Bitcoin Forum

Didn't those ASIC users pump up BTC Volume and market acceptance as well as multiplying the offers available for the community now?

I get the point scrypt is easier to be used by everyone with low power also but isn't it the big players bringing all the market into the coins?

As conclusion of that thought, why is FTC pumped as hell and a coin like BTE is going down? Shouldn't the community go for ASIC friendly coins that the big players will jump on to increase the markets?

Since it's different, it gives cryptocurrencies as a whole more security.

No, ASIC is a vulnerability, addressed by the scrypt algorithm. GPU is a much better hardware of choice to be based on for decentralization. ASIC can be cheaply mass manufactured by a well funded attacker, while GPU can not, to get massive amount of GPU, you have to compete with the general gamer market, it is extremely difficult to obtain a meaningful amount of GPU to attack the network.

Yes ASIC can also be made for scrypt, but due to the memory intensive traits of the algorithm, the scrypt ASIC will be a lot more expensive than the SHAXXX version, and also power usage will also be higher. The advantage of ASIC over GPU will be a lot smaller in scrypt mining.

A well funded attacker wouldn't have a problem acquiring vast amounts of GPUs either.

Scrypt is neither better nor worse than SHA 256. They're just different hashing algorithms.

Yes, I think so, too.  Look for BTE to go up in the next 1-2 years.

They would have a problem, as AMD GPU can not be just produced on demand. You can have $100M dollar at hand, and you would still be looking at a big red "SOLD OUT" message on newegg back in June 2011 when high end AMD GPU were sold out everywhere. The attacker would have to carefully and slowly accumulate GPU, without disturbing the market supply/demand, it'll take a long time. By the time the attacker has accumulated a high amount, the GPUs would have become obsolete because it's generations behind the current products.

a person with enough money and ordering capacity can likely order by the pallet direct from the manufacturers.

could they not just make a scrypt ASIC?  surely if a video card can do it, and it was designed for only CPUs originally, an ASIC can do it better.  argument invalid.

Yes they can. This is a fallacy that has been floating around for a while now (that scrypt is ASIC proof.)

NOTHING is ASIC proof.  :)

The idea is that it is much more costly to build (and most likely design). Now how much harder is a good question.

You don't seem to understand, AMD's production capacity is pretty much static year over year. Unless the attacker signs contract with AMD to buy $100M worth of chips year after year, AMD isn't going to go through the costly ramp up production just for the attacker. Therefore, this person must compete with regular GPU supply/demand game. This is why in June 2011, AMD high end cards sold out everywhere for months, you think AMD/MSI/Gigabyte etc.. don't want to make money? They literally can't, since AMD doesn't have spare capacity to produce more gpu chips for MSI/Gigabyte to make graphic cards.

Now if the attacker is so well funded, that he can afford to sign multi-year contract to buy Billion dollar worth of AMD chips, then yeah he could possibly attack a scrypt network of 100GH. On the other hand, to attack a SHAxxx network, for example the current Bitcoin network with 100TH, only a less than $10M investment in ASIC is needed.

With 10M he can just design an ASIC and produce the chips....

Yes, he could, but we don't know if a scrypt ASIC have any major advantage over GPU? what we do know is a scrypt ASIC must have tons of memory, just like a GPU, and also it would use much more power than SHAxxx, because you have to power all that memory.

So when will the BFL scrypt ASICS start to ship?

Pretty much this.

At the moment SHA-2 as Bitcoin uses it (preferably with merged mining) seems to be the best way to secure a cryptocurrency without making it botnet friendly.

On the other hand scrypt is better for encouraging miner decentralization, though the existence of popular mining pools takes some weight off of the hashing algorithm's ability to effectively enforce mining decentralization. Because of the way it chokes hardware much more than SHA-2, this is probably going to be one of the more popular and effective ways to do secure password storage going forward.

SHA-3 which I don't think any cryptocurrency is using is weird. It was designed to be fast, and there are already open source HDL layout for implementation in FGPAs and ASICs. I can't think of any good use cases for it beyond NIST felt like it was time for another hash function competition.

Why not a coin that does both?

I think RUcoin does this.

lol :D