[ZcF-general] Study: Detecting ASIC Miners in Zcash

[Sonya Mann]

Hi everybody! I'm cross-posting from our announcement blog post:
https://z.cash.foundation//blog/asic-equihash-study/

The Zcash Foundation asked University of Luxembourg researchers Alex
Biryukov and Daniel Feher to investigate the potential presence (now or in
the past) of ASIC miners in the Zcash and Equihash ecosystems. This is the
first step in addressing the commitments we made in our official statement
<https://z.cash.foundation//blog/statement-on-asics/> on the ASIC
resistance debate. Today we are jointly releasing the results; the full
report is available on their website
<https://cryptolux.org/images/e/ef/Zcash_Mining.pdf>.

Biryukov and Feher concluded, “In the short period of time of this study (2
weeks) we could put an upper bound on the ASIC/FPGA potential presence in
Equihash mining ecosystem as of end of May 2018 at 20 – 30% of total mining
operations,” based on GPU miner’s dev-fee estimates and the fraction of
above 8Ksol miners in the Equihash mining landscape. Dev fees are typically
2% voluntary fees that many of the GPU miners pay to the developers of the
most optimized GPU mining software.

To be clear, that means that *if* ASIC operations were active in the
Equihash ecosystem, they did not comprise more than 20 – 30% of total hash
power.

Biryukov and Feher continued, “Most of the mining power (95%) is
concentrated in pools so any large hidden ASIC/FPGA operation should be
present in one or several of the pools, moreover four pools concentrate
87.5% of the total mining power.”

The researchers made sure to include a caveat: “It is important to note
that our current methods can be ‘fooled’ by careful ASIC miner and the
methods are also not fine-grained enough to detect ASIC miner testing of
few % of the total hash-rate. This is a work for further research.”

We encourage you to read the study
<https://cryptolux.org/images/e/ef/Zcash_Mining.pdf> yourself, as well as
the ballots <https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/Elections/pulls> that will
be part of our upcoming governance process.

Sonya Mann
Communications Manager
Zcash Foundation
@sonyaellenmann <https://twitter.com/sonyaellenmann>