hopefully zen doesnt get hurt by the asics through 51% attacks... a lot of good coins like zen and komodo are at risk now... these are great projects that don't deserve to get screwed over because of bitmains greed.

fact about root - he was only in it for the money - said so himself... sad they promote someone like that to moderator... heh.. i guess its a business so zec co and him have more in common with each other...

LOL

yeah root, he was a good guy, used to chat with him a lot, but he is very pro asic... and now he is a zcash mod... heh.. a sellout... he loves bitmain... and loves bcash... and loves roger ver pump and dump scammer... him and zooko have a lot in common...

anyways they can all go F themselves.. that forum died well over a year ago... its been worthless since the end of 2016... 

Huobi Pro is about to release a “Global Blockchain Industry Overview and Prospects” report for the Fiscal first quarter of 2018. The full report will be released at the Blockchain Festival in Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam between May 24th and 25th. I have a sneak peek of the report and would like to share what I consider to be the most interesting parts of the report. This is the second part of four overviews of this report.



   Our current form of economic activity depends on the public’s trust in centralized institutions such as banks and lawyers to process transactions and contracts for us.  These centralized parties introduce an added layers of security risk and cost to all of the transactions or contracts that we execute.  The digital economy is now seeing a paradigm shift away from centralization to trustless decentralization.  This trustless decentralization through blockchain goes through three levels of development according to Xiao Feng, vice president of Wanxiang Holdings, initiator of Wanxiang Blockchain Labs and General partner at Fenbushi Capital:

1.  The first stage of a blockchain is the creation of a distributed communications network for peer to peer communications and transmissions in order to facilitate the exchange of information.  The internet has spawned many distributed communications networks for file sharing such as Napster, and as the internet grew, the idea of Napster evolved in to what we now know as BitTorrent.  

2. The second stage of a blockchain is the creation of a distributed ledger which records and synchronizes transactions through cryptography.  The distributed ledger is created by a set of rules which are defined by mathematical algorithms and coding which allows anyone anywhere to take part in the ledgers creation and eliminates the need for a third party to control the ledger.

3. The third stage of a blockchain is the decentralized and open economic ecosystem which gives incentives to the public to participate in value creation and sharing.  Public users are able to receive payment by completing tasks such as verifying the distibuted ledger though mining, staking, or by uploading content.  These examples give people incentive to be a part of the ecosystem in a similar was as if an employer was to pay them for work, however in the case of blockchain there is no central employer.  Blockchain technology has now evolved through those 3 stages of development.

This current state of blockchain technology now faces several bottleneck issues which need to be overcome in order to evolve further.  The three major issues that need to be addressed are scalability, privacy, and interoperability.  

Scalability is the most important and critical obstacle that must be overcome to obtain mass adoption of blockchain technology throughout the world.   Currently blockchains are unable to handle the transaction volume that is required for daily global use at the level that we are used to when we use centralized technologies such as credit cards.  VISA can currently handle up to 24,000 transactions per second, where the major cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum can only handle a tiny percentage of that throughput with Bitcoin achieving up to 3 to 4 transactions per second and Ethereum achieving over 20 transactions per second.  Both Bitcoin and Ethereum currently use Proof-Of-Work consensus algorithms which are very secure yet very inefficient in processing large amounts of transactions.  To process more transactions per second we are seeing a move away from Proof-Of-Work  consensus to Proof-of-Stake, Delegated Proof-of-Stake, and Byzantine Fault Tolerance.  



In addition to Proof-Of-Stake there are several other solutions to the scalability issue which are: side-chain/state-channel, sharding, sub-chain and layered structure:

1. Side-chain or state-channels can process multiple transactions off chain and then record one final transaction on-chain with the main chain acting as the final settlement layer.  Examples of side-chains in use or development today are the Lightning network for Bitcoin and the Raiden Network for Ethereum.

2. Sharding divides a blockchain network into many separate, independent areas, called “shards” which are each assigned to a small group of nodes.  There are generally two kinds of sharding, transaction sharding and state sharding.  Transaction sharding assigns different transactions to different shards to create a parallel processing of transactions.  State sharding is similar to transaction sharding but adds in cross-shard communication.

3. Sub-chain and layered structure allows for the separation of transactions and smart contracts. Traditionally transactions and smart contracts are all executed on the same node(s).  Cardano is currently attempting to build such a layered structure which divides the blockchain network into a “Control Layer” and “Settlement Layer”.  The settlement layer handles all transactions and the control layer runs smart contracts and decentralized applications.

The second major hurdle that blockchain technology needs to overcome is privacy.  Most of the current blockchains today provide pseudonymity, they do not directly show the users identity, yet the transactions and store of values are transparent and are open to anyone who wants to check the public ledger.  A few cryptocurrencies can maintain privacy, however they are currently only focused on financial transactions or payments and these technologies have yet to find their way in to more advanced blockchains that incorporate smart-contracts and decentralized applications.  The most popular privacy focused blockchains that we know today include Dash, Monero, Zcash and Verge which use CoinJoin, Ringsignatures, ZK-Snarks, and Invisible Internet Project respectively.



The third obstacle which needs to be overcome is interoperability, or cross-chain technology.  Blockchain systems can currently be divided in to private blockchains, consortium blockchains and public blockchains.  Private and consortium blockchains are more likely to be adopted by businesses and financial institutions, however: 1. digital assets can not be transferred between the three kinds of blockchains; 2. Public blockchains can not communicate with each other.   Some of the current proposed solutions for interoperability include: Notary Schemes (Ripple), Relay Technology (Cosmos and Polkadot), Side-chain Technology (Bitcoin’s Rootstock), Hash locking technology (Lightning Network and Raiden Network for Bitcoin and Ethereum Respectively).  The most well known example of cross-chain technology in use today is Atomic Swaps which have occurred between various blockchains over the Lightning Network.  Bitcoin and Litecoin have had successful cross-chain Atomic Swaps (trades).

The information that I have been given to share came from the fourth part of four parts of the “Global Blockchain Industry Overview and Prospects” by www.huobi.pro. The full report will be made available exclusively to attendees of the Blockchain festival Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam. If you would like to attend the festival you can obtain tickets for 50% off the cost with promotional code “WRITE50”. Please visit www.blockchainfestival.com to learn more and to get tickets. To trade new tokens you can visit www.hadax.com which is operated by Huobi Pro and is where newly listed tokens can be traded and voted on for listing.

http://bit.ly/2HGWw3x

   Huobi Pro is about to release a “Global Blockchain Industry Overview and Prospects" report for the Fiscal first quarter of 2018.  The full report will be released at the Blockchain Festival in Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam between May 24th and 25th.   I have a sneak peaek of the report and would like to share what I consider to be the most interesting parts of the report.   This is the first part of four overviews of this report.



   As we know, in 2017 there was a paradigm shift in the crypto asset markets.  Attention and investments shifted from being only bitcoin oriented to being altcoin or token oriented.  This drive into alternative tokens was driven by several factors with the most important being crown funding capital through ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings).   According to Huobi’s statistics 435 out of 913 token sales succeeded in hitting their soft cap targets, which is a success rate of almost %50.  ICOs in 2017 raised over 5.6 billion US dollars, compared to only 240 million US dollars in 2016.   Not only were there an unprecedented amount of ICOs, but those ICOs saw unprecedented appreciation within the same year, in some cases appreciating hundreds of times over their initial ICO value.  Spectrecoin, Particle, Neblio, Populous, Qtum, Augmentors, OmiseGo, Icon, Ton and Ox were some of the best performing ICOs in 2017.



   In 2018 the amount raised in ICOs has already exceeded that of 2017 with over 2.5 billion US dollars being raised in February alone.  Telegram, with their Gram ICO raised 850 million US dollars of the 2.5 Billion US dollars total raised in February.  EOS has also continued to raise record amounts of funding during 2018 with EOS raising 3.3 billion US dollars by the end of April 2018.  

   With so many ICOs raising money, and with little regulation or accountability in the sector, it has been difficult for investors to distinguish between the good and the bad projects.  This led to a lot of scam ICOs where investors were conned out of their money by entrepreneurs who did not end up delivering on their promises.  As the majority of the ICO’s run on Ethereum Smart Contracts, the ethereum community headed by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin proposed a new way of ICO funding through what he called a DAICO which stands for “Decentralized Autonomous Initial Coin Offering”.  DAICO combines the benefits of the DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) with the traditional initial coin offering crowdfunding approach.   The DAICO model gives investors more control over the release of their investment.  The system uses a system where project developers are given funds raised as they complete developments of the project.  Once a development is complete, initial investors are able to vote release funds to the developers.  In contrast, if a developer fails to meet a goal or deadline, the investors can vote to terminate the contract and shut down the DAICO in order to recoup their investments.  “The Abyss” is the first project to have used the DAICO, raising over 17,057 Eth and 141,183 BNB (roughly 14.38 million US Dollars) during their crowdfunding in April and May of 2018.  The Abyss Token Distribution was:



   With many tokens being accused of being securities in 2018, some blockchain projects have decided to go back to the old way of raising money with traditional IPOs, offering Reg A+, Reg D or Reg @ Security offerings.  By complying with the more strict regulations of an IPO, these companies can be assured that they meet any legal requirements that they may be liable for.

   Huobi believes that these tokens, that were predominantly created through ICO’s, will continue to enhance the crypto markets throughout 2018 by driving the market with real world use of blockchain and the tokens that are used on them.  A new paradigm shift from investment-driven crypto assets to “investment + application” driven assets.  It is also expected that crypto-to-fiat transactions will decline and crypto-to-token transactions will increase as more users experience this shift.

   The information that I have been given to share came from the first part of four of the “Global Blockchain Industry Overview and Prospects” by www.huobi.pro.  The full report will be made available exclusively to attendees of the Blockchain festival Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam.  If you would like to attend the festival you can obtain tickets for 50% off the cost with promotional code “WRITE50”.  Please visit www.blockchainfestival.com to learn more and to get tickets.  To trade new tokens you can visit www.hadax.com which is operated by Huobi Pro and is where newly listed tokens can be traded and voted on for listing.

http://bit.ly/2HGWw3x

you see a future that is centralized... controlled, pegged...

bitmain backed circle usd coin as a bribe so they could bulid mining farms in the states.  this was done for their best interests, not ours... they never have our best interests at heart.

the whole idea of crypto was supposed to get us away from centralization... away from politicians and governments that can be bribed... away from corruption...

when corrupt companies can do things the rest of the public can not - that is not an open market

if crypto is too volatile for you, stick to the USD.  crypto doesn't need you.  if you prefer centralized corrupt currencies... you already have them and you can want more... but don't tell us what we want... we know what we want.

as for natural selection... medicine is also a part of natural selection and ProgPOW is the medicine that POW crypto's need

This is how ASICs make networks more secure (from huobi.pro):

Announcement on the Suspension of BTG deposits

Dear users,

Due to blockchain network instability of BTG，Huobi Pro has suspended BTG deposits. We apologize for the incovenience that this may cause. Thank you for your understanding.

Huobi Pro

May 19, 2018



Note that we can expect this same attack to cause problems on all equihash chains now, especially BTG, Zen, ZClassic, Bitcoin Private, Komodo, & Hush.  All of the smaller cap coins are at risk of being devastated...  and again, even zec might be at risk, though the chances of bitmain biting off the hand that feeds is less than them attacking the smaller cap coins

cool its all good, thanks for trying

have a goodnight

Prove it was done with GPU's

The educated guess would point to ASIC's being used, as it is commonly discussed that this exact attack is the primary risk of ASIC's towards small cap coins...
However when one entity currently controls over 50% of the zec network, it is also a risk to zec... and it was zooko that took the educated guess that bitmain has over 50% of network hashrate now.


This is a major risk with allowing a chinese company to control the hashrate of any POW coin... bitmain and other chinese ASIC manufactuers can easily be controlled by the chinese government... and that is not a nice thought.  (since i live in china i can speak from being on the ground here)

you mean All equihash coins if they decide to fork as even zooko has now admitted that bitmain probably has had over 50% of the zcash network hashrate for months now, maybe up to 6 months... from his interview with coindesk at consensus

ASICs definitely secure networks better...
must have been GPU miners doing the 51% attack on BTG today...
Jihad Wu would never do anything like that... no .. never...  he wouldn't dare test this kind of attack out on smaller cap coins...

zooko was right, ASIC miners can be trusted more than GPU miners...  he was right, no problem letting bitmain take over your network....



https://twitter.com/bitcoingold/status/997544334508548096
https://forum.bitcoingold.org/t/double-spend-attack-on-exchanges/1362/17

Thanks, doesn't matter too much to me though since I rarely used the forum for the last year.  eitherway  removing the 6 month suspension would show good will on their part though... and would make them look less guilty

it is funny shawn got so angry after that video... yet he never stated WHY HE CHANGED THE POST.

so my words stand, I will not remove the video or post any kind of retraction.  I do consider him an employee of ZEC co... unpaid directly ... fine... but still an employee and representative of the company on their company forum.  if shawn really felt that his posts were not a reflection of ZEC co... he would not have edited it.

That's what ive been telling people today, best day to dump zec and pick up some better bags.

Remember the D3, remember the L3... bitmain flooded the market with these...  they are room heaters/door stoppers today

at a limit of 50 per customer the market will soon be flooded with Z9 mini's... they will quickly be as unprofitable as a D3...

then will come the Z9 Monster with 10X hashrate of the mini - rinse and repeat....

the only coin that remains somewhat profitable with an ASIC today is bitcoin and that is only because the markets need bitcoin as the trading peg...
if bitcoin wasn't the petro-crypto... the bitcoin asics would probably also be paperweights

and remember 2 years ago, ROI on a bitcoin ASIC was what ... never???

   tried my best to show people their true colors...

i had been mining ZEC religiously since testnet...  even if it was not the most profitable crypto to mine with my nvidia cards, i kept them on zec...

and all that time zooko disliked us GPU miners because we can just change networks to the more profitable chain...

well even if ZEC is more profitable (which it is not)... I wont be mining it again...

yeah he doesn't care, except when he can get double founders rewards by making 2 ZEC chains... then sure... then he can fork a GPU minable chain and support both the GPU and ASIC minable chains... and I bet he would do it with godspeed...

no double founders reward?  then he doesn't even know if its possible to fork to a GPU only chain...  

funny how he can say its a possibility to have a new GPU chain, and then right after reply to my twitter saying the problem is he doesnt know how the ASICs work (and therefore cant produce a GPU only fork)


well he sure as hell won't be making bitcoin great again (or crypto)

The monthly cryptocurrency sentiment report by Huobi Academy of Blockchain Application indicates that investors are very bullish when it comes to the future of cryptocurrency market cap.  The report was distributed over the internet through wechat, weibo, E-mail, twitter, telegram and other channels.  The cryptocurrency sentiment reports surveys almost 2000 crypto investors from 23 different countries to gauge short, mid, and long term outlooks in the markets. 

The huobi Academy of Blockchain Application cryptocurrency investor sentiment index is also issued once a month and is weighted out of 100 by the results of all the questionnaires collected.   Again the data is broken down in to short-term (within the month), mid-term (within six months), and long-term (within 3 years) sentiment.



Optimistic sentiment has increased 17% from the previous month to a level of 83.9% positive.  Short, mid and long term sentiment increased 24.2%, 15.7% and 7.5%, reaching positive scores of 75.9%, 88.4% and 95% respectively.  After the market decline from January to April, a rising sentiment is an important signal for investor confidence in the cryptocurrency markets.



Over 50% of those who answered the questionnaire were very optimistic and expected a greater than 30% increase in market cap this month, with 81% of respondents expecting a growth greater than 10%.  7.6% of respondents indicated they felt that the markets would not change much and remain the same with fluctuations of +-10%.  Only 11.4% of respondents were slightly pessimistic or bearish for the short term.



Bullish outlooks and confidence in the markets increased for the next six months with 71.4% of respondents expecting very optimistic increase greater than 30%, and 90% overall expecting an optimistic bullish run of greater than 10% gains.  Those who felt the market would remain sterile fell to only 3.4%, with only 5.8% of respondents remaining pessimistic and viewing the potential for a bear market in the mid-term. 



Outlook for the next 3 years was given an even greater bullish rating than the short-term and mid-term results, with 84.1% of respondents expecting at least 30% gains in market cap, and 92.7% of respondents expecting gains of 10% of higher.  The bearish outlook fell to only 2.7% from the previous months results of 6.9%. 

As is usual with volatile markets such as with the cryptocurrency markets, investors confidence grows with longer time frames.  When viewing the cryptocurrency markets it is important to always look at the long-term bigger picture than be driven by emotional swings in the markets.  The overall bullish trend is still in tact.

Corrections are the norm when it comes to cryptocurrency prices and market cap.  A retracement was expected after the tremendous extension during bull run which the cryptocurrency markets experienced during December 2017 through to January 2018.  Many investors estimate that the bottom of that correction has occurred and that we are gearing up for another uptrend to reach new all time highs.  Traders are currently experiencing lower lows and higher highs, which echo a bullish sentiment in the markets overall.

The first quarter of 2017 was attacked with FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) from every angle.  From Korean exchange rumors, US Tax time, Tether fears, and some of the largest exchange hacks of all time, it is no wonder the markets experienced a downtrend during that time.  A similar downtrend fueled by the Chinese government freezing bitcoin withdraws from exchanges also occurred in the first quarter of 2017.  The start of 2018 was similar to the start of 2017.

If the second quarter of 2018 reflects that of 2017 we may be in for a solid bull-run once again, and from the looks of the markets today, it would seem as though we are at the start of another uptrend through May and June.   FOMO (fear of missing out) may start to set in if we can sustain levels over $10,000 for Bitcoin (BTC).

https://blog.huobi.pro/hc/en-us/articles/360000058621--April-The-composite-investor-sentiment-index-in-April-increased-17-0-
https://blog.huobi.pro/hc/en-us/article_attachments/360000064881/Huobi_Cryptocurrency_Investor_Sentiment_Index_Report-April.pdf

yes, already put him on ignore

I don't give a F what ZEC co. does at this point.

what they should do is, yes, postpone sappling and deal with the ASIC mess right away.  Priority should be given to what they said first, which is remain ASIC resistant, alter the algo to eliminate any threat of ASICs... sappling and any other upgrade came after the statements on ASIC resistance and forking off ASICs.


but they wont do that... so again... i dont care what they end up doing.

Yeah I totally agree with everything you say,
it was his reply tweet on March 30th that made me loose all respect for zooko:




"I'm not sure it is possible.  Also it might be undesirable, because commodity mining means miners have less at stake and don't lose much if abandon or betray the project.  Also CPU-mioning means the people making the money are botnet gangs- not the people i want to have around"

that was in response to asking him for suggestions on how to change Ethash to eliminate the asics...

at that point he literally said we were the people he didn't want around... there was no reason at that time to say that and insult those of us who have built his hashrate from day 0 testnet days....  that was a month before the asics came out... and its not like bitmain is watching those kinds of tweets... so yeah.. at that point i realized he is not someone we should want around...  that he would end up betraying us, not us betraying his network.

That tweet and reply was a few days before I posted on the forum about the potential of ZEC co. getting sued if they did not eliminate the ASICs as was previously said they would do... (which was on April; 3rd)

then the fact shawn edited his post (on April 4th)... I would like to ask him WHY he edited it.. but I can't since im banned  

that pushed me over the edge.


yup, we will never know as if there was collusion, ZEC co. was probably paid via z-address...


yup, it was actually mentioned a lot of times on the forum that they would just fork and eliminate any asics, however i cant find most of those posts anymore... but I was an avid user of the forum and can clearly remember being told that several times.... as I was making videos at the time so I needed to reassure my viewers that GPU mining equihash would be safe for the future...

which is why i really feel cheated by them... because I recommended them... and really feel like they are throwing us off a cliff without a care of what was said in the past...

when i tell people something based off of what I am told, i expect what i am told to be true... i have an infamous reputation to uphold...

Thanks for your input phil.  poll is not aimed at trying to get zec co to do anything, its aimed at letting miners know they are scum.