Re: [ANN] Zcoin (XZC) - Implementing Zerocoin technology for financial privacy

We are aware of about 20-30% hashrate on some unaccounted pools. We knew this because when we were trying to notify our pools to hard fork, we couldn't find these guys.

Btw, we are aware of some of the concerns of miners that our hashrate is being dominated by botnets. Ocminer from Suprnova mentioned that previously there were some schools etc who complained to him and he identified them from many small hashrates. He does have a point.

I spoke to miningpoolhub on this and he mentioned that this could be CPU miners as well and he brought up that on other coins, there are single entities with much bigger hashing power as well.

So, both sides have valid points.

Regardless of this, MTP is now an absolute priority and coding is well underway. We will post updates as soon as they are available and a more accurate timeframe can be estimated but tentatively should be by the end of Q2 2018 and hence we won't be doing a another transition algorithm since it's not that far off.

We previously had some concerns of pool software as none of our coders are experienced pool coders but we believe that even if we have to launch with solo mining to start with and then organizing a bounty for an open sourced nomp or yiimp pool for MTP, this would be acceptable. A period of solo mining isn't bad and is true decentralization.

As I don't understand too much from the tech perspective, will MTP solve the botnet mining issue once and for all or are there also problems that might come up some time in the future?

As I understood MTP requires large amount of RAM ~10 Gb. Miner activity will affect behavior of average computer much more and thus will reveal itself. As expected botnet performance will be reduced.

So every mining rig would need 12 GB or so of RAM to be able to continue mining ZCoin? That's a hefty additional expense, particularly with DDR4 systems.

That means it does not only successfully prevent botnets from mining, but also negatively impacts all the average miners who have good intentions?

It may be. But miners have intention to do job for network unlike botnet computers which are just victims and tool in hands of botnet master.

Not so much.

"Reuben Yap 7 months ago

It depends on the parameters. The design goal is actually to allow MTP to go up to 10 gb of RAM while remaining lightweight to verify though the reference implementation is 2 gb."

Zcoin MTP video, only 2minutes 49 seconds to understand it.

https://youtu.be/DAJirQaBIzY

That seems to be an interesting solution, but I keep thinking of this always as a cat and mouse game. Like no solution is forever when it coms to technology. I can be totally mistaken because I am not a programmer, but maybe one day those who produce Asics find a way to counter this again? Could that happen?

They call them ASIC resistance algorithms. So they resist but are not ASIC proof. Because of the memory usage, it increases the cost to produce a machine hopefully making it less profitable for them to make it for this coin/algorithm. It should do a good job of identifying bots and help reduce those since the memory usage will hopefully alert the user that their computer is infected.

Other than that the mining difficulty is about to crack 29k, ouch.