Bitcoin Forum

This ASIC arms race has gotten out of hand. To give Bitcoin back to the majority of Bitcoiners I hereby propose to change the hashing algorithm to Scrypt-Jane.

PS, yes I'm serious.

Only miners have voting power. You cannot change that.

I think somebody owns stock in AMD lol.

I think that's the whole purpose.

Doesn't sound very libertarian to me.

Then people will do a new arms race with new devices for scrypt, the only thing it will do is piss off everyone who bought mining equip or mining shares (quite a lot of people) and thus hurting Bitcoin. -> clear No

ASICs shouldn't bother anyone. A rig with 4 7970 GPUs can only get barely 4 GH/s and costs over $3000. Now, for $649, you can get a rig that gives you 4.5 GH/s. ASICs are so much cheaper, with the tradeoff of having only one purpose. Also, imagine how mad CPU miners were when GPU miners came out. Must have been infuriating. Advancement of technology will always happen. ASICs just happen to be the next step past GPUs. There will be something to pass up ASICs in something like 10 years. Just watch.

Are gpu's still worth investing in if you get free electricity?

Why not just create a new competing currency and let the free market choose?

Are ASICs worth investing in if you get free electricity?

2 7970s will cost you $950 for just under 2 Gh/s
$650 can get you a 4.5 Gh/s rig.

already done
cough litecoin cough
litecoin is for the noobs wanting the sandbox of crypto currency to dip their feet into, learn the ropes, get into business, make some money and then decide if they want to get into the big business of bitcoin, or develop the litecoin further. much like growing up in africa, starting with new economy. do you stay and develop a new economy. or get on a plane and move to the developed world. your free to decide


also to add, thinking that mining is the only way to make money is very narrow minded and shows you have no clue what economy is.

think about todays real bricks and mortar world.

are your family getting an income from minting bank notes or being gold diggers.. no. the creation of the currency should be less then 1% of the total ways to make money.

think about retail, domestic services, fast food, manufacturing.. bitcoin has opened up a new economy just like opening a fresh new country. mining is not the only job vacancy listing.. open your mind. find a niche and become a bitcoin millionaire.

imagine it like this. looking at the fiat market and wishing you could go back 100 years and be right at the start of the "big boys" of business.. well here is your chance

Someone already did - it's called YACoin.

There you go OP.  Just convert all of your Bitcoins to YACoins and start mining them.

https://vircurex.com/welcome/index?alt=yac&base=btc&locale=en
https://www.cryptsy.com/markets/view/11

Just be happy that there is no new technology beyond ASICs for a long time.

Give it 5 to 10 years. 2nd Gen ASICs will probably come out in 2 to 3 years though.

If KNC actually gets their 28nm asics out the door we are pretty much done with rapid asic progression, after that we will be at the mercy of node shrinks like the rest of the industry.

Thats a quantum computer, not an ASIC. Quantum Computing actually isn't as efficient as ASICs are, and it is not a threat. Quantum Computing cannot compute SHA256 math at a fast pace.


What are node shrinks?

Until I can order an ASIC on Amazon and have it delivered the next day and for less money than the same hashpower in a GPU, that is purely hypothetical.

They're still worth it today even if you have to pay for electricity, but not if you have to also pay for the PC to put them in.

This right here. I think changing BTC over to scrypt-jane would cause a massive issue with the system as a whole at this point. ASIC's would then be useless, as well as all the money invested in them, and that would cause a (likely large) exodus from the currency.

This, miners who invested hundreds if not thousands of dollars would be cheated out. They are the people who are willing to invest and risk large amounts of money into the bitcoin mining world. If you alienate them like this, due to having a finite supply of such people, less people will be mining, and there will be far fewer people willing to spend time and money to design new ASIC's for the alternative mining algorithm. We will have a very small hash rate for a very long time, the efficiency of mining will be low due to using GPU's, which will make it easier for an opposing party to bring it down.

I hadn't even considered the ability of attacking BTC with 51%'s due to a change like this. That in itself is a huge red flag.

i think sha256 is what will keep bitcoin the gold standard vs litecoin the silver standard. I've noticed all the 100+ alt coins that have come out of the woodwork all seem to use scrypt.  i guess thats bc anyone can mine your chain for a long period of time.  the asic arms race has got a little crazy, and ithink its funny how its not playing out like everyone expected (i remember when any miner i'd talk to would say "gpu mining will be completely dead by november 2012).  i've already made the switch to ltc with my gpu rigs but thats mostly bc i think litecoin is undervalued.   oh well i guess only time will tell.

lol, people claim BTC mining is dead on GPU's all the time. For most people, though, it's still profitable. And it's arguably the safest coin to mine as well. If the crypto scene died down, BTC would be the last to fall.

Did you guys see this related Poll?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=233420.0

it looks most people REALLY DON'T THINK SO!  65 Votes so far... I guess that is a pretty sizeable sample for BT

Enough with the "ASICS are bad mmmkay"

But this is where it will end up. Since there is not much more that can be done technology wise, in order to be competitive it's all about producing as many as possible at the cheapest cost.

I agree. I'm positive there are companies close to getting ASIC's ready to go mass produce that aren't going public yet because they are going to mine them until their profitability goes down. It doesn't make sense to think otherwise: if you can sell something for $300 or earn $200 a day off it, it's clear which path to take.

I started a bounty for a better hashing algorithm that will keep things more decentralized: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=234611.0

As long as changing the hashing algorithm is on the table, we might as well attempt to find the best one!

I really don't see changing the algorithm happening. Especially with how old Bitcoin is and its following right now...

Bitcoin cannot change hashing algorithms without a 'fork' as the current miners would never go for it.  But new chains could benefit from a better algorithm and then the market will decide where to move the value.

OP is mad he can't get rich easy, now wants to kill off all the people who worked hard and spent a lot of money into ASIC mining..

Um what?

Just no, take your greedy ass some where else.

It's not.

The existence of the poll just shows that people don't know what they're talking about.

Forking the blockchain like this would kill bitcoin at this point.

I know I would take all my money out of it.

Imagine you go to a store that accepts bitcoin only to find you are using the "wrong bitcoin".

If you hate the hashing algorithm so much, create an alt coin. Oh wait, there is already Litecoin and it's dying, lol.

I'm sorry you didn't think to order an ASIC early enough but all the butthurt GPU miners in the world are not going to be able to change Bitcoin's hashing algorithm.

And if bitcoin really did start using scrypt, people would just make ASICs to mine that way.

ASICs are a GOOD thing for bitcoin.

If you want to explore the benefits, issues and complications that arise with using scrypt-jane as the hashing algorithm, one place to look is the two active alt-coins currently doing so:

1) Yacoin, launched May 8.  See https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=196196.0 and https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=206577.0
2) Onecoin, launched yesterday.  See https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=200177.0

Just let thread die, even if sha256 would be completely broken ... we would not have the hashing power required to takeover the chain with a new algorithm.

Can someone please provide a link to where you can purchase an ASIC for $649?
Thanks in advance.

are you serious ?

Me? or the OP?

I'm serious.

https://products.butterflylabs.com/homepage/5-gh-s-bitcoin-miner.html

for $649 you can get over 10 GH/s and have change left over

No matter the algorithm, there will almost certainly eventually exist an ASIC that is either more efficient or less expensive than a GPU or a CPU. A different algorithm might have a smaller gap, sure, but given how competitive mining is, that gap, however small, will always be enough to push away non-ASIC miners. Once the mining community has ASICs, it becomes impossible for a government, etc. to spend millions of dollars to get better equipment than the mining community. Instead, they have to compete on even footing - matching dollar for dollar what the network already has. If we make it past this point without an issue, there will be no need to change the algorithm.

Even if the network as a whole spends hundreds of millions of dollars on equipment, if that money wasn't spent on ASICs, governments, etc. can do a 51% attack just by spending a few million dollars on research and development of an ASIC.

No we learn from improving technology the arms race is also an experience that grows tech upwards

 ;D  ;D  ;D  ;D  ;D  ;D

ASICMINER's USB Block Erupter .

True; it'd be nice if they had a better hash:cost ratio though, :(. It's hard to tell if they will ever pay off but I mean, if they last a few years I guess they could pay off eventually.

Sorry, but that doesn't meet the requirements in either way...

But the leftover change is all you're going to have for the next few months (or maybe longer)...

lol, this is so true. I think it will be a long time before any of the big rigs are shipped, considering BFL is now selling the chips themselves for the next month or so.

Agree on the asics being too OP at the moment and that we wont be seeing an end to difficulty rise any time soon. However actually changing Bitcoin code to remedy this? No way...

I predict Bitcoin becoming more corporated/enterprised where big companies control production, volume and price of the bitcoin. We allready see the signs of this with Asicminer having a big part of the hashrate at their discretion and selling shares to the "public". Small time home-miners will fall off eventually. When that happens the home miners will embrace another coin and i think it wont be scrypt based :).

False.

Everyone full node validates which rules are followed even if by only keeping the entire blockchain and relaying new transactions and blocks and since none of the full nodes can be forced to validate rules they don't agree with every full node is sovereign in how Bitcoin works for it.

"SHA-2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sha-256) is a set of cryptographic hash functions (SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512) designed by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) ..."

NSA? Prism? What was that all about? ...  ;)

this is both stupid and dangerous. of course NO

You say this as if an ASIC for scrypt has never even been contemplated, which is just flat wrong. It would just be much more expensive to produce ASICs for scrypt (or any 'memory hard' algorithm) do to the huge memory requirements vs SHA256 generation.....

I do like the idea of ASICs and was about to buy one about 6 months ago (from BFL) which I am VERY glad that I did -not- buy from them and got a 7970 instead, as someone else said earlier, when I can buy an ASIC on amazon and have it delivered in 1 or 2 days, thats when I will buy them. I just think it is far too much a risk to 'pre-order' an ASIC from any of the companies selling them.

No company in the game to make a profit would sell ASIC hardware below the expected value of all Bitcoins the miner will produce during its useful life.  The added cost of creating a consumer-ready product with packaging, shipping, and other supply chain issues means that the consumer can never make money by buying an ASIC because the large mining firms can get more hash power, cheaper and sooner.   

The only way to make a profit through purchasing ASIC hardware is if the manufacture has different expectations than you do about the future value of Bitcoin and hash rate of the network.   In this case, it is much cheaper and lower risk to speculate directly through buying Bitcoin. 

Assuming a market player will act in such a way that does not maximize their profit is a good way to get burned.

so in the days of the wild west no one sold a pickaxe for less the the average earnings of a gold miner in his life time
so in the industrials age no one sold a stick of dynamite for less the the average earnings of a gold miner in his life time
so in todays times no one is selling excavators and shloosh machines for less the the average earnings of a gold miner in his life time.

next you will be telling me that farmers have never sold a potato at wholesale to retailers but instead sold every potato they dug up at retail price...

http://www.amazon.com/ASICMiner-Block-Erupter-USB-Sapphire/dp/B00CUJT7TO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1379299441&sr=8-1&keywords=block+eruptor

The FABS would be the ones selling the pickaxe, dynamite, etc.   The people contracting the fabs 'in-mass' to produce 1 million chips have two options, mine in-house, or sell to customers.   Option A is 80% cheaper than option B.   End result, margin on mining becomes so tight that the only people who can compete are those who follow Option A, in house mining.         Option B has capital costs 4x as high before they can start mining.

Your analogies are poor because they are approximations because the intermediate products are MULTI-USE and have no value without a mine and labor behind it.   Where as every ASIC cpu has value with only electricity as an input.   Large mining farms will have much cheaper electricity, cheaper packaging, and economies of scale that will increase the difficulty to such a point that only people operating at such efficiencies can mine more bitcoin that the cost of the capital required to produce them.