Zcash appears to be demonstrating their lack of technical expertise on block chain related matters:
There is no publicly available optimized code for Equihash, so we don't really know to what extent it
is bandwidth or latency bound. There may be subtle trade offs between the two. We really need to see the memory behaviour of actual running optimized code.
1. You didn't address my electrical efficiency point, which I think is probably the most damning. I very much doubt that the memory power consumption will be even 1/10 of the computational power consumption. Thus an ASIC will be at least 10 times more power efficient, Don't I remember pointing out the same issue with your Cuckoo hash? What was your retort again?
2. I also very much doubt it will be latency bound (even after the 10X speed up of the computation), because optimized sorting doesn't have to be random access.
For any memory bandwidth bound, there is this:
Additionally I was thinking that this Equihash can be trivially sped up on an ASIC because the Equihash algorithm is not memory latency bound and thus is bound on the sorting and computation speed and/or the memory bandwidth, which can be optimized with specialized hardware.
There is no publicly available optimized code for Equihash, so we don't really know to what extent it
is bandwidth or latency bound. There may be subtle trade offs between the two. We really need to see the memory behaviour of actual running optimized code.
1. You didn't address my electrical efficiency point, which I think is probably the most damning. I very much doubt that the memory power consumption will be even 1/10 of the computational power consumption. Thus an ASIC will be at least 10 times more power efficient, Don't I remember pointing out the same issue with your Cuckoo hash? What was your retort again?
2. I also very much doubt it will be latency bound (even after the 10X speed up of the computation), because optimized sorting doesn't have to be random access.
For any memory bandwidth bound, there is this:
Out of interest. Why does it matter for a coin which is currently in the alpha stage and only running on the test net?
Isn't the whole point of this stage to weed out issues like this and work on a more sustainable architecture before it ever goes live?
If it goes live with these issues then I would find it worrisome and quite comical, but I don't understand the point of complaining about a alpha stage.
Ostensibly you do not understand the technical distinction I noted.
The issue here is not one of ferreting out bugs and optimization, which is what an alpha and beta stage release are for. Rather, I am noting they didn't even mention (nor anticipate) in their research paper all the factors that are relevant, so it may exemplify they are not very expertise in this particular area of ASIC resistant proof-of-work technology.
No, I misunderstood. But now I agree.
But then I think it is much to early to reach a verdict.
The coin is not near to being finished and if it gets released with such or other fundamental issues then they don't have anything at all. Just more noise in the crypto market.
This could be said about any crypto, but the team behind Zcash looks very promising. So I definitely want to see where this project goes in short and long term.
Has anyone reviewed the white paper further and found any other issues?
