Bitcoin Forum

Ok so what is so bad about the fact that Bitcoin now uses ASIC's that has everyone using Scrypt or other ASIC protected code?  Is it because they don't want to have to invest the cash for Bitcoin, or is there another reason that seriously disrupts the effectiveness of Bitcoin.  I understand they say it centralizes Bitcoin, but as the price rises the whales will get out earlier because they got in earlier so centralization doesn't seem to be a problem to me.  What is it?  Why use Scrypt?

Is it bad feeling from all the people who spent a very long time in pre-order while the required hashrate just kept going up, so effectively what they ended up with was a worse deal than what they imagined they would get?

Not into mining at all so am unsure, that just seems to be what I have read about.

Ignorance.

has a bank ever cancelled your purchase of a graphics card because it can be used for scrypt mining?  ???

has a government ever been interested in GPU owners?  ???

all that has happened to ASIC buyers, search the forum for some really scary stories....one of the biggest weaknesses of coins that depend on custom hardware  >:(

while the price of a coin can be greatly diminished by hostile action, the mining itself can not be stopped, if the hardware is generic. asics on the other hand can be blocked easily; if country X wants to block Asics from entering that is easily done at the border: block a few companies, block certain types of devices, done.

blocking cpu's or gpu's would not be feasible  ;D

ASICS however make the network broader and more resilient - if it wasn't for the constant threat from governments, banks, exchanges and so on.

its easy to pull the plug on big centralised operation = block chain stuck and open to 51%.

A top of the line GPU mining rig will cost an amount similar to an ASIC device. The ASIC is going to be way more efficient at mining.

CPU miners bitched about GPU miners the same way GPU miners bitched about ASIC miners.

Sorry, it's ignorance.

Valid point, however I think if a government wants to take down a crypto-currency it doesn't care if it has to ban ASIC's or have a war on crypto-currency miners similar to its war on drugs, if you change the scenario they will adapt accordingly.

Correct. Now if we had another xxx product to mine bitcoin, ASIC miners would hate those, and so on.

it's a 'rich get richer' sort of thing where those who have money can buy more powerful hardware and make more money faster so people create coins to combat this to distribute coins out more evenly.

I think people are more furious with companies making ASICS. I mean some preordered the Bfl shit in September and still haven't got it FFS. I personally prefer altcoin GPU mining.

That did cause a lot of heat.

I agree that is a "rich gets richier" thing.
I  own several ASICS, and (even close) none of them give me ROI yet.

Why, well, shipping time, shipping destination (if you are not in asia, europe or the US you are fucked) by the time the ASIC arrived, and I was able to take it out of customs, the complexity grow so much that they make very little.

I do NOT agree that is the same that CPU guys complains about GPU guys, because BOTH can be purchased easily anywhere!, ASICS do NOT.
ASICS require preorders, and those who are on the most developed countrys get them FIRST, and we, in 3rd world countries get them LAST, so we LOOSE, so IT IS a "rich gets richier" scenario, like it or not, admit it!.

GPU are versatile, can mine ANYTHING (and do other shady things too  ;D ;D ) so are my FIRST choice by FAR, and I can purchase them with easy, and NOT they are NOT cheaper than ASICS at all.
most top of the line GPUs I have costs a lot more than ASICs equipments, not to mention what costs 1 of my big GPU rigs.
but at least I can buy them without ppl asking me what is that, what are you using for, because they are general purpose items, and in some countries, the LESS the government know about what you do, the better!.
so, sorry, but it is NOT ignorance.
if I had live in asia, I probably had developed an ASIC by myself right now, since it is not the first time I design specific purpose ICs for the industry, but the country where you live is a decisive factor.

My personal opinion is that BTC was created to fight cintralization and to be available to everyone. ASIC's go against both of those things.

QFT and me, too about GPU mining. I'm a gamer, so why not?

I think bitcoin's early meteoric gains (china) drew the attention of a lot of wide-eyed slackers who thought they'd found the holy grail.

And they were right. The mistake they made was buying mining hardware from scam artists instead of simply trading their FIAT in for crypto and being patient enough for it to mature.

Everyone knows it doesn't cost $20,000 to produce one of these ASIC miners, but people pay it because it's a money-printer! Big surprise, you got scammed on the purchase of your money printer.

What did you expect? What rational human being would sell an object that is worth more plugged in that it is sold to the public?

No, ASIC devices do not "go against" both of those things.

Specialization is inevitable. It isn't logical to fight it.

Ultimately, hashing with an ASIC device is less expensive than hashing with a GPU or CPU because they are more efficient.

If Bitcoin continues to exist, we will see more available hardware as competition continues.

So much energy being wasted on mining, save the planet maaaaaaannn. But seriously, there is so much energy/power being used in mining. It's an obscene amount.

I hated them because the people selling them were not to be trusted.  i did not want to send my money into a blackhole where the people selling them thought very little of their customers.

It's far less than the energy required to run the things which Bitcoin could potentially replace.

How much energy does it take a single bank to be open for business each week? Consider the land to house the bank. The materials to build the bank. The vehicles to transport the employees too and from work. The paper checks. The plastic debit/credit cards. The air conditioning/heating. The security. The customers driving to and from the bank. Et cetera. How many actual banks exist? I think there are over 6 in my small town alone.

Then you have things like the VISA network. The printing of actual fiat money (which involves growing, harvesting, and preparing cotton). The US military to protect the petro-dollar! ;)

LOL, fiat is far more environmentally unsound.

Who cares. I'm mining on Mars anyway.

a single gpu can be bought easily for little investment. and does double duty as a gaming divice and mining investment. i know people who bought a better card or went crossfire because they would pay for themselves. and with the money made they went on and bought more or better equipment.

with asics it is imposible to work your way up. anything under a couple of grand wil never roi. and buying a gaming rig that you wil actually use for 2 grand or a box that sits in the corner wich you can only look at is not the same.  
it went from a nice interesting hobby to have some fun with for regular people and maybe even a way to pay for your gaming rig, to a wild west high stakes battlefield where if you dont pay attention and keep up with everything you will get fucked by everyone and their neighbour. in a matter of months.
and a lot of people lost everything, most of them by bad luck or things out f their controll.

if you dont have cash to burn, you just cant play at the moment. people who where running big rigs then jumped on the asics, those are not the ones who complain. the small guys who where the early adopters are the ones who feel robbed of their baby, and i can understand that. their baby turned into an out of controll teenager.

and indeed the asic manufacturers are also a big problem. they abuse the system in a way that was never intended. but i dont blame them. its part of the transition, if i knew how to make these things for a few houndred bucks and people where throwing buckets full of money at me just to get their hands on them i would also charge as much as i could get for them. anybody who says they wouldn`t is a liar or an idiot.

also the insane difficulty jumps turn the stuff you actually do buy into paperweights in a matter of months. those are risks you have to be willing and able to take, and indeed only for the people who actually allready have money.

but by this time next year things will will be back to how they where in the good old gpu days. the first asic chips where basicly ten year old technology. but asic manufacturers are catching up with current technology fast and when they hit the point where intel, amd and nvidea are now the big jumps in chip performance are a thing of the pas. things we tell our gandchildren about.
intel and amd have been struggling for years to push performance further. and those are the billion dollar big dogs. or do you think bfl has the r&d capabilaties to go out and show intel how its done. no way!

once performance increases go back to a 10 or 15% gain per year (gpus have been on this schedul for decades) instead of the current 50% per month because every month there is another dev who comes to market with even faster stuff, the network growth no longer will come from constantly faster and faster chips hitting the market, but just from sales of extra units. then the stuff that you buy will actually be rellevant for a few years.
just like 7950`s still are a decent buy nowdays, even though they have been on the market now for nearly 2 years or something. and even with amd gpus being sold out for months now, difficulty levels on scrypt never went as crazy as they did for sha. not even close.

bywhen that happens the asic manufacturers will all be selling basicly the same stuff. just like nvidea and amd, and chevrolet and dodge , and all other competing companies have been since the dawn of time.
We will be in controll of the market once again! Pre orders will go away! Prices of machines will drop and the cheap entry level asic miners will actually be relevent again and make some cash for the owner. enabling people to start small and work their way up again if they desire. or just do it for fun, as it should be.

the future for btc is bright!!! once the out of controll teenager becomes an adult. everybody wil love bitcoin again again. even the early adopters who are asic haters now.

There is really only one reason to hate ASICs. And it might not be a reason at all; there might not be any reason.

The fact that some miners have lost money because they are not able to compete with their GPUs is not a valid reason. They went into it as an investment. It didn't fail them. It only changed. Now they have to mine Litecoin, or some other coin that doesn't use ASICs, and buy/sell at one of the exchanges. They haven't lost. It has simply been another milestone for them to overcome. They will have done it already, or they would have failed anyway.

The only real reason to hate ASICs is that they help to clump mining into mining clubs or co-ops. It is this clumping that might become a danger to Bitcoin - the 51% danger - making Bitcoin centralized. We are at a strong point with Bitcoin... a strong point of financial freedom. If Bitcoin goes down because of centralization by some mining co-op, it will be a long time for some other coin - one that doesn't have the 51% flaw - to catch up.

Personally, I recommend building Peercoin (ppcoin) as an alternative to Bitcoin. Why? Peercoin has a good start. It seems to be reasonably stable. And it is both, mined and minted. Minting is based on how many coins you hold and for how long. The centralizing threat is almost nonexistent with Peercoin.

Let's build both Bitcoin and Peercoin, Bitcoin because it has such a good start, and Peercoin because it is a tad safer. Forget the hatred, and get on with your life. Focus your energies on helping yourself and everyone else against the flaws that are readily visible in the fiat currency system.

:)

i dont agree, the reason that coops are forming is because you need big money to compete right now. but that will all go away sooner then you might imagine.

asic manufacturers have been selling ancient technology for premium prices because there wasn`t anything better. 60nm chips where thrown out of hosting farms a decade ago and been poisioning children in africa ever since because back then they where allready slow and ineficient.
BFL is still selling the same stuff to this day in jallapenos if im not mistaken. there isn`t any competition on the asic market atm. just a big race to where we should have been allready.
asic devs have been leapfrogging, not competing. there is a real difference!

once the dust settles the is no reason anymore for huge farms to exist. there will be some out there, just like there are big ltc farms now. but they wont be a threat because mining will be available to everyone once again...................................       until quantum computing hits the market. i just paid for my preorder. they promised the delivery date will be no later then q3 of 2031 :)

How much energy do you think it takes to ship fiat currency around the world? To print it? How many resources do bank branches and sky scrapers use? These things are much more obscene in wasting energy but that is just my opinion.

If EVERY miner had ASICs, today, right now, and co-ops became a thing of the past, someone would think of something better, and co-ops would start up again for those who couldn't afford the "something better."

To be certain, co-ops will always be there for some who would rather not mess with the mining themselves. But ASICs are hated because they make the "playing field," the mining, too difficult or expensive for some.

ASICs should be hated because they help the 51% monopoly to become more of a reality.

:)

thats the point. there is nothing better for the forseeable future. if there was we would have had thumbstick drive size gaming pc`s capable of 4k resolution by now.  it moves so fast now because they where miles behind. once the gap has closed things wil be quiet again for at least a few years.

and the coops that do exist are just small because  there isnt any real money there, since the people in it cant afford anything on their own.. and when asic prices come down a lot as competition rises, there will be just a handfull of people who would even consider a coop. if they can buy an asic for a couple of houndred dollars which they can run for a few years and it wil still generate more money then electricity will cost.

Excellent point!
how much power does google use!?!?
what about centrifuges to separate weapons grade uranium? (thank god they don't use calutrons anymore!)
and the list goes on and on, mining, is irrelevant in the planetary scale IMHO.

I do understand your point on this matter. What I really mean to point out was that with POW coins the energy levels required are just going to increase more and more, and there are more and more of these type of coins popping up all the time which is just adding to the power load. There are far more energy efficient coins out there that use things such as POS and their future hybrids/improvements. Although in there infancy they could lessen the power drain once developed further.
I do understand your point though on the processing power drain fiat causes.
Just a thought though, I am not an expert ( obviously) and should probably stop talking now  ;D

and what he said :)
You cant compete with the "big guys" with the "big money"
In the end bitcoin "possibly" will become the very thing it was meant to fight against.
"They" will control what happens to your money when it serves their interest at the time.

Original poster asked an invalid question.  The valid question is:

"What benefit does ASIC bring over CPU/GPU?"

The answer is none.

There's no energy consumption benefit.  Corporations simply upscale their hardware size, using the same amount of power, until all inventory on the entire internet is out of stock.

ASIC brings no benefits, problems too numerous to list, and also severely reduces market penetration.  

A currency with no market penetration has no liquidity.  With no liquidity, it's not a currency.

Why do you think Dogecoin has more daily transactions than Bitcoin?  Market penetration.

i have a different take on things. the bitcoin landscape is the way it is for multiple reasons but most importantly a shortage of asic miners to furfill demand. once this evens out the bitcoin mining  scene will be the same as the scrypt scene is now.

its basic economics.

in the near future you are able to buy new bitcoin asics at best buy at normal prices, allong with your tablet and laptop.

It's also basic economics to BYPASS THE MIDDLEMAN (ASIC seller), and use GPU or CPU algorithms for coins.

There's no reason to like ASICs unless you enjoy being screwed by middlemen.

this is also true, for bitcoin to really take off people have to use it every day. buy busticket. popcorn at the movies, coffe at starbucks with the bitcoin wallet on you phone.

if everybody holds all their bitcoins. why would it have any value?
i have a bucket of sand, if we all hold our bucket of sand and think it is special, maybe we can convince others to think its special to. even though you cant use it for anything

asics do have advantages. why buy an entire computer thats build to do a million things good enough just to mine.
shed all things you dont need and optimize it for a single task. makes it more eficient and a lot cheaper.

thats what asics do. thats why the whole world uses asics instead of pc`s, and for far more important things then bitcoin mining

i can buy a motorhome to go to the shop at the corner to buy a bottle of milk. that way i`m sure i got something thats up to any task i can encounter on the way. but is it really necesary and actually the best way to do it?

with gpu and cpu you just changing from one middleman to another. amd is also just a middleman.

once asics are produced using current (like haswell equilivent) technology, the market will settle down.  and that moment is not that far off anymore.
once there is nothing left to copy and asic manufacturers actually have to start developing new chip manufacturing proceses to move performance forward asics will be abundend and wil be sold at normal profit margins. not for over 2000% profit as it is now.

Not comparable when people already owned CPUs and GPUs before Bitcoin existed.  This is probably also a rational motive for decreasing block rewards, to make that widespread hardware at the time actually matter, regardless of what happens in the future.

It depends on the vision of the creator as well.  Do you think the BTC creator would invent something and purposely restrict it's market penetration to as little as possible, thus making it fail as a currency?  Only thing saving BTC at the moment and giving it any market penetration whatsoever is the alt coin industry.  It would not reach enough hands to have a critical mass of liquidity otherwise.  We currently have CPU and GPU mining by proxy, and more people interested in it than ASIC as well.

There's a reason why you would never see a site like Amazon take NXT, at least for the next hundred years.  If they did, one of the thirty owners of NXT just wanders onto the page, blows all his NXT, and buys the entire site?  Now it's Amazon's job to sell people NXT by default?  Market penetration matters.

I don't get those people who complain that ASICs won't ROI, and then they go ahead and build giant GPU farms that won't profit unless they can count on reselling their used hardware on eBay for >75% cost after 1 year.

Wrong. The answer is that an ASIC protected network prevents malicious entities from building ASIC devices and 51% attacking a network protected solely by CPU/GPU.

As long as there is a financial motivation to build faster hardware, faster hardware will be built. Attempting to call a truce at CPU levels or GPU levels is foolhardy at best. Someone will always look for an advantage to exploit until we hit the limits of technology.

Are you on the grass this evening sir?  Since ASICs are already developed, the "malicious entity" with money to burn that you talk about, would simply go and buy a bunch of ASIC to accomplish the 51% attack.  They could also do the same thing with GPUs, thus, it is neither a positive or negative to either argument.

I would argue though, that a worldwide network secured by both GPU and CPU would be the hardest to attack.  Take a coin like Darkcoin for instance.  I believe GPU and CPU will live together on this coin somewhat, and CPU won't be entirely crowded out.  If Darkcoin fails in this regard, you can always design a coin strictly for this purpose, and leverage memory requirements + hashing functions high enough that GPU always has the advantage, but CPU miners will still be around in high enough numbers.

The obvious solution to all these problems is to just have more than one block chain, with vastly different hashing functions and memory requirements for all of them.  Obviously toss some Proof of Stake systems into the mix too.  Wait...that's what we already have now...it only upsets people that are highly invested in Bitcoin...so they call anything that isn't Bitcoin a trash coin.

We don't need 200 coins to exist, but we do need at least 10 with highly different attributes.  I figure many proof of stake coins will also survive as virtual bank accounts.  I think PPC will definitely be dethroned as top PoS coin.  Cashcoin in particular has a better economic model.

A point was made earlier in the thread that I wish to dispute. Somewhat.

I don't recall which of you said it, but what was said was that ASIC chips are relatively cheap to produce and sold at an absolute premium. So far, so good. But then the point was made that anyone developing ASICs would be insane to not follow that paradigm.

This is what I would dispute. The opportunity exists right now for someone who has the resources to follow a rather different model, and it's not only not insane, it would generate them more business than they could handle AND more goodwill than any other manufacturer.

That model is this:

Make a small batch that's expensive enough to cover NRE and a rather large chip run. Use the profits from that batch to build a huge amount of machines, and sell them just over cost. The profits per machine would be minimal, but selling IN HAND at low cost would gather up so freakin' many sales that said manufacturer would probably have to expand their operation to keep up with demand.

Now if you believe that Bitcoin is a passing fancy, this model will not appeal. If you're only in it for the short run, it won't appeal. If you want to be top dog when the dust settles, it will have a great deal of appeal.

This is the way I would do it. I am crazy, but I'm not insane. I understand the consequences and morals of my actions. (reference M'Naughton, the legal standard for insanity at common law). The only thing stopping me is lack of funds, as with money I could hire the experts.

Personally, I love ASICs. They're making the network so strong that mainstream adoption of bitcoin is within reach, as even the true paranoid can do the calculations and figure out that the network can't be easily broken. Would it have gotten there without the ASIC revolution? Probably, but it wouldn't be there now.

This same "arms race" happened with PC's. In the long run it was a good thing, as you can now go to Walmart, plop down 400 dollars, and have what was defined as a supercomputer when I was a pup.

This.

Given all the ill will towards pre-orders and so on, I can't understand how someone hasn't quietly manufactured a mid-range mining rig, no pre-orders, no website, nothing. Boxed up every single rig, ready to ship, then opened their webstore and customer service centre and watched the money and kudos roll in. Hell, let's go all out and say they might even have owner's names, a physical address, and a phone number on their website.

Bitmain has come the closest, and if LightningAsic pans out, they seem to be playing the same way. But they do it in small batches, rather than continuously in hand. Still, far better than ANY of their competition.

if you buy overpriced 290x cards for 900 dollars a pop, you wont roi, true.
i build a new rig with 12 7950`s over christmas, i think 5 of them i bought where used, the rest brand new, also the cpus and ram where used as well.. in terms of btc it has allready has made roi.
i got the btc back that i put in allready. its just gravy from now on. and because difficulty doesn`t move insanely fast, it wil bring goed money for at least 6 months. maybe a year, and than ik can probably sell everything off for maybe 25% of what i payd for it. the rig wil pay for itself at least 3 times. probably more like 5 times.
you just have to be smart about it.

good luck doing that with a 10k neptune.

we do need the fastest hardware available to protect the network, if btc network still ran on cpus. and one gouverment started to develop an asic on their own in secret, 5 antminers probably where enough to kill the network. i dont think the cpu hashrate would be much higher then a terrahash.

if you want to that now you need much more then a few smart people and a few bucks to design an asic that is capable of taking over the network.

because they missed out on getting rich with zero or little investment.
Suckt it up, invest take risk and profit, dont be a cry baby.
The sun already gets up every day for free !

i was the one who said that. the problem with your statement the way i see it is quit simple. asicsthat are released at the moment are becomming obsolete far to quickly.
chips that are made now are surpased with chips with double the power within months. (i`ll say it again, thats because current chips are based on manufacturing processes that are considerd old by the rest of the industry)
the people who are rushing these things to market are not out to build a brand or something, they wanna get rich quick.
plus they dont have enough r&D to sustain a long term model. they don`t have the money to design the new generation of chip technology, thats done by the big dogs. the chips architecture was developed in the fpga days, and for the last year they just have been shrinking the dye. that isn`t really developing anything new. because the r&d that was needed to figure how to do that was done years ago by people who didn`t have a clue what bitcoin was and was done probably for the aerospace industry.
once we hit 20 or 18nm,  the huge performance gains are a thing of the past.

i`m sure there are some devs out there who are allready developing real top of the line hardware, but that costs time and money. but when they are done they dont have to wory there will be anyone making vastly more efficient hardware for quite a while.then it becomes much more interesting to sell at normal prices, because you can keep selling it for at least a year.
in the pressent you have to take what you can get. your hardware will be outdated faster then you are able to develop a new product.

ASIC's are a very important step towards mining centralization. That's it.

asics are a an important step to making cheap efficient hardware available for everyone. ultimatly fighting centralisation.

I will agree in the past ASIC's have been built on legacy technology so it was fairly easy to develop a faster model. The reason this occurred was it was cheaper to manufacture 135nm versus 110nm versus 65nm versus 28nm versus 20nm. The cycle has been proven and has continued to 28nm and we are already seeing 20nm announcements from KNC and others but I do not believe as you state that "huge performance gains are a thing of the past" for several reasons.

1) We are not at the edge of Moores Law. I agree we are close but not their yet. The majority of ASICs are coming from 2 foundries TSMC and Global Foundries. Both companies have the ability to go to 16nm today. At 16nm they are now getting close to Moores Law but they are not there yet.  A couple of companies (Intel and IBM) can go beyond 16nm to 14nm but at that point the industry hits a wall until the next jump to 10nm (2015/2016) but it will take a couple more years until mass production can occur at the 10nm size. To develop at 14nm is expensive so I do not believe we will see products at this level until we have exhausted all other options.

2) Current ASIC's have essentially been a re-targeting of FPGA's without any significant improvements in design.  I believe there is a significant amount of research underway in this space and I am certain current developers are optimizing their designs. This level of optimization should allow a few more iterations to increase the hash to power ratio's. Look at Bitfury's design extremely efficient ASICs but still on 65nm tech and GHASH.IO have shown that with a great design and large quantities you can still be relevant against new technology. Companies like 21e6 (ex samsung) certainly know a lot about ASIC design.

So yes we are getting close to the edge of Moores Law and I agree when we get there we should see a good 2 year run where we can move from Niche players with limited access to next gen ASIC to a proliferation of low cost competitive ASIC's but we are not there yet.

2015 will be an interesting year.

And as there would not be centralization if there was no ASIC.
So what your sain is that we have ASIC to fight centralization which was created by ASIC....wouldnt it be easyer not to have ASIC in first place?

Imagine how much more miners would BTC have than it has now. How much harder would it be to centralize it and shut it down if there was no ASIC around...
More miners, more BTC users, more users wider adoption, wider adoption better BTC price....ASICs just ruined initial idea of BTC.

Wow, touche!
I was thinking exactly about doge coin phenomena, you are correct!.

yes but the steps from 120 to 28 nm took the industry maybe 2 decades. we went through the whole cybvle in one year.
and performance will improve. just like the new generation of gpus  are also 10 procent faster. and next years release wil be 10 percent faster again. same goes for intel chips. hell even cars are on the same cycle. steady small increments of eficienty with every new release.
btc asics have become a 1000 times faster in a year or something, thats just not going to last. if this where to continue we would have 100 petahash machines the size of an antminer by may 2015. that just isn`t going to happen, because the room for improvement to catch up with current technology isn`t there anymore

and yes, eventually if the easy progress by schrinking is done for, the designs will be tweaked for effinciency. but that wont have anywhere near as much impact as schrinking does, plus it takes a lot more time and money to develop these new architectures.

a 10 to 20% percent improvement in effecienty per year is where it will be in the not so distant future. i think thats realistic and is proven by the entire tech industry in the last decade.

and until samsung and the likes anounce a new technology that makes asics in general obsolete, we don`t have to be scared there will be anything else to kill asics, because this is the best way to do these kinds of tasks.

if the network still ran on cpu, a single asic machine develloped by an evil gouverment in secrety would kill btc overnight. asics are not special and defenatly not invented for btc. bitcoin adpted the concept. and if we as a comunity didn`t do it, it would be very easy for the ones who are evil to do just that.

to protect the network we have to make sure it is kept to the highest standard available.

Where do you get this idea?
All of the asics that I have, never made ROI, some of them are close, but not there yet and I has been months! more than 8.
3 of 4 of my GPU farm, give me ROI in less than 5 months. (not counting that I can resell the GPUs that are all working perfectly, and recover 60% more!).
GPUs are FAR more profitable and a more sound business than buy ASICS, my numbers, and the cash I have in my pocket, is telling me that.

Yeah, and those damn looms put hand tailors out of business and ruined our lives. Best go throw some wooden shoes in the works. That'll show 'em.

Be real. It was going to happen. You put geeks on a technical issue, they WILL make a better machine. Right now, it's the middle of an arms race. It'll settle down, prices will come down to meet reality, and there will be a place for scrypt as well.

As for ASICS enabling centralization, well shit me george, were there not pools taking up most of the network before Avalon? No? sure seemed that way to me. Face it: ASIC's are nothing new. They've been in watches and the like for decades. This is just a new application for an existing process. They do it more efficiently, thus they have taken over one type of cryptocurrency mining. Now there are beginning to be scrypt ASICS as well. Technology is in a constant state of flux. It always will be. Prior to the ASIC revolution, had Bitcoin actually gone mainstream and gotten the attention of the world's rulers, they would have soaked you via taxation to put a supercomputer or two on the job, and they would OWN that network. This has become much more difficult for them. It couldn't be done silently or cheaply at this time. BECAUSE of ASIC's.

Eventually, as others have pointed out, the improvement will become incremental rather than crazy. Already it has slowed somewhat. We're not seeing 40 percent jumps in difficulty anymore, and probably never will again unless somebody develops something even more efficient than the ASIC's. Evolution goes in fits and starts. The revolutionary part is an exclamation point, but it's not the end of the paragraph.

i think by the middle of this year when the neptunes, monacrhs and presperos hit the market we wil see 30% + jumps once more. but that will be the last time until asics as a concept become obsolete in the entire industry.
that will probably be caused by things like grafeen chips or quantum computing or something like that. and thats not consumer ready by a long shot, will take at least 5 years. but more like a decade if you ask me.

a few years from now we`re having a beer somewhere talking about those crazy years when bitcoin was comming to adulthood, and the way people went crazy. we`ll have a few laughs and have warm fuzy feelings when thinking about the way things used to be. and that it actually was a fun thing to be a part of.

You may be right, but I actually think it'll still be in the neighborhood of 25 percent max, because the "obsolete" chips are still being disseminated, and 28nm chips from at least one manufacturer are already being put out in multiple configurations as well. I don't see 20nm die shrink as a big deal, honestly. I think it will at best give marginal gains over 28. Optimizing the design, even at higher process nodes, will give a better yield. I think that's where it will go. As already noted, the current bitcoin ASIC's are basically reduced size FPGA's, whereas they could be completely purpose designed. Doing so would make larger silicon real estate more valuable. The race to the bottom on process nodes is kind of a stunt, and definitely a shortcut over what CAN be done. If people start to shy away from the preorder bullshit, I think we'll start to see more "ground up" designs, and more efficiency because of it. There is a lot of redundancy to an FPGA, because it's NOT application specific. Fewer functions equal more real estate, less power consumption. I don't think 110nm was really finished out for potential. There's still room for a lot of improvement, and frankly most of it's design work.

Quantum's a long shot. I don't think it's going mainstream in a decade. I could be wrong, but I've been hearing how it's "right around the corner" for two decades. Instead we still have expensive and impressive toys in a few universities.

I am utterly unfamiliar with grafeen. Wazzat?

it mostly depends on how much funding goes to these types of things. if a country like the USA or something finds a way to have a a big competitive advantage in some field by having that technology, things can move very quickly. but on the other side, it might never come at all. i don`t know enough about it to make any usefull predictions.
the only reason the atomic bomb was develloped in 5 years was because of war and endless funding. if it wasn`t for ww2 nuclair technology would probably have been 25 years behind and nuclair reactors where just now becoming the new cool thing.

grafeen is basicly a molecule thick cunductor when used in chips, but it has a wide range of uses. very versitile.. its actually just carbon i believe. its nano technology on steroids. i don`t know that much about it either. but if your into that kind of technology you schould check it out. crazy stuff but very very cool!

Been into nanotech since Engines of Creation hit the market. Now I'm just waiting for the final breakthrough for assemblers :) Yeah, I'll definitely check it out. Thanks!

yeah i like that stuf to, but i don`t have enough background in those fields to really get into it. but its fascinating nonetheless

ASIC => centralization => big hit on head => ?!

Miners mine as long as it making money. And the community is full of their voice - not to change before earning enough. Security/efficiency call is all base on POW, there is always other ways to do it.

Look at the big picture, transaction fee will be kept lowering by competition of upcoming digital coins, and mining cost determines transaction fee ultimately. In the end, anybody can mine with redundant power of the devices he/she owns to barely make up the wasted capacity. Do not worry there is not enough idle power. I am now running some scientific computation programs for free, using 4 CPU cores out of my 8, and there are thousands of other people with me. 1000 stable online nodes could be enough to replace VISA.

I am not someone you can nail a "Missed Loser" mark on my head, or someone promoting something else. I got bitcoins and love it, and wish the community still have the leadership to move on, no matter what have achieved and what to cost for a bright future. Do the right thing, or be left in the cold - community's choice.

if you haven't read it: Engines of Creation (http://e-drexler.com/p/06/00/EOC_Cover.html)

And is this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene) what you were referring to?

Or maybe, just maybe, devs could change away from SHA256 and protect BTC from ANY sort of ASIC. They could have done it, but they didint as someone is making huge amount of btc/$$$ out of ASIC. Only 1 single change like that would turn away anyone from investing into ASIC hardware (private or goverment) as ASIC is useless piece of hardware once you change away from SHA.
BTC can be protected on software level much more effective and easyer than on hardware level.
If potentional invester into ASIC knew that devs will switch code as soon as there is problem, they would not even try to create it as it would be money thrown away.

ok, i`ll give that one a read. seems very interesting..

and yes thats what i was talking about. in dutch it is called grafeen. i think it has big potential, especially in aplications nobody has thought of yet, at the moment they are just scratching the surface of its posiblitys i think.. if they manage to eventually find a way to produce it on a industrial scale it could change so many things.

you cant make it it totaly asic proof. anything thats calculation based can be turned into an asic.. you can only make it more complicated so asics are to expensive for commercial use and it makes no sence for a company to make them...
but an gouverment that wants to kill bitcoin isn`t concerned with roi . theyll just spend a billion dollars on developing an asic machine, and kill the the network in one single swoop because the entire network is just 1 terrahash big if only cpus are running it...

if you want to kill the network now, youre gonna need a lot more money to do so because the network is so much bigger and there are no other options available that are masivly more powerfull then asics.

GPU farms do profit if done right, but the majority of people who started mining have low knowledge and shouldn't have invested in this.

You dont have to build ASIC proof coin (tho it can be 51% proof like some are), all you have to do is change formula that's calculated ONCE and that will be enough to scare away anyone from even attempting to create ASIC as they would know that as soon as they fire it up, devs would change scrypt again and they would be sitting on worthless piece of hardware. It's something like nuclear bomb. You wont use it as you know they will use it too. And for ASIC, changing formula is nuclear bomb...total annahilation.

You can't really kill BTC. All devs need to do is change formula and off it goes again. As simple as that.
Who, in his right state of mind would go and create ASIC if they knew that they would have only short effect on network?

BTC strength is not in it's hardware, it's in it's software, and it's software that can and should protect it.

And i have one question for you. Who are ppl that can make decision to "change or not to change" BTC code? Are they maybe somehow connected to ASIC manufacturers? Now....tell me, how decentralized BTC really is?

You have absolutely no idea how GPU farming is profitable dont you? Not only it pays off in few months it continues to make good coin for more then a year and even after that you have good GPU and computer cards to use or to sell. With ASIC you have piece of hardware you can throw away.

;D +1

Mining is absurd and obsolete.

The pyramid-scheme keeps going on because some people benefit from it.

if btc starts going this route bitcoin is never gonna last. why would anyone prefer a system like that over fiat. the security risks involved in running the network like that are masive.

There would be no security risk as threat of ASIC attack would be null and changes in BTC code are done anyway, so why not to use them to make more secure coin...

It's not this. BFL Jalapenos sold for just $150 when they were announced. And the ASIC USB miners from ASICMiner and others were always very cheap and definitely in the range of the small miner.

That has certainly been the case in the past. I mined on the same GPUs for almost 3 years, and they're still worth something.

Past performance is no guarantee though. It is true they will generally have better resale value than ASICs.

This isn't true at all. There are roughly a dozen ASIC manufacturers. You can order from any of them. Some of them ship right away, some are preorders. There are plenty of options for the casual bitcoin miner. It in no way centralized bitcoin mining. If bitcoin mining has become more centralized it is only because bitcoin has become more popular and its price has skyrocketed in the past year making it more attractive to corporations and larger investors. It is in no way the fault of ASICs.

Your model is already being done. No ASIC manufacturer can keep up with demand presently. That is why few of them are dropping their prices. What sets the price on an ASIC is how much it can be expected to earn, not how much it cost to make. Prices will drop as difficulty continues to rise and the least efficient ASICs will become obsolete. The most efficient ones will sell for not much more than they cost to make and difficulty will stabilitze so that the average miner with cheap electricity can just barely expect to earn a profit over what they pay for the ASIC.

completely agree!

Exactly. This is how technology progresses.

When a Super Quantum Double-Secret Probation miner makes the xTB miners worthless, some of xTB people will crab as well.

ASIC is killed bitcoin !

No, it's a demonstration of the most simple rule of economics. People respond to incentives.

If you could come up with a way for miners to get paid a little bit more if their rig cleaned x liters of air per bitcoin mined (not counting the dust that accumulates on the damn things, heh) people would jump on that too.

all of those where obsolete 1 month after release, no one who bought those a month after their release had any chance of recovering their btc.
so thats only for people who like to throw away money or just dont care about roi because they just bought them to be part of the movement and have a little fun..

That's the point with most ASICs coming out to market, they are already obsolete by the time you put them to work, that's why is so hard-almost impossible to get ROI from those devices (specially if you live in remote areas, where shipping cost is ridiculous, customs charge you a lot more "just in case", and on top of that they also calculate the percentage "including" the shipping cost!, also the mail usually lost you packages and you lost weeks trying to figure it out where it is or what branch has you  package, and I can keep on and on.

If I can purchase an ASIC BEFORE it becomes obsolete, I could probably make money out of it, but in the present climax, with preorders, and shippings that they first ship to US customers, then the rest of the world, the rest of the world is fucked UP, period.

I doesn't happens with GPU, I am a big client from a local distributor and when I request something, i got priority and get the packages first, so for me, get the newest GPU is easy and it takes less than a WEEK.

someone here said: ASIC killed bitcoin, I don't think so, but I am sure that ASIC wanted to kill the MINER, and the miner is the one who support the network, nobody likes the miner, but without him/her the network will not exists, so he is got a point!.

no wonder how doge is growing... and probably VTC, looks promising.
 

You make good points. I see the problems with ASIC's currently as growing pains. And obsolescence is not necessarily the same as lack of utility. My '97 Caravan is definitely obsolete, but far from useless.

So far, the market has chosen Bitcoin as top dog, which is SHA-256, and LTC and DOGE seem to also be very successful outside of "just" the crypto community, and they are both Scrypt.

So it appears that both paradigms are viable, and as for ASIC's killing the small miner, I don't think that's the case. The network was going to grow, by design. If it didn't, then the experiment would have already been a failure. That it's growing differently to what was originally envisioned is just the way it is. You can't plan the future, you can only plan for the future. It has gotten to the point that the HOBBY miner is unlikely to turn a profit, but hobbies are usually not about making money anyway. But small scale businesses based on ASIC miners are not out of reach. You may have to set up in an office or workshop for power requirements now, but that is not a killer. It is a higher barrier to entry, but not a killer.

Even given that, it's also becoming true of LTC. You want a farm of GPU's, you're gonna be sucking power at a prodigious rate. Which leads to the same conclusion. "Alt" scrypts will still be profitable from home for a while, but that depends largely on trade FOR LTC and BTC, so it's again a "hobby" thing for the most part.

As you noted, where GPU's shine over ASIC's is availability. That likely will get sorted. Bitcoin ASIC's haven't been live very long, and GPU's have. Give it time. I think the preorder game has almost run its course, as people are sick of waiting for their machines. I didn't play that game, and I won't, so it doesn't affect me negatively. The companies that deliver stock on hand are NOT hurting for customers, and their prices are not outrageous.

I got more, but I have to leave :) Interesting thread.

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