Bitcoin Forum

According to reports scrypt ASICs may soon exist, finally completely eliminating this feature distinguishing Litecoin from Bitcoin— at first LTC was supposed to be CPU only but that failed, then GPU only and thats failing.

I never thought much of the goal here, but at least it was a distinction— if, IMO, a kinda dumb one.  The thing I like least about alts is the lack of distinction and innovation they frequently suffer, and so being another asic mined coins but with different asics seems like such a waste to me.

If the LTC community wanted it could change POW and the practice of being willing to change it would probably be a stronger protection for general purpose hardware than the use of any particularity or set of particular schemes could ever be. Though since (it seems to me) so much of the LTC community is miners the change would have to be to another CPU+GPU friendly one so the existing miners wouldn't be left out.

There are a lot of options here— including different POWs already deployed other ALTs or something novel.  What got me musing on this subject was the question of: If I threw out an alt that used ECDSA signature validation as its POW would someone write ultra fast GPU code for ECDSA (which would be very useful in helping to scale node performance, even in Bitcoin)?

I suspect that if LTC doesn't change POW now that the introduction of fixed function hardware will mean that it never can. Perhaps its already too late, though I don't know: LTC has always advertised itself as being <s>GPU</s>ASIC proof, and a violation of that is an outright bug, which arguably should be fixed no different than if it were possible to mine more than 84 million litecoins.

Such a change could be made mostly seamlessly— a new version released, and a deadline for upgrade, not too unlike the Bitcoin 0.8 hardfork or the nversion=2 blocks. Existing miners could even use coinbase votes (indicating their ability to support the switch in the blocks they mine) to trigger the change so that it could be done in a way which is assured to not exclude too much of the existing hashrate (though, presumably, using a coinbase vote would fail if there are secretly large asic farms already). Miners would need to upgrade software, but they'd just have to update sometime before the switchover, no tricky synchronization would be required.

I wonder what people think of this? Is this the sort of thing that could get near-unanimous consensus in the LTC community?

Maybe you could even convince CK to stop being a prick and put ScryptECDSA/GPU support back in cgminer.

I think it would be funnier and just if they did the switch after BFL and the other bozos dumped 100's of thousands into developing a piece of junk.

+1
I don't see why anyone would object since forks and forced upgrades are a dime-a-dozen in altcoins.

One possibility is just a "minimum change". E.g. changing the number of salsa rounds by a few and tossing an xor between them at some spot or another.  It would totally break any fixed function hardware, but would be a 2 LOC for any cpu/gpu miner.   I think something like that would be an unfortunate loss of an opportunity, but it would also keep open the possibility of change in the future by avoiding fixed function hardware.

Bitcoin could use a change... Really someone could just come out with a new coin with a changing algo over time to prevent this once and for all.

And if we change LTC will just get changed Asics.

Also, We would need to make the change soon, before mining voting power is lost.

I'm surprised to see you posting this gmaxwell.

A lot of the earlier developing staff saw this coming in 2012 and their response was this: "ASICs are an important means to secure the network and represent that a chain is reaching maturity."

The longer time goes on, the more I see this as true.  There will be other coins to fill the gap.

My response now is: no, there's no need to change the algorithm and ASICs should be embraced, when they finally do come out.

Indeed, I thought LTC's motivations were outright stupid here— and what you were 'quoting' there could easily have been me. I still think resisting ASICs is a not very useful goal, but it is a clearly stated goal of the system, and it does serve to distinguish it from Bitcoin.

After working with a number of ASIC makers in Bitcoin space, I have to say that some of the luster has worn off a bit from my prior enthusiasm too, not enough to disagree with my prior position, but enough to say that was more complicated than I gave it credit for:  ATI never raised their prices (usually after recovering NRE from sucker buyers who eat all the risk, even though the asics have no resale value) to the point where it was difficult to make a return on being a miner yourself, ATI never ran huge farms with substantial chunks of the network hashrate, etc. But this is an aside.  I don't mean to doom and gloom ASICs: so long as specialized hardware is possible— and it always is— having the honest users using it is good... but LTC sold a Bill of Goods that excluded this stuff, and so ASICs showing up is arguably a bug.
 

We're not at a time when BTC mining has reached maturity, really.  In 6 months the market will be flooded with devices and companies will find themselves in a fierce battle to lower prices and try to outsell their competitors.  ASIC manufacturers right now have no idea of the industry that they're seeking to enter, but people who have been involved in the microchip business since the earlier advent of computers are seeing echoes of the past.

I think that repurposing hardware is good for the next big chain, or for finally giving the incentive to complete the primecoin GPU miner, or whatever.

tacotime and myself did a few benchmarks with tweaked scrypt params: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=122256.msg1316383#msg1316383

The creator of scrypt has said that the he thinks that scrypt params of Litecoin don't use enough memory (link (https://twitter.com/shamoons/status/311256158658760704?x)), probably before he fully considered the tradeoffs between cost-effectiveness of ASIC and verification/propagation of blocks by Litecoin (non-mining) nodes. He later said that for the Litecoin scrypt params may be good, estimating that still would 10x advantage over SHA256 in terms of the cost-effectiveness of ASIC vs genereal-purpose hardware like GPUs (link (https://litecoin.info/Comparison_between_Litecoin_and_Bitcoin#SHA256_mining_vs_scrypt_mining)).

gmaxwell: regarding whether it will be too late to change the PoW hash function, as you've said in the past, miners exist at the pleasure of the users (link (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=146191.msg1557247#msg1557247)). To take an extreme scenario, this should supposedly/hopefully mean that if say 90% of the mining power (i.e. ASIC miners) and 10% of the users decide to follow certain protocol rules while 10% of the mining power (i.e. non-ASIC miners) and 90% of the users decide to follow different protocol rules, then the fork with 90% of the users should win. But such scenarios are vague and no one can predict the future, Bitcoin could also have such conflicts with ASIC owners who e.g. wish to change the block size limit to gain higher fees, or other scenarios that we can try to come up with...

I think that doing more scrypt benchmarks with the purpose of trying to see which scrypt params give the best tradeoffs is a good idea, coblee & warren what do you think?

gmaxwell, do you an educated guess regarding which scrypt params should offer the best tradeoff between making ASIC less cost-effective and fast enough validation/propagation of blocks by regular nodes?

My vote is on NO.

For the most secure network possible, ASICs are needed. Nothing is ASIC proof, changing the PoW is just delaying the inevitable. ASICs will come to Litecoin if they are economically feasible, no matter what PoW is implemented.

If ASIC uses 1% of the electricity as a gpu people will just use 100times as many... saves nothing.

now PoS could be a solution to the resources thing.

You have a point. PoS is the only solution to energy savings thus far I agree. I will retract the statement about energy efficiency. :)

I think my first point though is very valid.

A point I've argued many times. But in hindsight I was somewhat wrong. No finite collection of fixed algorithms (Even a large set) can be ASIC proof (in fact, large sets probably just lead to ASIC monopolies due to higher NRE).  But if you change the POW periodically in ways which aren't predicable months in advance, and in ways that can't just be generalized with anything more specialized than general purpose consumer hardware... then I do think you would actually have achieved a fairly high degree of asic-proof-ness. There is just the question of the costs of periodic changes being worth the benefits, and what cadence is required to make investment unwise.

Hmm continuously select the params of the PoW hash function deterministically according to pseudorandom bits of future blocks? Interesting idea...

Edit: I think that maybe the idea is that if ASIC miners have a large fraction of the current hashpower, and they try to control the pseudorandom bits that will decide the next PoW params, then they will have a disadvantage in the competition against other miners because they'll have to re-solve blocks multiple times until they get params that they prefer?

Also.. any poll held on this is going to be pretty biased IMO because of the number of GPU miners that frequent this subforum. Of course most of them will vote Yes.

As far as a PoW that will be more ASIC resistant. What about Momentum PoW.. what Protoshares is using: http://invictus-innovations.com/s/MomentumProofOfWork.pdf

EDIT: After thinking about if for a bit, the Momentum PoW would not work as it would effectively cut out current GPU miners. Any change of the PoW must allow everyone that is already participating in mining Litecoin to continue to do so.

I admit gmaxwell, there very may well be a way to make a coin ASIC proof, but I'm not really sure how it could be done.

Don't believe everything you read. These protoshare guys apparently have never heard of cycle detection algorithms (like Pollard's rho) that find collisions while avoiding the space complexity blowup, their whitepaper is nonsense.

NO

Changing it will deter the price dramatically, and you will have a lot of people leaving Litecoin (including myself). Nobody wants to invest in something if the rules are just going to be changed later. Change is inevitable. Sure go ahead and modify the code. Someone somewhere will figure something out eventually and you will be doing the same thing all over again.

It's a slippery slope, and you're opening a whole new can of worms.

(and I am a GPU Litecoin Miner)

In practice that just means the optimal mining technology will be the world's best FPGA, instead of the world's best fixed-function ASIC. :D
Unless you're capable of creating a substantially different POW function every couple days to defeat skilled, well-funded, and persistent FPGA designers (and C-to-RTL synthesis tools)...

Anyway, I believe it's morally wrong to change the POW 2+ years after launching a coin, if you did not at least mention that possibility when creating it. You would destroy many hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in the "evil" ASIC(s) which, in the long run, will make all cryptocurrencies less secure by encouraging private, secret, centralized ASIC development. And then there's the whole slippery slope aspect - if we can change the POW, what else can we change? How about we increase the block reward 10X so I can haz moar coinz plzz, at the expense of savers?

A significant advantage of existing cryptocurrencies is that the key attributes were made fully public up front, held constant, and not politically revised by any party (so far). If you start making up the rules as you go along, you've just created a less centralized & possibly more democratic, but still politically manipulable, imitation of a Central Bank and fiat currency. Maybe there is demand for that, maybe not, but if you want that, you should at least have the decency to launch it as a new coin, rather than corrupting an existing one.

-rph

I vote yes because this will discourage the proliferation of unnecessary altcoins. Here's my argument. With the advent of ASICS litecoin was in the right place at the right time. Miners were stuck with obsolete hardware that could not profitably mine bitcoins, so they enthusiastically joined the litecoin community, thus providing it with substantial impetus. Once litecoin-enabled ASICS become available, the cycle will repeat itself on some other altcoin. Most altcoins are junk, and the ones that aren't should grow on their own merits, not because they rely on GPU/CPU proof-of-work. Litecoin can maintain its hegenomy by periodically buying time with tweaks to the proof-of-work.

The miners can vote on whether they wish to change a protocol rule, as was the case with BIP16 (P2SH) in Bitcoin.

coblee has initiated a public discussion on changing the scrypt params, a few months after Litecoin was launched (link (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=64239.0)).

But do you hold the vote before or after the ASIC is deployed in significant quantity? ;)
In effect, whoever decides the timing, decides the outcome of the vote.

-rph

Before, maybe non-mining users can also vote via some sort of a fee, though this can be messy...

BTW, I'll believe that ASICs that use 128.5kbytes (or less with TMTO) per scrypt() invocation exist only after I see any, the production cost of such an ASIC should be much higher than SHA256 ASIC.
Maybe some Bitcoin ASIC manufacturer like Avalon can estimate for us how costly it is to manufacture scrypt ASIC ?

I'm all for ASICs as long as we can keep the cost of them prohibitively expensive so that only us early adopters can afford to stay on top. I'm so sick of all these newbs just now getting into LTC. Price them at 500-1000 LTC each and we'll be good.

*cough*

I'd suggest not to change it. Since BTC's success has proven that ASICs are good, LTC can follow the same trajectory: to take off further.

BTC is exploring on the moon where no one has been before. Being number one means BTC has to innovate in order to continue its success. LTC has been a successful follower so far. Being number two takes less market share but also less risk.  In almost any market, there's always room for a number two, a follower, who doesn't need to be too innovative.

It seems like a question of philosophy and degrees to me. Scrypt is GPU and ASIC resistant. Should it be ASIC hostile?

Some of the things talked about when litecoin was just a glimmer in coblee's eye were low initial cost mining, mining on consumer hardware, spreading coins out with a wide mining base, discouraging centralization, being open and transparent.

ASICs worry me. It's a fact that a scrypt ASIC would have to be much more expensive and more complex than their bitcoin mining counterparts. That could work against the majority of miners in the end. All PoW mining eventually comes down to hash/watt. If scrypt ASICs are going to be more expensive AND more efficient at hashing then that could stratify the mining economy. Potentially limiting mining to those with tens of thousands of dollars to spend in a pessimistic scenario. Going further, what if the ASIC producers refuse to sell? Self mining while protecting their ASIC designs in the courts.

There's obvious trust issues there. The real innovation of crypto coins is their trust-less nature. What gmaxwell said about litecoin differentiating itself resonates with me.

What would be the downside of small periodic changes to the PoW? It's pretty much limited to a software problem. I don't think any scrypt ASICs have started mining yet. That would have shown up on the network hashrate. So there's no miners to hurt at this time. Miners and users should have to do more frequent software updates. There would have to be steady software development.

The miner side of that could be a problem with GPU support for cgminer being dropped. On the other hand, a few months ago there was a very successful funding drive for litecoin development. Some will be unaware of changes or refuse to update their software. On the other hand, encouraging users to stay on the latest versions could give huge security and efficiency benefits to the net.

Changing the PoW also sends a message. Litecoin is ASIC HOSTILE, forget about it, don't even try. Without a doubt there will be other coins that would not take this path and scrypt ASICs would be produced eventually (maybe not without a doubt, I think it's likely though). It also says that litecoin is a work in progress, subject to change. I can see that in both a positive and a negative light. Shouldn't we keep trying to make the more perfect coin? It's not a tyranny, any software developers are free to make their bids and users are free to vote.

I'm surprised to say that I'm in favor of the proposal. I'm not fully versed in all aspects of this choice but it seems to be the lesser of two evils and would be in line with litecoin's principals and core philosophy, as I understand them.

EDIT: I don't think this is any kind of problem in the near future. I'm trying to imagine the network YEARS from now. I'd rather not see a couple of data center type mining farms being the only ones hashing for litecoin.

There won't be only one ASIC designer. Don't worry about it. ASICs will drive the price of LTC much higher. The reason is simple: the initial few ASIC adopters will be very profitable since there rigs are faster, thus driving the price of ASICs high. As more people use ASICs, mining will become much less profitable. Miniers will then consider choosing between the following:
a) spending 2000 dollars to buy ASICs to mine just 2 LTCs in 3 moths
b) spending 2000 dollars to buy 4 LTCs

LTC price thus goes much higher. This is what we've seen in BTCs history.

By losing some miners, you will see more buyers of LTC. There need to be just enough miners in order to secure the network, not too many of them. But a successful currency needs more investors. LTC initially need to be GPU/ASIC proof in order to have enough miners to prove it is secure. But now I think there are more than enoughh miners.


If this would be a problem then BTC would encounter it first. LTC will then still have enough time to avoid it. Being a follower takes much less risk.

Arguably the attribute made public was, technically, that litecoin was best mined on CPUs. If I found a bug that let me make additional litecoin out of thin air, would it be immoral for litecoin to fix it? You couldn't really make the same argument to introduce such a bug.

In any case— just a thought.

This is the first time I've heard someone suggest that. I thought it was generally accepted that Bitcoin's price in march was primary related to the increased press Bitcoin received from the cyprus default and bank funds confiscation. 

It certainly should be ASIC-hostile. ASICs allow for more mining centralization than card-miners. It's another thing that allows Litecoin to be distinct from Bitcoin.

Then the question remains, will other scrypt coins follow suit? or will there be a "split" between asic-minable scrypt coins (feather coin/bbq) and litecoin?

I suspect that gmaxwell started this discussion in order to let LTC fail. Changing hash algo is very dangerous and is the easiest way for a hard fork. Enough altcoins have dies because of hard fork.

I own both LTC and BTC. I sincerely hope that the BTC and LTC communities will work together. There will be alot more difficulties ahead along the way, for any currency to be finally successful.

I disagree, I don't think there's a hard link between coin prices and difficulty going up. Your statement contradicts itself a bit there too. If prices were to go up because coins are harder to mine, then those mined coins would be more valuable. Making mining more attractive.

I think being reactionary and changing the PoW after the release of ASICs when centralization has become a problem would be a disaster. That just sounds like pure turmoil to me.

LTC was created to be as fair as possible. Attacking high priced custom hardware in the hands of a few in favor of consumer grade GPGPU mining available to everyone makes sense to me. The bar for entry is very low, easy for many to step over. If you have a PC you can start mining reasonably effectively with about $150. Litecoin will seem very different on the whole if you need to spend enough to buy a car to get in the door.

EDIT: Slight change to first comment

It would be a really bad precedent if technical specifications of a coin are that arbitrarily changed. Other coins would start changing their specifications left and right, and it would end in a total chaos. I suggest we consider initial specifications of a coin as a written contract that absolutely cannot be changed. It'll be easier and safer for everyone that way. When rules are defined once and forever - this is an HONEST coin. Redefining rules is highly suspicious and screams of FRAUD. Just my modest 20 millilitecoins.

It indeed can be dangerous if the network topology is truly decentralized, but not so much when there are no more that several dozens mining pools. We already have a precedent, the transition can be done safely in the same way that the BIP16 transition was done, i.e. first a majority of the miners vote that they are willing to accept the change in the future, and only then after there's a significant majority they switch to a client that actually implements this change.

There wont be really serious investments into litecoin until energy-efficient devices will come out.

My concern would be the perceived "fairness" of any change. The majority of the current miners are using GPU, but a change of algorithm would affect the relative profitability of GPU vs CPU mining (in extremis making GPU mining impossible) and I expect it would change the balance between different GPU cards. Whatever is chosen then someone will feel maligned (and certainly the very few FPGA miners we have currently in the wild).

There is a need to ensure that miners for the new algorithm are publicly available and promoted well in advance of the change, or we risk a scandal where a few lucky individuals gain a huge advantage by (for example) having a more efficient GPU mining implementation than is publicly available.

Finally the algorithm needs to be provably secure. I'm no crypto expert, but from what I've seen of the SHA3 candidates, these were designed for ease of hardware (ASIC) implementation, so this would rather limit the field, perhaps just to tweaking the parameters of the existing scrypt algorithm, which would probably not be sufficient to rule out ASIC (or FPGA) using external memory (its memory bandwidth hungry, not memory per-se, so just increasing the number of rounds, or the scratchpad size would not necessarily prohibit an ASIC solution). EDIT: And as for ECDSA, I believe fpgaminer already has an implementation in FPGA for vanity mining, so that algorithm is certainly not ASIC/FPGA proof.

Anyway, I'm not convinced ASIC will offer a huge gain over GPU, perhaps a little more energy efficient but the NRE cost will make it expensive compared with GPU.

So I voted no (perhaps to be expected as one of those evil FPGA developers ;) )

I hope ASIC mining will be push out from LTC...

Yes.

ASICs will centralize the network. We can see it happening with BTC.



 

It would be trivial to change the algorithm... as long as most of the miners switch... it's effectively changed.  And, what's more, you can make it perfectly ASIC resistant:  have a public forum vote on the next algorithm.   Select from a few alternatives.   Vote on the best one, and whichever wins, schedule a time for the switchover.   Old/new blocks can be distinguished with a version stamp.   No integrity has to be lost.   It would make for a great story and litecoin could remain "lite" forever.   Other coins can jockey for CPU position (my fav CPU is primecoin).

No, because I want LTC to strengthen (higher hashrate leads to stronger network).

This.  My vote is no, let litecoin develop on its own even if ASICS will come out for it to mine them.

NO - because it is dangerous to change fundamental properties of a coin after its release. That is crypto 101.

You mean like Bitcoin did?

I answered no to the pool, and I have to say I am surprised that the majority of vote is Yes (LTC haters?)
I agree that ASIC technology decreases mining decentralization but ONLY during the first stage.
ASIC is the way to go to secure the network, gain credibility and attract more investors.

Up until now I haven't seen any proof of LTC ASIC, have you? ...

YaCoin with its increasing N factor already covers that niche. Current memory requeriment is at 4MB (for Litecoin's 128kB), will be 32MB in 2015, 256MB in 2020, 1GB in 2030, etc. Whoever doesn't like the effect of scrypt ASICs on Litecoin can just trade their coins and will likely lose less value than in a hard fork -- which, if it just raises N once, will be just a temporal patch.

Just having the threat of possibly changing Litecoins algorithm could be enough to keep ASIC's at bay (or keep them secret).

No one will invest in developing an ASIC for Litecoin if there is the chance that the ASIC will then become worthless.  

I used to be against ASIC's being made for Bitcoin while I was mining Bitcoin with my GPU's.  The supply could not meet the demand initially and it felt unfair.  With all the huge delivery delays and scams, I was not prepared to risk investing in ASIC's.  Also, for a about a month, Bitcoin became extremely vulnerable to a 51% attack.  Anyone with just a few ASIC's could have overpowered the network.

Now however, Bitcoin ASIC's are readily available, the network is becoming very secure once again, and the massive investment in technology has only added to the credibility if Bitcoin.  

If Litecoin can follow the same path, I think it will only be good for it.

I haven't actually read anywhere that someone has come close to having a working ASIC for Litecoin though, which is surprising.  Bitcoin was at $15 with 25 btc per block when jgarzik received his first 48gh Avalon.

I voted NO not becuase i wan't this coin to fail but becuase i don't think it would be practically possible to make sush dramatic changes and get most people to agree on a new Nfactor. I don't wan't the coin to fail yet since i need to finance my new multi GPU setup  ;D

A new coin only with a different Nfactor would probably die off pretty fast for obvous reasons.

Check out cypherdocs gold down btc up thread where this economic effect was discussed as a possible cause of btc price rise.  New people come to btc seeing huge gains.  Mining appears on the surface to be easy money.  But once people realize mining is a zero sum losing game they move on to straight investment.  Wouldn't surprise me if eventually we will see a crypto coin released with a ready made ASIC that goes with it.

No proof yet but from this thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355268.0 there should be chips in developer's hands in the next few days. The performance is nothing to write home about (60kHash/sec scrypt plus another 1.75 GH/s or so SHA256d in dual mode), but where they lead others will follow.

Jasinlee's Fibonacci project is now claiming to be ASIC too https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=368468.0 though originally it was FPGA. This employs off-chip SDRAM so is likely to be more cost effective IMHO.

This statement isn't necessarily true, the correct statement is that higher decentralized hashrate leads to a stronger network.
Here's a comment by coblee on that: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=165015.msg1723744#msg1723744
You can see some more info at https://litecoin.info/Comparison_between_Litecoin_and_Bitcoin#SHA256_mining_vs_scrypt_mining

Bump for move votes. Not sure if it even matters anymore :-[

These Scrybt Asics are still vaporware and from what I read in the asic miner thread they more expensive per MH then GPU , only advantage they have is less power consumption

Do we need false resistance?
The problem with picking an algorithm like scrypt is that you are starting with a false assumption of "resistance"(think of a cheap watch that says water resistant)
resistance is not the same as proof! e.g Litecoin started by saying GPU,FPGA,ASIC resistant this has now changed over time to just be Asic resistance, can you see the problem?

Why is it a problem for Scrypt?
Because as the algorithm became more popular and other people starting working on ways to mine scrypt they found ways to mine it on GPU and FPGA thus the so called "resistance" is a flawed method!

What's so bad about Scrypt?
to create the resistance the developers have created a linear function which consumes resources on any platform CPU, GPU, FPGA, ASIC

this is bad for Asic development because it costs money for extra silicon space :-\

the reason Asic's are so fast is the they are Application-specific integrated circuit and the more cores you can get on a small amount of silicon space/design area the better as it will result in cheaper and faster designs and thus Asic mining hardware

so you can understand that Scrypt Asic's will cost more and also not be able to scale the cores to get good performance in terms of hashes per second for the end user thus it will be a very long time to get your ROI for a Scrypt based Asic device  :'(

The exponential growth of technology is often described by Moore's law and has shown for many years how we will always look for new more efficient and faster ways of doing the same thing  :D

Better Idea?
Pick a fast and well balanced algorithm that can work well on all platforms so when you use it on GPU,FPGA,ASIC you get good performance and lower costs to produce any type of hardware

I think it would be best to have good balance of efficiency, power usage, performance and cost effective implementations on all platforms so when someone wants to spend excessive amounts of money on R&D for a Asic miner they should pick an algorithm that would use very little silicon space = more chips a wafer = cheaper $ per chip

I have picked and modified Blake-256 to fit this exact role as it has a better parallelism than SHA-256 and is faster and uses less resources  ;D

First coin to be made with Blake-256 is Blakecoin (named after the algorithm) and is also merge mine capable   8)

unlike Scrypt based coins with Blake-256 we can make new coins and then just merge mine them on pools, we can then just mine pools that merge the coins we like rather than this pick and choose battle that is going on in the Scrypt based alt coin world  ::)

I am not a salesman or a marketing guy so I built Blakecoin from a technical point of view with efficiency and long term use in mind and forgot to add the spin and hype  :D

anyway hope I have explained why Scrypt based Asic's are such a risky investment  ;)

Merry Christmas everyone

The majority have agreed to change the POW. Fork away!

More discussion:
http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/1u2fst/a_majority_of_litecoin_holders_agreed_in_a_vote/

Novacoin changes stuff around, they think nothing of screwing around with interest rates for example, setting them nice and high knowing their cronies won't object as long as they plan to change them back low again once they and their cronies have gained lots from the high interest.

Gosh knows what other screwing around they might decide at any moment to do.

-MarkM-

You modified it?

Oh great just what we need, a home-made made-up crypto algorithm.

Didn't they have a don't do this at home label on the damn thing?

Please everyone avoid the damn thing until real cryptographers have had a few years to thoroughly look it over like they probably did with the real Blake that this guy claims to have hacked up somehow.

-MarkM-

The new Cuckoo Cycle proof-of-work system that I made available yesterday at

  https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo

should be more robust against time-memory tradeoffs.

Check this topic : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=404364.0.

Vertcoin : Adaptive N-factor in Litecoin

 ;D

Not too many voted considering how many people have a stake in Litecoin.

More people will see the thread if it was stickied by mods.

i think yes because being mined few people is bad. If we target to be global currency we must reach all people.

yes, fuck asic

Yes. In order to keep the currency decentralized, the distribution of hashing power must be divided among the largest possible amount of people. We're gonna see LTC go the the BTC route and in a few years, the whole network will be in the hands of a few wealthy miners.

Perhaps if this occurs, something such as an Equalcoin can occur that truly focuses on the highest possible degree of decentralization. All of the arguments that LTC needs ASICs to be more secure are bologna. What you really need for these coins is public acceptance and excluding more and more folks and creating larger barriers to entry is going to put the power in the hands of a few <-- a dangerous precedent that BTC seems to be going down.

Yes. And time is running out. One guy on the middlecoin pool already has 800MHash/sec ASICs online, and stated that he will up it to 4000MHash soon. That is several percent of the whole LTC network. Action is required now, before the voting power of the GPU miners is lost!

it would be good every one or two years the PoW to change a bit ;)

The whole purpose of Litecoin was to make it ASIC resistant, so I vote yes.

Is there a way to verify this?  Aren't all these ASIC companies just starting to take preorders?

No. More hashing power makes it more resilient against a 51% attack. And changing it midstream isn't a great idea if it isn't absolutely required.

There is a fair share of preorder schemes, some of them being scammy.

But these guys actually have scrypt ASICs online ('gridseed' chips). Check the thread on middlecoin.com. Chinese, they post there under the name sfire or someting similar (couldn't find him just now). They just mine for themselves at the moment, because the chips are 'too profitable to sell' right now.


This is their stats. The hashrate has constantly risen over the last few days, with about 80 MHash/s per day:

http://middlecoin2.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/reports/1M3jtksp1upR33SX1VzeCfH5x9fc6zKykR.html (http://middlecoin2.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/reports/1M3jtksp1upR33SX1VzeCfH5x9fc6zKykR.html)

You could not do this with a botnet, and the sheer size and growth rate makes a GPU farm very unlikely

you are correct. like BTC, ASICs made it more secure and its value was increased dramatically.
The same could be made to LTC and other srcypt coins. This is a good thing, no? ;)

No, Zoro. it's not a good thing because it means eventually there will only be 2 or 3 miners with all the hashing power as all other forms of mining become obsolete and development of these chips becomes more and more secretive. One chinamen having 4000mh/s - 20% of a pool he joins is ridiculous. I thought the point of cryptocurrencies were to decentralize? Now, you're going to tell me no, the actual point was whomever can afford to make the biggest investment and price the most others out makes it somehow decentralized? That's a complete joke. Good thing I'm not mining Litecoin.

Think about the proportion of a small personal individual investment ROI on putting the effort into assembling GPU rigs and then think about how simple it is for some big hotshot (like in this case) to get basically a guaranteed return on investment at GPU miners' expense. Many are failing to realize that Litecoin gained popularity for this reason - the BTC GPU Miners who spent so much time and effort investing in their rigs got stiffed at the end by big $$ coming into play.

Also, the people saying "no" are likely the ones who pre-ordered the ASIC chips. None of them are willing to discuss the decentralization issue, instead putting up a useless argument that the network will be more secure. It will be just as secure if you can assure people ASIC chips will not come in and price them out of existence. In reality, getting the mining to be distributed among more individuals will make the coin more secure and less susceptible to threat from intervention from government. Do we really want to go down the same route?  Ridiculous arguments in support of ASICs. Absolutely ridiculous.

What increases the value of a coin is the public's acceptance of it as an alternative to fiat currency to be used for transactions. Insisting we need these giant increases in hashing power to increase price is false - the amount of investment capital poured in has little correlation to the price. It's based on what the public's perception of trust is in the coin and that's something nobody has been able to achieve yet. The biggest proponents of decentralized currency are still sticking to gold & silver for this very reason - people like you want LTC to be an investment, which in-turn produces more dollars for you. This will ultimately be the battle in the cryptowars - those looking to make money as investment VS those looking to decentralize authority and control over the currency.

Put the power in the hands of the most possible miners and LTC will surpass BTC. Let it go down the same route and it will always be considered a 2nd rank CC

Litecoin changing it's POW - Hmm.. Not sure, you'll only have to do it agin and again..

YaCoin does a nice job as a variable scrypt coin.

If you want a coin to be truly ASIC resistant you may need to come up with a completely new algorithm paradigm.

Serendipitously enough - I have just had an idea that may/may not work..

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=322581.msg4450472#msg4450472

Please check that out.. Curious to hear if you think it might/won't work..

I like the idea, Sparta. There is also one fellow on the mining board who came up with the idea of a "equalcoin" based on the premise that the methodology behind mining is
false paradigm. The paradigm must shift from "maximum hashing power" to "maximum amount of total users". Think about it. What would make the coin ultimately more valuable - achieving the same hashing power from having 500,000,000 miners around the globe OR having the power come from a few people who have priority access to development of chips? I'd rather have my coins in the hands of the people than in the hands of a few miners whos self-interest will surpass the interest of the coin-holders and other miners.

BTC did not achieve its goal of becoming a commodity and being widely accepted. It's become more of a speculator type of deal (both in price and in terms of mining) and because of that, it's going to be easily to prone to regulatory bullying, etc. I guess these currencies now are just paving the way. Bugs will eventually have to be fixed to create an ever-increasing effort for inclusion, instead of exclusion which is what these ASICs do.

Looks like cheap used GPUs incoming.   :-\

i like the coin!

First 4 users on wemineltc.com! are these botnet or ASIC?


1   UserID 28113   351,960    KH/S
2   UserID 29608   312,130    KH/S
3   UserID 21386   305,670    KH/S
4   UserID 107637   251,135    KH/S

Other than gridseed (ASIC) and ltcgear.com (FPGA), none of the other ASIC developers have shown anything that could account for this sorts of hashing power... not sure what's going on...
I keep a list of all the LTC FPGA/ASIC developers on the LTC forum: https://litecointalk.org/index.php?topic=6506.0

Of course, ASICS are shit. They bring no secure, they bring only possibility of 51% attack and the whole network will be in 1-2-3 hands!
And I vote for changing algorithm, if it is possible.

But, don't you think, that middlecoin-mega-hash-man just slowly redirect his big-big gpu farm from elsewhere to middlecoin? I think, that's the point!

High hashing power does not imply secure network necessarily. And ASICs are especially risky since only few guys can obtain them, and they give you a lot of advantage with respect the rest of the miners therefore, it's way more easy for a guy with cash to 51% attack it.

Also, if ASICs become the norm, I'm out of LTC because like many folks have said, Bitcoins was meant to be obtained by just running the CPU in your home, and that's a key factor for cryptos to become succesfull.

Proof of Activity (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=102355.0) by Charles Lee

Scrypt ASICs need to stay away and leave us GPU people be

If they want more coins all they have to do is make more SHA-256 coins they don't need to ass rape the scrypt coins.  Sure it will be profitable for them for a few months, and then after that every coin will be like bitcoin.  Fuck that

Agreed. One could make a good argument that the bitcoin network is less secure now than it was in 2012.

I am concerned by these developments, in light of LTC's initial purpose. 

Is anyone in touch with the devs?  Is there a way to get ahold of them for discussion?

Perhaps they have been bought off with some early pre-orders? 

I think people really miss the big picture here. If you are worried about centralization then trying to push ASICs out with memory changes will not help. This is why: the first time you change the code, ASICs will not work. People who develop ASICs will immediately get wise and as soon as the technology catches up(and it will) they will make ASICs and just mine with them. If they are smart they will mine to different pools under different names, etc. The only reason you know there are ASICs on the market is because people tell you. If no one told you, all you would see is a spike in difficulty over time. Even that can be spread out to not look conspicuous. Now you have one company doing untold percentage of the network hashrate and you have centralization all over again. This time it's without public knowledge of it which is even more dangerous.

Is centralization bad? yes. However, ASICs don't cause centralization by themselves. If people in the LTC community got more group buys, and got more ASICs into people's hands then there wouldn't be a centralization issue at all. It is only because all the GPU miners have no desire to get ASICs or be a part of the arms race (and who can blame them) that centralization happens.

Well its the price point. That is what the issue is. Most people have a hard time getting 500 bucks together for another video card.... now with these asics your gonna ask to get 2K+? The only ones that will have this are those with money, and then what happens is these people with these "asics" will then dump coins on the market even faster and lower the prices even more, which in turn kills off even more normal users due to less profits. By the time something is "more affordable" it does not make sense to spend the money because the ROI is so damn low.

http://static3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110907222405/bttf/images/a/aa/Clock_Tower_Lady.jpg



Save the clocktower, vote yes to resisting ASICs.

I agree on all your points, unfortunately changing the POW doesn't fix this, it only makes it worse.

That is little out of context, he went on to say that a democracy of uninformed people does not work. What he was referring to was the fact that people don't understand the dangers of changing the POW and he does. He also said in that same chat that if you can convince people at the litecoin foundation with arguments that the risk is worth it, he is happy to listen and possibly take action if the dangers are understood. At least that is how it read to me.

You can always vote with your feet and just sell your LTC.

No; ASIC technology will never catch up to requiring many GBs of memory.

Just adopt a PoW that takes at least a GB of memory to solve
(with no time-memory tradeoff) and that depends on latency rather than bandwidth.

That will put an end to specialized mining hardware.

Yes, ASIC technology absolutely will catch up. It may take time but considering how fast larger memory sizes come out and then cheapen it should be no surprise that it will. I suggest you read up on Moore's law and the new memory technologies coming out. This is and always will be a function of price of a coin and price of memory (and of course difficulty).

I suggest you read up on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random-access_memory#Memory_wall

Main memory latencies have improved very slowly over time.
Highly optimized ASICs for latency-hard algorithms already exist.

They're called memory chips.

WTF 2/3 of people support a PoW change. Maybe the devs of LTC should have thought of ASIC resistance before setting the n-Factor and memory requirements absurdly low, but lying to everyone how ASICS and GPUs are an impossibility.

++1

Are there serious plans out to restrict ASICS?
Or are this only all speculative, so no one will really ban the ASICS?
Eventually are the ASICS the "backbone" of the coins, but its a game with the fire?

There is no TMTO if recomputing the data to save half the memory is millions of times slower, as it is with the right memory-hard PoW.

Yes, 100%

It's such a scam, the only people who win are the manufactures, who take pre orders months in advance, and sell it to the people who pre ordered them just when it's more profitable for the ASIC companies to sell the ASICs rather than to mine with them. The difficulty goes way up, ruining it for the people who bought the ASICs and us regular folks. And on top of that, the ASICs have no resale value, unlike the GPUs.

I rather just spend the 8 thousand dollars on Litecoins and see if it goes up in the months before the ASIC is released, and the many months, maybe over year to get a ROI.

In fact, I rather buy 25Mh of GPUs than buy a 25Mh ASIC, because at least I know I can resell the GPUs in a couple of months and break even, rather than wait a couple of months to get the ASICs and then wait who knows how many months to break even, if ever. And then have a dead weight sitting there.

Litecoin was designed to be ASIC proof. Even GPU proof, but that did not work out either. ASIC is definitely not the back bone of Litecoin yet. But changing the PoW function is hazardous, certainly. Still, I vote for it. Because Litecoin will lose one of its distinguishing features if it becomes dominated by the ASIC miners.

Although the votes are skewed towards yes, I'm glad a significant amount of talk is for not changing it.

As mentioned earlier, doing so would lead to a slippery slope; and is just a means of delaying an "inevitability." The issue is that the premise was already shaky from the start; in such a burgeoning and young area (in technology, no less) a sweeping statement saying that a protocol would be ASIC-Proof was a stretch in itself. And the trickiest thing is how to ensure that the protocol remains ASIC-Proof. If we change it once, and then realize that we were wrong, we'll have to do it again. And again. And again...

I think that the implications of changing are far greater, and more far reaching than leaving it as is. How people react to it is another story (for all we know it could bolster the value of the network), but is it worth the "risk?" It would be much simpler changing the mission statement of LTC in my opinion. Once again though, the reaction to this type of change is unknown. Plus you lose the main "differentiating" feature of LTC. But for me, that is much more worth the "risk" than changing the protocol (and possibly changing it again and again).

I think the loss in credibility of possibly having to change a protocol multiple times far outweighs the credibility loss in changing a relatively young mission statement.

once these ASICs come out, they're going directly to the profit-switching pools like multipool/middlecoin.

so glad Quark doesnt have this problem ... it looks better and better all the time :)

GPU mining needs to die away slowly. Bring on the ASICs..

ASIC machines did not contribute anything, just taking $$$ out of minerts and put them in BFL-AVALON-KNC like companies.

Introducing ASIC to the scene would be same like cheating in the games, you will reach better score easily, but the game would become non-playable for a lot of ppl. Like when there is a cheater in CounterStrike pool and there are no admins, soon will be plenty of them, and the charm of gaming is spoiled by retard.

I do have to say, ASICs indeed shift the profit from those doing the actual mining to those making the mining gear.

It is a bummer.  There is a lot of fun in designing, deploying, and maintaining a large GPU farm.  I will be sad when ASICs obliterate that niche. 

Lets avoid the ASICs, we need to keep them away from us.  They are great for bitcoin and we are proud for that.  But we need scrypt to allude them.

That's the main issue that a lot of people don't understand. That it takes money away from the miners, and gives it to not the people who bought the ASICs, but to the companies that creates them.

People really have to think about what everybody asks, which is if they can make more money with their ASICs, then why don't they just mine it themselves. They do mine, they just sell it to people just in time for them to not be as profitable, since they have no resale value.

Are you sure that the existence of these scrypt ASIC is not a hoax? I've seen no FPGA scrypt implementation usable yet. And, having a FPGA is a first start to test and optimize a future ASIC.


In my opinion, having a fully specialized and efficient scrypt ASIC, interfaced with a high speed DDR5 memory (scrypt requires a lot of memory...) , and competitive with a R280X (4.3 billion transistors) will not be there tomorrow....

Not always.  For example, I don't see how you can compute this hash function without 32GiB of memory.

They are available- look for 'Gridseed'. At the moment, the pricing is on the level of GPU cards, in terms of kHash/$. But this is price gouging, they can be manufatured a lot cheaper, and will flood the market, once production is ramped up.
Unfortunately, because I really like running my GPU rigs  :(

do anything need to  avoid asic

The voters spoke. But nobody listens? nor comprehends? Let alone acts?

 2014 is THE YEAR of Bitcoin. Not 2013.

 Huge things are in store for btc in 2014, and any others along for the ride, as long as their extremely well marketed and promoted. If not their merely part of the noise in the side show called the Crypto Exchanges.


 What will 2015 be? Widespread Bitcoin adoption. And whoever else has their act fully done rides along too.


 It's Winner('s) take All.

Do I need to remind the greater crypto communities that everyone hate's losers?


 The vast majority of the marketplace already has it's #1 winner.

 There are only so many runner up slot(s).

 And the point being that once one get's to that position it will be difficult to dethrone them just like it already is going to be most difficult to dethrone BTC. Only BTC is now in that position. No one else has even arrived to the party yet. And everyone else has yet to prove their even worthy of success.

 These Alt. coin runner up's (winners, if there are any more winners) must force themselves into the marketplace fast, before btc gains too much of a stranglehold on far too many, to make much market penetration possible. And they each must carve out their own territory, and greater acceptance in the mainstream.

 So far a few minor one's are much more impressive than any of the major runner up candidates in terms of their marketing, promotion, and real world applications. I wont bother to discuss the details, that should already be painfully obvious for anyone that has paid attention.

 Needless to say businesses and everyone else will not care to juggle many different crypto-currencies unless their uniquely targeting audiences for whatever reason(s). The one thing that made Litecoin special is already now missing! That can't stand, and then also hope it passes the test of wide spread review and acceptance. If Litecoin cannot defend itself from ASIC's, then what else can it not defend itself from is the very thing many will soon question.

 It was thought that the wonderful thing about Litecoin was that it is ASIC proof, and that it was THE Crypto for The MASSES. But then we find out it's not. That simply must be fixed without any further delays. Or Litecoin ends as fraudulent, and likely fails because it cannot live up to it's major claim to fame. Others already are asic proof, or so they merely claim? Yet the CPU only types are also botnet-coin specialty frauds.

 Maybe even adding PoS is possible as an alternative, I don't know. I have no idea. Just fix it. And KISS it. (Keep it simple stupid = kiss). And for certain don't screw it up while doing so. And get it correct, the 1st time. Do all that and suddenly the Litecoin development team are the new hero's in the greater Crypto-Currency Revolution that is about to take the world by storm. And doing that, plus strong promotions and ever stronger marketing will force Litecoin to be at least #2.

 Enough burning daylight. There's no time left to waste.


 2014 is the rush to get into the mainstream marketplace.
====================================

 So far LTC is barely treading water.

 ASICs will be the ruin of Litecoin. That's a no-brainer.

 Again, the community has voted, the votes are in, and no one is changing their own votes.

 There is absolutely no time to waste anymore. Please get it done now, without further delay, and get those promotions and marketing plans fully underway now too. Otherwise a stampede will out run, and out play what was to be at least #2.

Correction: ASIC may result in many no longer supporting Litecoin. But that is merely speculative.
                         ----

  I am merely troubled what the end results could be. After more reflection I don't want to say asic mining of Litecoin will be it's ruin because clearly that is an unknown outcome that cannot be predicted.
In fact it may well be the best thing that ever happens to Litecoin. Only time will tell that outcome.


 My last thoughts on this topic:

 I am very dismayed and disillusioned after this poll here, and the poll taken in the Litecoin forum, both on this very topic, and that both polls results display that the clear majority desire for Litecoin to be shielded from asic mining going forward, if at all possible.

 Obviously many want asic mining going forward, and their in firm command and control.

 Okay, best of luck.

  As an investor, and miner too, I decided to already make a judgement call. I took profits a few days ago, and will point my miners elsewhere.

 Lastly; Those in firm command and control Litecoin have lost the confidence of the clear majority.


Caveat emptor

The best way to deter ASIC mining from gpu mining is to create competition among ASIC mining manufacturers.

One possible way is to create a new scrypt coin with much reduced N-factor (litecoin is 10?) and have hugh supply of coins in short time span-- like 500 billion in 1 year (dogecoin has 100 billion in 1.5 years) .

So everybody - even ppl without much computer knowledge - will be able to buy a $5 USB ASIC miner and start enjoying mining and owning some "new sparkling computer coin" !!

Vertcoin (VTC) is somehow similar to that

i voted yes, if you are currently mining with gpus and you are not mining vertcoin, you are doing yourself and all gpu owners a disservice and putting yourself out of business at the same time.

People tend to forget history.

"May 21st, 2010,  Laszlo Hanyecz, a programmer living in Florida, sent 10,000 bitcoin (BTC), the online-only, open source cryptocurrency, to a volunteer in England, who then spent about $25 to order Hanyecz some Papa John's."

Sometimes being first out of the gate with a new technology is an achilles' heel. But, you are right not all coins will succeed.

Estimated Next Difficulty:   6,367 (+11.00%)

too late?

Yes. Most likely. Unfortunately. All the GPU miners will be pushed out of the scrypt coins. Where will all the hash power go? N-factor scrypt? Or something completely new? This will be interesting.

必须要改算法，干掉矿机。作者的愿望不就是没有矿机的干预吗？现在矿机来了，算法不改的话，作者会被世人耻笑的

I dont know where you are getting your info:


Litecoin Difficulty:   5,835
Estimated Next Difficulty:   5,426 (-7.02%)

Just noticed the date, oops.

scrypt-n asic under testing ;D http://pic.twitter.com/eh7RXRuv6Ahttp://pic.twitter.com/CsTS2zgRhd

Hi,
Here i would defentely vote with YES. Lite coin should change and be asic protected.

BR,

Gondel

I vote for YES.

Year, change it.if ASIC comes, LTC is destroyed！

may be "DAC" do ti himself.

the rule is automatic or "most people" game ??

I CHOOSE "YES"

BECAUSE I HAVE GPU MINER.

矿机出现更利于发展   如果为了这个改算法  永远不会成为主流币

yes because ASIC destroyed Bitcoin .

Yes, change it to X11.

The talk about changing algos won't go away anymore.
I'm doing Darkcoin since yesterday and I already enjoy the silence and lack of heat mining X11.
My power bill will be cut in half. The chart for the coin looks amazing.

A lot of the hassle regarding fundamental changes in the software would be taken away, if there were an in-app update method contained in the wallet.

Having ASICs is not all bad. It's a much cheaper way to secure the blockchain. The argument that it somehow precludes small miners is also false. There are already GPU farms that control hundreds of MH and more (think hundreds of R9 280/290s), something that would be unthinkable for small miners. If anything cheap ASICs will make it easier to mine at much less power consumption for the average miner.

+1

Yeah, and suicide is also not that bad, you won't have to bring down the trash anymore, just saying.

wat?

Oh nothing important, let me just piss in your corn flakes.

distribute to more. the value is more

支持改变算法抵制矿机，虚拟市场唯一的出路！

aha,ithink so

pls!!!!!
change it!!!
change all the coinssssssssssss !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11

all coin based on LTC will die :-[

YES

抵制矿机，支持显卡！！！！

If you are going to travel down that Luddite road, why not make it GPU resistant too - a CPU only coin. Better yet, just rename it the ABACUS coin and implement an abacus only PoW algo.

Most people who criticize ASICS on the basis that they are offensive to the concept of decentralized mining need to stop and think.
In a very short time, ASICS will be as common and affordable as GPUS are today and everyone will have a few in their basement or garage.
Meanwhile, GPUs are rapidly ending up on the CPU die or SOC.


Aggregate distributed hashpower secures a coin, it does not threaten it. ASICS represent forward progress.

I think the dev should change the algo. You guys have made lots of money. Just do something more.

and that's a good thing

Litecoin was never made to be asic proof. Many other small cryptocurrenies just advertised their cryptocurrency as asic proof because asics had not been created yet for litecoin. Even if they change the algorithm hardware will eventually be made for it to mine faster.

avoid ASIC mining, bring more money to the market, not to the mining machines.

100% agree.
We allready have asic coin and its BTC no more needed.
For Ltc holders who dislike asics just sell it and buy other asic resistant coins(if they also fail to change algo after asic comes switch to other  )  and then I think developers will listen more to Your voice.
As I see POW system one of best on my option to solve double spend problem. So why pay meaningless hardware +kwh whitch will bring less sequrity when We can pay for kwh only with better sequrity.meaningless hardware Money bring to market and crypto related projects to improve cryptoeconomy.

From my understanding, a coin dev wants to have their coins network be secure. IE spread on mining power. The mining power itself is somewhat irrelevant from my understanding. Example:
10 people mine GoofyCoin, They use gpu's, each person has 1 GPU, all same model gpus. That's 1/10th of the mining security. Someone decides to add another GPU to their rigs, they now own a bit more of the mining power. One person joins making it 11 people now, They have an asic that can do the same as 4 gpu's. This becomes closer to threatening the security however there are enough gpu miners to still hold the spread of mining power to not make it a 51% attackable coin yet.

Now who do you think would be more willing to buy gpu's over asics? most consumers is generally the answer that people say.

Asics cannot be sold for other purposes that are useful via consumers or via enterprises as far as I know. Maybe MIT and schools may buy asics for computational math experiments, however still very hard to sell compared to graphics cards.

I would say every day consumers are more willing to try out mining and mine a bit with a high end graphics card that can help pay the power bill and maybe a little or all of their graphics cards price, paid for via the community that invests into crypto.

If we promote asics we are potentially eliminating the demand for the crypto which may lower the price of crypto.

I would rather have gpu miners and cpu miners mining crypto instead of asics due to the fact that the consumer is going to be willing to buy a graphics card or a cpu over buying a asic which has no additional use once it's obsolete. At least gaming cards and cpu's are useful in every day consumer use.

what i see is take kwh price plus a premium fee that covers mining, then you get your end result for how much a crypto coin should be of value. for example I pay .14kwh after taxes on my power. My hardware costs to setup a 24/7 miner with one gpu would be around $700. If it takes 300 watts total to run my PC 24/7 at .14 kwh that alone will cost me:$367.92 USD in power a year.
 If people want me to help secure the network and providing coins to the network for transactions, then I should be getting paid a minimum of 367.92 USD per year for this service. I would most likely also add some sort of premium since I have to buy the hardware, however that hardware at the same time is hardware that I may want to keep or can resell at a later point. Lets say a 50% premium rate on that $700.

That means after 1 year I'll have made back $350 on the $700. Then can either use the graphics card or sell the parts.

I strongly believe our coin networks should be based upon hardware prices and power prices. I'm no mathematician so I'm sure the above examples I provided could use a better formula. Either way the above example promotes proper stable growth instead of people whom buy asics since there aren't a lot of people whom would buy asics compared to people that would buy gpu's. coins that want to run on asics should be asic algo specific and the other algo's should be gpu specific. Luckily now we have scrypt-n that was meant to be for asic resistance to keep consumers in the game for mining. It would just be nice to see scrypt come back to its old ways of no asics since a lot of the alts that we're used to were mined primarily on gpu's for a long time and asics have ruined it.

asics haven't ruined anything, asics are merely another tool, human greed on the other hand has ruined a lot.

keep the rich whales out of this coin !!

Asics are already out and asics manufacturers will be pissed off !!
 :-*  ;D

+1 This guy has it spot on.

This place was pretty chill back in the day. After BFL, Pirate, Zhou and a few other things this place went down the drain. It went from being pretty cool with people helping each other out to a place where everyone is cut throat and trying to make an extra buck.

ASICs aren't the issue. GPUs, FPGAs, it's all the same really. Did anyone honestly think people were going to CPU mine for the next 100+ years?