The Zcash community would benefit from greater transparency on the part of hardware manufacturers, as would the broader Equihash mining ecosystem. We are making a formal request for voluntary disclosures from Bitmain, Innosilicon, ASICminer, and any other company that makes mining hardware. We appreciate Bitmain’s recent move in this direction, and hope to see more progress going forward.
Here are the disclosures that we’re asking for:
- The firm’s policy for when it does or does not mine with its own equipment
- A policy on which blockchains and which pools the firm will mine
- Transaction inclusion policy (for example, will the firm mine empty blocks)
- Hard data about self-mining, such as total hash rate, updated on a regular basis
- Shipping and volume info about Equihash-capable miners
Sharing this information is a way for hardware manufacturers to demonstrate good faith and build trust with the community.
Edit 7/26/2018: Bitmain has published a transparency policy.