- Steve Sokolowski
- Archived posts: 4559
- Joined: Aug 27, 2014
Zelcash mining to be suspended on April 10
Unfortunately, we decided to suspend Zelcash mining starting in about 14 hours. Earning in Zelcash will not be affected.
Zelcash is issuing a fork tomorrow to a new network - "Flux." Mining the new network requires considering several additional "charity addresses." We reviewed Zelcash's website, but were not able to find sufficient documentation to easily implement this new requirement. There is a pull request with some Javascript code, but the code has no comments as to what each part is doing, so we can't easily translate this code to our system without being able to understand which parts are necessary.
The section on what miners need to do on the Zelcash website simply redirects to this pull request, rather than providing a link to a document that has a detailed explanation of the theory behind the changes. The website itself is heavy on marketing speak and flashy graphics, and the git repository itself, the most important part of any coin, isn't really even mentioned until the bottom of the page.
The Zelcash testnet does not have any nodes that have the full blockchain, and we were not able to find a list published by the Zelcash developers of full testnet nodes through all major search engines. We can't proceed without being to test our code on the testnet regardless of whatever other documentation we could find.
There are also other issues with Zelcash that make this change particularly difficult to implement. For example, Zelcash will now be the only Equihash coin that doesn't support "z" addresses, which would require additional work to treat Zelcash differently than these other coins. We're also concerned about whether the amount of work being thrust upon miners and exchanges due to this fork is going to cause widespread discontinuations and make the coin be delisted from all exchanges that accept US customers, because they don't see a way to earn a profit after doing all the upgrade work.
After reviewing the options, we decided that focusing on re-adding an algorithm that supports CPU mining, like RandomX, would be a better focus at this time. Most of the 20 customers who are mining Zelcash would likely be more profitable mining ethash for the next month, and we'll be glad to assist in that transition.
We may come back to Zelcash in the future, and we apologize for the inconvenience!
Zelcash is issuing a fork tomorrow to a new network - "Flux." Mining the new network requires considering several additional "charity addresses." We reviewed Zelcash's website, but were not able to find sufficient documentation to easily implement this new requirement. There is a pull request with some Javascript code, but the code has no comments as to what each part is doing, so we can't easily translate this code to our system without being able to understand which parts are necessary.
The section on what miners need to do on the Zelcash website simply redirects to this pull request, rather than providing a link to a document that has a detailed explanation of the theory behind the changes. The website itself is heavy on marketing speak and flashy graphics, and the git repository itself, the most important part of any coin, isn't really even mentioned until the bottom of the page.
The Zelcash testnet does not have any nodes that have the full blockchain, and we were not able to find a list published by the Zelcash developers of full testnet nodes through all major search engines. We can't proceed without being to test our code on the testnet regardless of whatever other documentation we could find.
There are also other issues with Zelcash that make this change particularly difficult to implement. For example, Zelcash will now be the only Equihash coin that doesn't support "z" addresses, which would require additional work to treat Zelcash differently than these other coins. We're also concerned about whether the amount of work being thrust upon miners and exchanges due to this fork is going to cause widespread discontinuations and make the coin be delisted from all exchanges that accept US customers, because they don't see a way to earn a profit after doing all the upgrade work.
After reviewing the options, we decided that focusing on re-adding an algorithm that supports CPU mining, like RandomX, would be a better focus at this time. Most of the 20 customers who are mining Zelcash would likely be more profitable mining ethash for the next month, and we'll be glad to assist in that transition.
We may come back to Zelcash in the future, and we apologize for the inconvenience!
