IMO the people who are against ZCash's decision more than likely haven't read the ballot or don't understand what is going on.  Zcash isn't welcoming asics, they are simply saying they are not prioritizing switching the algo to resist them.  In fact I think the road they are going down will be interesting.  By 2020 they want to have their own thermodynamic efficient algo that they will post open hardware specifications for.  It would be like the Open Compute equivalent of an asic miner.  If we are also being honest with ourselves its not like the Z9 is some power-hogging contraption that sounds like a jet taking off.  This thing outperforms a 1080ti by 14x with virtually the same power usage. Not to mention its $850, not much different than the price of a gtx1080ti.  Out of all of the miners bitmain has made recently, I think this is the hardest one to argue against.

As for the founder's reward, say what you will but you only need to compare the price to the forked coin that removed the fee. $156 vs $7

How can you say they save zero power?  to get the same performance on 1080tis it would take 3 Kw.  The Z9 uses 300 w.  To get the same performance on Nvidia you would spend $10k just for the hardware, not to mention the rest of the components needed.

When you say a coin is crushed, what do you mean?  unprofitable to mine?  Really I think this is the major disconnect and why zcash has a committee to make decisions like this.  Most miners don't care about anything but profitability, which is natural.  But do you think the average bitcoin holder mines or cares about people making money from mining?  No.

As for the cheap power, there are other aspects such as space, heat, management, and noise. Even if electricity is free there will come a time when you run out of space, have issues with heat, and possibly worry about noise.

i don't see the point of ASICS saving power as well. Not bashing here but ASICS saving power i can't comprehend. People would just end up buying more asics and hash and in the end what you will have would be same or more power consumption with higher network hashrate and difficulty. Profit would simply readjust and be the same in times like this. ASICS in general i feel is sort of like a nuclear arms race.

The only time i see asics being a viable choice would be perhaps a portfolio diversification where you have x amount of GPU and require x amount of asics to balance your mining venture.

Also speculation:

Mineority charge $399 for Rx570 + 1 year of hosting. It's ~$30 USD in electricity to run it for a year at $0.03/kwh, 120W. Let's call it $50 USD to run a card all in, inclusive of wages, cooling, rent and other fixed costs divided by all GPUs.

At their scale, I assume they can get Rx570s for $150. And their cost is $150 + $50 to run it for 1 year. It's not too bad, they get 1 card free for themselves for every purchase. They get all the money upfront, no cash flow issues. They make money mining off the free gpu they get for each purchase. After some months, they pay off the facility upfront costs and stuff like mobo,psu, other pc components.

I spend an hour a week taking care of 300+ GPUs and 22 asics, almost all errors except hardware failure self recovers. They can surely do better, and 1 technician for every 10,000 GPUs should be sufficient. This is 1 salary to pay for every 10,000 gpus, 5000 which are mining for themselves.

It's only possible due to their massive scale. And if they are btc early adopters they are pretty stacked. It's all just fermi estimation, but they can do it. You won't be able to mine new coins as they pop up, but if you just don't switch coins often, mineority's package makes sense.

so youre gonna be selling pickaxes and shovels. not a bad strategy at all

Regarding GPU supply: Can Nvidia regulate third party producers to reduce how many GPUs they put out for sale? It feels like there should be ALOT of more GPUs out on the market, but there isnt. And the price is still higher then i would expect it to be in this climate.

I have a few  with a stick of ram and a celeron cpu I will pm you




https://i.imgur.com/hwDRGiF.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/pEzJ2nz.jpg

"I said that if zec does not collaspe  the asic miners will save no money."  Sorry but I'm not a mind reader.  This is a vague statement and could mean anything.  What do you mean collapse?  The price drops? 51% attack?  Collapse can mean many things.  "the asic miners will save no money."  Again, what does this mean?  I would think that if zec collapses they would be a up a creek too!

Whether you like ASICs or not is kind of a null point considering they are being produced regardless.  I understand the argument that people will just buy more and the same amount of electricity will be used regardless.  This argument ignores all of the drawbacks to asics though and only considers the benefits of high hashrate with lower power.  Keep in mind:

1.  ASICs cost significantly more than a GPU
2.  They can only mine one algorithm
3. They are useless for any other function.
4.  Warranty and support are dismal
5.  Their value is strictly tied to the coin(s) they can mine.

So you are really weighing versatility with lower performance vs no versatility with high performance.  For this reason alone, GPUs aren't going anywhere.  I'm not a green peace, save the earth type of person. i don't think ASICs are good because they save electricity.  But as someone who has worked in the technology sector for 15 years you can't discount a technology that is more efficient just because its different than what you own.  Half of these coins that are forking are nowhere close to the goals of their projects yet they are wasting resources to accommodate older, slower, and more power hungry devices.  And whats going to happen when nvidia releases their new cards?  Should we cripple the algorithms because now some people have faster, more efficient hardware?

And just as a disclaimer, I am 100% GPU.  I've owned 1 asic, the A3.  I owned it for 2 months, made $1000 and sold it for what I paid for it.  It was loud and hot, not for me.  Really the only reason I think the Z9 is so great is because its neither hot nor loud.  I am still not going to buy one though.