Zencash Algorithm Change

Rolf Versluis (BlockOps) post a few days ago why is it important to make changes regarding current Zencash algorithm Equihash.

This was presented on a biweekly update on August the 8 2018, BlockOps makes it very clear why Governance protocol is so important to take such decisions it’s not just hard fork and call it a day, planification for this kind of changes need to be study very well to prevent mayor problems after the fork, because yes for this kind of implementation a hard fork would be require.

Since Equihash miners were announce on May difficulty has increase

Having a Governance protocol would make things easy since then node holders could vote and be inform of the community decision and sentiment about the required changes.
The main reason behind changes on the algorithm is that GPU miners are starting to find Equihash coins non profitable after ASICS came out this year, its not the same anymore and Zencash is not the Equihash pioneer, making this kind of changes is a bit of a risk since during the changes are applied the coin is expose to a 51% attack until the rest of the hash rate is redirected.

As BlockOps mention, quote
“ASIC resistance only means an algorithm has a lower amount of energy expenditure differential between hash rates mined by CPU, GPU, FPGA, and ASIC (for that algorithm). It is possible to temporarily become non-mineable by ASIC’s by changing to an algorithm that does not currently have ASIC miners available for it, but that is not ASIC resistance, it is only delaying the inevitable.”

It can’t be more clear than that, there are tons of coins clamming they are ASIC resistance when its actually not true at all, migrating to a new or different algorithm and truly making Zencash ASIC resistance that could attract a lot of GPU miners to the project that could consider directly invest on the project to run secure nodes that would secure the network and get more investors.

I’ll keep track to Zencash weekly updates to keep you posted.