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X11 info on website is outdated

cibrigue

New member
The statement about X11 on the website (https://www.dash.org/x11/) is outdated, because there are X11 ASIC miners on the market for more than a year, as far as I know. I think the "ASICs will be much more difficult to make for these algorithms and should take years." sentence is misleading, and should be corrected or removed.

I know that it is a terribly difficult question, but do you think Dash will change its hashing algorithm in the near future in order to protect itself from miner centralization? Bitcoin is paying now a high price for letting it happen. On the other hand I know that miners need some protection on their investment too.

Do you have any protocol worked out in case you decide to change, or is it totally off the table?
 
The statement about X11 on the website (https://www.dash.org/x11/) is outdated, because there are X11 ASIC miners on the market for more than a year, as far as I know. I think the "ASICs will be much more difficult to make for these algorithms and should take years." sentence is misleading, and should be corrected or removed.

I know that it is a terribly difficult question, but do you think Dash will change its hashing algorithm in the near future in order to protect itself from miner centralization? Bitcoin is paying now a high price for letting it happen. On the other hand I know that miners need some protection on their investment too.

Do you have any protocol worked out in case you decide to change, or is it totally off the table?


This is the 'old' webpage !
good find
tx
 
There were some ideas about collateralized mining but so far we haven't developed any of them - there is simply no need to yet.
Our mining is nicely distributed imo https://chainz.cryptoid.info/dash/#!extraction and majority of miners/pools always comply and do their best to upgrade their software and/or protocol asap when needed (at least that was the case so far). There is ~5% of mining power in every migration which does not comply but that never was a big problem. Changing hashing algo and pissing off legit complying miners/pools who invested a lot in securing our network and help Dash to grow is not a very good idea imo.
 
I agree, the mining distribution looks healthy and I also think that having a good relationship with a complying miners is a must. They contribute to the Dash network just like the masternode owners and all the users.

I'm just watching the Bitcoin Core vs Unlimited debate, and I wondered if you have plans to avoid the scenario what they are facing now. X11 ASICs are coming and they will get even better soon, making the CPU/GPU mining obsolete (I'm not a miner, we probably passed that point already). If that happens we can say that at least some kind of centralization will begin, which is - I think we all (users, masternodes, miners, developers) agree - not good.

I could understand the miners to became angry if the hashing was changed in a month or so, but what if the switch from X11 was announced well before it happens? Miners need to be able to calculate risk and potential return on their investment, but they probably don't expect to run their hardware for more then a year anyway.

I'm not trying to be clever here, I know that you guys are thinking a lot about this as well, and I'm still a Dash newbie, I'm just curious and I also would like to be able to estimate my risks.

Thank you for your amazing work and I'm honestly rooting for Dash!
 
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I'm just watching the Bitcoin Core vs Unlimited debate, and I wondered if you have plans to avoid the scenario what they are facing now.
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The issue there is not miners imo, miners are highly incentivized in Bitcoin success, they invested a lot, imo the issue is:
1. there is a dominant dev team developing protocol which they do not use themselves (you can find few debates between some of them and Roger Ver where they admit that they use Bitcoin occasionally, like once a month or so)
2.a there is no way for network to fire such devs because they are not paid by the network, they are paid by MIT, Blockstream etc.
2.b there is no way for coin holders to provably vote and show their support to one or another solution - twitter or forum polls, or even node count are meaningless
We, as a Core Team, are payed from the blockchain and we have clear indication of support, so basically all tools to resolve the issue are in place already.

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X11 ASICs are coming and they will get even better soon, making the CPU/GPU mining obsolete (I'm not a miner, we probably passed that point already). If that happens we can say that at least some kind of centralization will begin, which is - I think we all (users, masternodes, miners, developers) agree - not good.
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GPUs are no longer competitive https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/hashrate-dash.html
This "small" bump in May 2014 was CPUs->GPUs switch and it's been mostly flat till mid 2016 when ASICs entered the game, hashreate growth didn't stop since then.
There are some potential trade offs in GPUs -> ASICs transition like not everyone who have bought GPU would bought ASIC (i.e. less people are mining) but there are also nice benefits like 1. ASICs are useless for anything else i.e. miners are much more incentivized to keep network healthy. 2. network can't be attacked by CPU/GPU-botnets anymore and you get this feature "for free".
Also, I tend to agree with Andreas M. Antonopoulos on mining centralization in China topic - it is not going to last long, it's only can be sustained while ASICs are on their way to current microprocessor tech limit, so it's more profitable to mine right where you produce them asap because at the time they arrive somewhere else they are already outdated. Once ASICs catch up, it should become more profitable to ship ASICs instead of mining, so this factor of centralization should slowly go away too.

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I could understand the miners to became angry if the hashing was changed in a month or so, but what if the switch from X11 was announced well before it happens? Miners need to be able to calculate risk and potential return on their investment, but they probably don't expect to run their hardware for more then a year anyway.
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That's a good point, we definitely don't want to jump the gun here.
 
Oh, sorry for the late reply, somehow I missed the e-mail indicating that you replied!

Thanks a lot for the very detailed answer, it makes sense, and I learned a lot from it.

Keep up the good work!
 
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