ZenCash / Equihash Algo / Antminer - useful and interesting blog information on developments

Credit to the ZenCash team for the sensible & understandable information they are putting out on developments.  The commitment to decentralisation is to be applauded & it seems to me the team is approaching the Antminer ASIC device for Equihas in a thoughtful and intelligent way.

The key piece of information for me was the following explain in the blog post that I shall link below. 

"Fortunately, the Equihash algorithm is flexible enough to make changes without a complete replacement, so changes can be made relatively quickly which do not require large software development efforts.

  The Equihash algorithm has parameters which affect the solution calculation, called the N and K parameters.  They affect the amount of time it takes for different combinations of processing power and memory, as well as the size of the solution.  The Zcash parameters that were selected before launch were N=200 and K=9.  After the launch of Zcash, cryptographers determined that values of 144 and 5 appeared to produce a smaller and more ASIC resistant solution. 

ASIC resistance in this case refers to requiring more memory, with the optimal amount of memory for the parameters 200,9 being about 512MB, with 144, 5 it is closer to 2.5GB. It is expensive to build memory into an ASIC miner, so higher memory optimized hashing algorithms tend to be more ASIC resistant. We can call this version of the Equihash algorithm Equihash-144-5 for differentiation."

The explain of the parameters and possibility of a relatively simple change that may address the threat is welcome and informative news.  I'd encourage anyone holding ZEN or interested in the coin to go and read the blog in full. 

https://blog.zencash.com/zencash-statement-on-potential-equihash-algorithm-change/

The development timeline and rationalisation of priorities just highlights what a great project this is, credit to the team.

Soundmoney.