Bitcoin Forum

I have seen how the mining community has been hating on the ASIC miner existence
Their excuse is that it is not fair to the guys using GPU

So when did we as humans become resistant to better technology?
GPU drinks lots of power compared to what it is chunking out and ASIC is hundred and thousand folds more efficient and yet people are opposed to the technology


Lets remove the Bitmain issue out of this (another post for another day)
This is basically discussion on why are there coins claiming to be ASIC-resistant aka (we dont want better technology and want to burn more and more electricity using GPU)

So if you are an ASIC-resistant dev of NeoScrypt dev for example
Please join me on this dicsussion

gpu miners hate asic because if an asic for a certain algo/coin gets released u can only mine it with asic and gpu miners are instant out of the game
see what happened to siacoin now
another thing is many asic miners are only profitable if you get them very early, once the whole batch is on the market difficulty goes moon, see L3+, D3(heater) or A3 depending on electricity price its not more profitable or profitiability going to hell like with siacoin
some asic company only sell in big batches, so only whales can effort it

i hate this asic shit too, because a small amount of people can destroy the possibility of mining for a certain coin/algo for the majority of miners

People hate ASICs because often the that companies make them mine with them first, then sell them when the person will barely make ROI.  This was a few years ago, not sure if it's still going on.  But regardless, the machine becomes useless with no resale value because of increased difficulty.  With GPUs there are more algos, more coins, and easy resale, they are much more versatile.

It also puts GPU miners in a difficult position.

They are also obnoxiously loud.  If you have a dedicated mining room that is fine.  But a lot of people use their houses, bedrooms, etc.

A good time when ASICs make sense if is you are going to save your BTC long term and you aren't look at ROI or resale, whether you are mining BTC directly or Altcoins and trading for BTC. Although they are also useful in Altcoins too if you can get them fast, then you can make a bunch for short time.  

Your argument is based on a faulty premise: ASICs are not "better technology," they are merely highly-optimized to perform one specific computational task. Furthermore, they have very short profitability lifespans - sometimes measured in weeks - after which they become "obsolete technology" which can't be used for anything else because "highly-optimized for one specific task" again.

This also applies to their supposed energy efficiency: the energy cost per unit of computation remains the same even as their profitability declines until they actually cost more to operate than they can generate.

Pretty much what MagicSmoke said. ASIC doesn't make sense. If there is a way to do mining with hardware commonly available to many, this would be the ideal from a number of angles:

* Decentralization
* Adoption
* Spread
* Reusability

Creating a device, shipping it across to the other sider of the world, only to be used for a couple of months, and then end up on the scrap yard is just a waste of resources.

all of the above what has been stated. And I would not recommend to put one in your living room, they make a hell of noise.

If you're the first to develop the ASIC, you can grab a huge chunk of the market in a short amount of time.  Look at SIA for example, the devs were going to bring out their own ASIC miners.  BitMain beat them to it and within a month the difficulty went up 100x, effectively knocking out the GPU miners.

Gpu's are sold and serviced by real companies with real warranties.

Many asic are pre order
Many asic have 90 day warranty  that are next to worthless.

I can make a certain profit with gpu's 100% certain.

I can not do this with asics.


Build a solar array make sure you are in a grid tie back state that buys your power.

say you do 100k-watt build on about ¾ acre of land   in New Jersey that translates to a constant 24/7/365 supply of 20kwatts.

i.e. free power up to 20kwatts.

If I fill a shed with gpu rigs from evga I get 3 year good warranties and have zero power cost.

if I fill a shed with asics I get 90 day shit warranties and have zero power cost.

why do I want asics? I don't


now not every one can do solar but frankly I don't care much for asics due to bullshit service and bullshit warranties. and pre orders.

If I could get asics at decent prices with decent service I would have an interest increase in them.  until the companies learn to behave like real companies I will be more with gpus.

So do you prefer they just innovate and keep the innovation to themselves and not sell?
Will you prefer that instead?

No am not wrong
Tell me what tool is do-it-all, i mean don't even get me started

The point am trying to make is if i make ASIC for x algorithm and it is 100x or 1000x better than your GPU, with less power efficiency with what it puts out, so GPU is better technology for that algo?

You guys are too hell net on the profit, lets remove profit out of this, we all care about the blockchain don't we? so why not look at it like having the ASIC mining helps to speed up transactions and help the cyrpto ecosystem with LES POWER consumption

How about you think of it like that?

For crying out loud, stop mining in your house, and if you do please dont complain about anything
Does Bitmain tell employees to mine at their houses? They invested in huge datacenters and mined there
First it is not healthy mining in your homes and now you want to use noise excuse?
Well mining rigs do n ot belong in the house to begin with..does you house have fire hazard protection and all the datacenter safety features?
I hope you get safe and nothing bad happens because many people just feel the need to mine at home and yet want to compare themselves to bitmain

Ok you coming from the profit angle, so why then people hate ASICs? if you are more profitable than them then why not be confident to compete?
So why then is the need for the ASIC-resistance cult?

If the mining process was not incentivized not many would get into it - that's just human nature. ASIC development takes millions of dollars of investment into research and prototyping, that too for a specific application. To make that back and more, there should be sufficient interest in such a product. In the absence of a payout for mining, you can assume what the approach of hardcore supporters of a cryptocurrency would be to a highly priced, resource intensive piece of equipment, that has no other purpose than to mine a single coin/algo. Not that in such a scenario, any manufacturer would bother producing an ASIC, but miners would prefer the multi purpose GPUs/CPUs that has many other applications in real life. Moreover, it is made by mostly neutral parties, serving majority of other purposes, and is affordably spread between the common populace. The severe limitations current ASIC manufacturers put in place, like minimum order quality, shipping restrictions and payment methods, limit who can receive the product, i.e., the rich and influential few. This just beats the purpose of true decentralization and a fair distribution of power.

There are benefits of ASICs, definitely, but just making the points as to why some oppose it.

It's not a matter of GPUs being a "do-it-all" tool (or as we 'muricans like to say, a "Swiss Army knife"), it's just that they are more generally useful than an ASIC. After all, GPUs can still be used to provide the display for a PC long after they are obsolete for mining, whereas pretty much every ASIC miner can only be re-purposed as a doorstop or boat anchor when it becomes obsolete; something which can happen within a few short months of its manufacture!



No, of course not. For any algo that an ASIC can run it will always be the superior choice... for that algo, anyway. The problem is that the very release of an ASIC into the market causes the difficulty for that algo to skyrocket (I guess you might say, "moon") and it becomes increasingly unprofitable to mine any coin using that algo; the ASIC shoots itself in the foot, so to speak. Meanwhile, the release of the ASIC absolutely wrecks the profitability of any GPU mining that same algo, but unlike the ASIC, a GPU can switch over to mining a completely different algo.


Lolwut? Totally different argument there and some prejudiced presumptions to boot. Looks like you don't really want to have a discussion, rather, you want to promote ASICs. I have no interest in such a discussion.

How much does a 100kW solar array cost? $130,000 - $200,000 according to https://www.infiniteenergy.com.au/commercial-solar-system-size-comparison/100kw.
20,000W is 480kWh per day or 175,200 kWh per year. 175,200 kWh at an average $0.12 is $21000 per year so it will take 6+ years to get ROI?

dud are u completly retarded?, asics are to powerful the profibiality of an asic coin/algo never grows with the difficulty asics cause. if there would be an asic for every algo out there POW mining would die in a couple of weeks. with an amd or nvidia gpu you can mine for years different algos and sometime good coins with new gpu compatible algos.
with fucking asics you can only mine profitable one algo for a short time, then you will need the next 10x powerful asic to make some profit

lol..not really actually..just want to dig in some points to see the counter points
its a strategy..lol
am trying to get into mining but am not sure if i want to get into ASIC or GPU or both
I do know that there will be ASIC for more algos..just my prediction
So i dont want to invest in GPU and then be left with waste..yesi ican resell but for anyone smart enough..you wont resellyour GPU for anything more than half the price..because right now you buy at double the price and when used and when crypto is no more and GPU gets back to their senses..then price will be 4x down

But yeah just trying to se...i just might nor get into mining at all and keep on trading and make stress free money
mining is stressful too..you gotta manage things and worry about paying for datacenter bills and all that and if things break you have to fix..etc

I prefer they stick to a few algos and leave the rest alone. They can innovate within those algos.  Keep a balanced atmosphere.  Like cars and trucks, both are useful.

asic ( and partly gpu) are all what you want to avoid for crypto.... asic turn a decentralized system into something highly centralized (all asic currency are not decentralized anymore)

cryptos are supposed to be decentralized....

asic resist it's a concept that some people like it ...
if u mine at home with more then 1 kw/h, from my point of view, u must be nuts , HOME it's a safe place for human kind
so asic resistant it's for people that mining with their gaming computer, helping blockchain , so home miner are market target for asic resistant coin
also eth and xmr ( asic resistant )  are not profitble at all for home miner, you need strong rigs to get some coins today.
it's very complicated to mining today

They already do that.  Stop being a shill

Maybe you should own both and see for yourself.....you'll learn real quick.
Especially since those with tonnes of hands on experience with them have given you their 2 cents. 

yeah he´s a fucktard who has no clue about mining at all.

You are confusing power consumption with power efficiency.  Yes an ASIC will be more efficient than a GPU, but higher hashrate only provides more security when its distributed.  If you have 10,000 different GTX 1070s mining a coin, then technically to make the blockchain more secure you would need 10,001 ASIC miners.  ASICs also do not speed up transactions and while more efficient than GPUs, do not in themselves save power.

The bottom line is most people on the altcoin forum do not like ASICs because they are heavily invested in GPUs.  When an ASIC comes along, it kills their profit.  There are also a lot of people here that were foolish and got burned buying D3s.  There are also people who saw the D3 thing unfold and now falsely think that any new miner Bitmain comes out with will meet the same fate.

ASIC mine altcoins means only fewer people play the pump dump game,just dump the coins and never buy back,we don't need ASIC altcoins

I think ASIC is not everyone can buy
GPU mining is more decentralized, everyone can mining coin with 512 MB card i think. So i not like asic mining.

If ASICs would mine another algos just like GPUs would be worth, even when its not the best for that algo. Just like Nvidias arent the best mining ETH, but you can put them to mine it at will.

"ASIC resistance" is a silly false premise  ;D I don't know where you got that info from but its total bullshit.

They are not ASIC resistant, they are DESIGNED for ASICs from the beginning.

It just happens that this ASIC is good ol' DDR. Why? Its a well established and widely available technology which helps with decentralization.  Also there won't be a sudden and huge shift in hardware because the cutting edge hardware for these algorithms is already available to everyone and will continue to be so, simple.

Uh, not quite. ASIC = Application Specific Integrated Circuit, which is basically a semi-custom IC, and like any IC its functionality is hard-coded so it has a limited ability to be used for something other than what was intended.

Algos that are "ASIC resistant" generally accomplish this by requiring lots of memory size and bandwidth, rather than high computational effort, per se. This removes the advantage which would otherwise accrue from designing an IC specifically for the algorithm - memory size/bandwidth is a commodity, after all.

DDR memory is not an "ASIC" because memory does not have a specific application, any more than a CPU has a specific application.

Reach out to Peter Bushnell, creator of Feathercoin, UFO and others.  Both of those coins are Neoscrypt.  He is on Twitter and the UFO Telegram channel.

As to your answer, some people say it's not fair to the GPU miners, but that is not the whole answer.  There's plenty of information out there on the subject.

 One of the reasons there is GPU mining today is because ASIC's pushed out the little guy.  Anyone wanting to start today faces high startup costs.  It's cheaper to start mining with GPUs than ASICs, and there are a variety of coins to choose from ASIC's narrow your choice and you are forced to upgrade to newer technology if you want the same kind of results. 

Of course it has a specific application, it is to provide fast random access dynamic memory  :P

That is why its wise to build PoW algorithms that target ram, we're already on the bleeding edge of the technology and in a way that the production of the hardware is not dominated by a single company.

Cryptonight (the algorithm for monero) tried to take it a step further and target CPU's L2 cache, the original intent was having a single scratchpad per core to be the most effective way to mine. Unfortunately they couldn't predict how good gpu pipelining would become.

TO be honest, securing the network is alot easier/better with ASIC resistant coins compared to ASIC coins. Unless you're the size of bitcoin. The entire computer industry is benefitting from GPU mining, but asic mining only benefit large mining coorperations and the power company.

You are making some false assumptions.
1. ASICs will not make transactions faster(that's not how mining works... ) .
2. ASICs will not be more energy efficient in the long run. there is no difference in miners having a 1Kw rig  versus 1Kw ASIC, hashrate will be much higher, but you are still competing against other ASICs ...

Think of it like this, lets say Claymore realeases ethereum ULTRA MINER that does 30Gh/s on a polaris card for under 100W , do you think you'll earn more with that? Only for a few minutes/hours untill everyone updates their rigs and you're back to square one.