900 René-Lévesque Blvd W, Montreal
Presented by the Zcash Foundation
Privacy: From A to Zcon
Why: This inaugural event aims to encourage collaboration of privacy projects inside and beyond the Zcash ecosystem in a focused setting and to scale future events as the community grows.
The large scale mining operations currently operating the Zcash blockchain are become subjective to a critical scalability issue pertaining to ASIC's. The equihash algorithm was originally designed to be ASIC's resistant, not proof. The time has come that the resistance has met a force superior to its integrity. Bitmain and Innosilicon both plan to continue developing scaling ASIC's technologies for the equihash algorithm. There is a 10-17x efficiency increase, based on sol/watt ratios, that will become a formidable presence in the mining infrastructure. Contrary to popular belief there was never an intention to keep Zcash ASIC's free, the choice of the word resistant couldnt be a more accurate description of the developers intentions.
There is a 6-9 month period of development on the sapling network upgrade that holds priority over the ASIC's resistance at the current point of the core codebase development. Notably having more time now that overwinter is out, a decision will need to be made before november to introduce upgrade ASIC's resistance on the network at the earliest time of March, and earliest is definitely March even with a full conclusive community consensus to acknowledge the problem immediately.
There is no reason a PoW modification for ASIC's resistance couldnt be implemented later for GPU miners to return to mining Zcash. That said a couple of interesting points were brought up pertaining to development cycles ASIC's manufacturers could introduce. 6 months is more than enough time to develop a new ASIC's chip, especially larger ones over 14nm, that would be easy to accomplished based on Zcash Foundations transparency model. The developers couldnt just slide in a secret update without 100% community consensus, which in reflection makes it futile to even begin to develop more ASIC's resistance as it would be a tedious IT maintenance commitment from all parties including exchanges that may drop the coin if every 6 months a very technical update is released.
ASIC's manufacturers can outpace the transparency model of the Zcash community.
I can not quote anyone by name, but I can share all information exchanged at the conference.
