and more. There are also some public statements from Canaan on the conditions of its availability.
Hereâs last 3yrs hash-rate. From July 2019 to July 2020, the network is flat at 160TH:
So at what point were these ASICs deployed so that they became dominant?
If you are calming small secret batches, then that should not be a concern to anyone. Right?
Whenever there has been highly efficient hardware deployed, even secretly, the net hash for those coins has exploded. Nothing of that sort happened in ETH.
It is impossible to have a 50% hash drop if the reward is dropped 50%. This can only happen if every miner has a marginal cost = the the BR at the moment and we know it is not true. If say 50% miner turn off mining then the reward for the rest of 50% miner will double and be back to what it is today. And since miners are making good profit at the moment which mean more miners will then join mining again. In a worst case scenario I think hash rate may drop 20%
If EIP 1559 justifies increase in BR then the bear market where ETH price dropped 90% would have justified BR increase. We did not have to do that