Bitcoin Forum

Scrypt mining for GPU miners is about to become a thing of the past


Scrypt ASIC miners are about to be unleashed on the market.

KnC, a reputable ASIC manufacturer and  Alpha Technologies, a promising new player, are racing to be the first to deliver super powerful rigs that will blow GPU miners out of the water.

ASIC miners are custom designed machines with chips build specifically to tackle hashing of a particular algorithm. They are much more efficient and the Titan and Viper both look to be around a hundred times more powerful than a Radeon R9 290X, and because they use a fraction of the power to hash, they can mine profitably when GPU’s are reduced to noisy and expensive heating devices.

Thousands of miners with GPU rigs are about to be outcompeted by these new ASIC miners. What happened to SHA-256 based coins when Bitcoin ASICS were launched is about to happen to Scrypt. Bye bye profit.


So you want alternatives....


Darkcoin, qrk, heavycoin....... some algos that are for now asic resistant...

there are others coins also so check them out lots of scrypt jane and quite a few qrk and x11 too.


Is it worth ordering a scrypt asic now or will most of the hot coins switched to x11, qrk, heavy, scryptN, scrypt Jane by then and it would have been a waste of money??

The kids who operated their toy mining operations too ineffectively to be able to afford ASICs will try to make more and more toy coins to play with, but there is no good reason for serious money to buy such toy garbage, rather the serious investors will want to invest in secure currencies, and that means families of merged mined coins secured by ASICs.

(Assuming they are going to invest in proof of work blockchain based currencies at all, of course.)

-MarkM-

Sweet, with Litecoin out of the way hopefully AMD GPUs will be cheaper thanks to the significantly lowered demand (if anything supply may overshoot demand because of this). Nice time for me to pickup a high graphics card then.

Anyways, on topic, I'm highly doubtful of anyone making a significant profit from mining given the power consumption and the capital necessary to start mining at this point. Not to mention all the delays with preorders and such.

There will definitely be downward pressure on GPU prices.

I agree cPoW will take over long term as I predicted,  but I think Scrypt will still be relevant.

Especially if economics of competition and scale drive the "grid seed" type miners way down, (20 30 $) similar to the BE.

This will allow for the market to still churn out some Scrypt junk , and the spammers that are pathetically trying to " inflate" crypto to death will have to move to cPoW.

So basically everything is as it should be.

i think amd will release a beast of a gpu at somepoint, they wont settle for massive profit loss's due to asic

How much profit can amd gain just by making a card built for mining?

AMD can potentially build their own asic for each scrypt algo, and take on the chain with a 51% attack in no time, if they really want lol

lol google/yahoo/avatar movie sever farm going down in a day just to mine, just imagine

they wont build a card just for mining, they will probley just implement somthing into their cards at a guess

There is always a coin for GPU miners.

lol yeah forgot about google power, even btc would be screwed if they build an asic farm for it

Its coming but i suspect as the GPU's become useless, they will switch to more ASIC resistant coins and start pumping those

I expect some coins wil change algorithm. Although d first people to use those asic scrypt miners would profit greatly

Even with ASIC, the mining mode will be discarded by the users.
Look at the coinmarketcap, a lot of Scrypt coins with GH/s hashpower and tens BTC IPO have only the similar value as those free distributed coins, such as C2 and Faircoin.

Scrypt is such a fragmented space that it is a disaster zone, even ASICs likely cannot save it unless the vast majority of scrypt miners merged mine the same collection of merged mined scrypt coins, and how likely is that?

Will scrypt and DOGE, or even either one of them, implement the ability to be secondary chain in a merge?

-MarkM-

If LTC and DOGE did this then i think it would be very beneficial to both of those coins.

Although wait i see already LTC is turning x11 now :)

I can't see that situation lasting long. Faircoin was recently 51% attacked, forked, and then dumped on next-e and poloniex. It's changing to POS to prevent it happening again. C2 is likely next.

A litecoin fork is proposing to turn X11. Provided enough separation is kept between the real network and the X11 fork network, people could spend their litecoin on the X11 network to buy real litecoins, they'd love that.

After the snapshot of the blackchain is taken, move all your coins to new addresses on the real network, so that only the X11 network will let you spend them. Then use them to buy real litecoins if the X11 fork ever actually gets on an exchange or you can find a sucker willing to trade.

-MarkM-

I thought faircoin was PoS in the first place? Evidently though PoS is not as secure as advertised?

Maybe because they forgot to have the first X number of blocks not require aged coins in order to start PoS mining or something?

-MarkM-

This.

I've been saying over and over that the vast majority of altcoins are just toys for whiny kids who wanted to "play miner" and couldn't do it any more with their dad's PC.
This, and scammers.
The sooner they start crumbling, the better.

I'm not sure of the details. I just assumed that POS hadn't kicked in yet. There was some funny business with the distribution where the dev claimed to have lost half of the premine. Nxt-e claim the dev performed the attack and have refused to reimburse customers. I guess it's possible the dev performed some kind of POS 51% attack. Again, this is total speculation, I have no idea what really happened and I don't have the time to read through the whole faircoin thread to check details about the coin.

So much irrational panic about ASICS these days …

In a very short time, they will be the price of GPUs (or less) and everybody will have a lots of them in their basement/garage happily mining scrypt coins and securing the block chains.

Use of malicious negative feedback to suppress free speech brings discredit on the bitcoin community

Amateur hour is over boys. Buck up or get off the horse!   :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ8HzyMiLd0 My rig...Been running for over 2 weeks now.

I upgraded from my 8 r9 280x's 5.5mh to 30-32MH with the addition of 80 gridseeds.

Take a look at Feathercoin. They are looking for a solution to this new arriving Asics.

https://forum.feathercoin.com/index.php?/topic/6626-changing-the-hashing-algorithm/

Feathercoin is finally admitting it is just a toy/hobby not a serious currency, eh? About time I guess...

-MarkM-

I don't get why people have to be on one side or the other when it comes to asics, both gpus and asics can coexist and they're basically different tools for a job.  

GPU's are versatile and have/can/will be used for the early stages of any new algo/technology/ect.  If you want to mine as an early adopter, gpu's are the way to go.  There will be new coins, there will be new innovations, and gpu's will be right there mining it.  I know many people are working on coins that actually do something with hash (like primecoin, which is a bad example because its still GPU resistant) and asics will be even harder to implement there.  If you decide you don't wanna be a GPU miner anymore, gamers will happily buy your video cards for a decent price.  

Asics arent versitile but they're a key component in securing a mainstream coin. If litecoin gets as big as bitcoin I'd rather it secured by asics rather then GPU's. For the end user, having the blockchain secured by asics is a good thing and gives a lot of reason to be confident in the security of a coin.  Asics will push out "the little guy" in favor of a more cooperate mining scenerio, but that's a good thing if you want your coin to be mainstream.

I remember this same exact discussion taking place with bitcoin when asics were hitting.  So many people sold off their GPU farms and declared GPU mining dead period.  All those people probably heavily regret selling off their GPU farms as there was still a lot of life left in it. (and there still is)

Feathercoin is not a new innovation though is it? Deliberately avoiding securing it seems pathetically stupid. Let ASIC miners secure one's feathercoin wealth and move on to mine other things with one's GPUs seems a more sensible approach, glad that one's adaptable tools adaptable to new fresh coins are being freed up from the onerous task of securing the feathercoins one already mined...

-MarkM-

It's been a long time since I paid any attention to feathercoin but...

Feathercoin was released with no innvoations but after several 51% attacks earlier in its life they came up with a new checkpointing system that supposedly helped stop that from happening.  Outside of that its just another litecoin clone.  Not to forget it was part of UNOCs which turned out to be a huge scam.  For me FTC has absolutely no reason to believe in it as a real currency.

Oh its one of the solidcoin-style-privileged-nodes systems, is it, like many of the PoS coins? A centralised checkpointing node or group of such nodes?

-MarkM-

I thought the Scrypt ASIC things were a scam?

Although i hate to agree with you....if you are not Asic....you REALLY have no shot at going mainstream....this is the simple truth

And what most people forget about crypto is....we are changing the way the WORLD views alternative digital currencies...they do not EXIST to put $$ in your OWN pocket....Asics will provide this....they old way of viewing coins is obsolete....adapt or die.

You brought it to yourselves when you sent money into BFL ASIC pre-orders. The arms race put aside the vast majority of the common people.

Now you can only whine ad nauseum in these threads to the level of spam, that the kids with toy mining are not willing to buy BTC and pump your holdings.

The more guys like you come here, the more I like altcoins. I like bitcoin, because it is supposed to be a peer-to-peer trustless system with no central authority. If one has to deal with this kind of ideological or antagonist crap from people that see themselves as some sort of unnoficial authorities, then I rather play with toys.

ASICs only lay waste to GPUs when the $/mhs is much lower.  They appear to be more expensive than GPUs at the moment (deliverable units, not vaporware)

Scrypt asics in hand doing 380-420Khs for under $200 on 7 watts or so...they are here for sure....

I am using them...

Where did you buy them for <$200?

Bullshit, the vast majority of the common people have no desire to screw around with weird techie stuff like mining, they just want their currency to be secure and to work. The very existence of miners may even be off-putting, leading to ideas that it is unfair that miners get coins cheap or that miners got rich quick or that the security of their currency depends upon pimply kids living in their mom's basements playing videogames and occassionally turning off the game to whip up some quick coin.

The vast majority of the masses do not mine, and certainly not with GPUs, plug and play blackbox units are more their speed but even those aren't really something the masses go for.

-MarkM-

i'll be going asic after the second version comes out.

Those "pimply kids living in their mom's basements playing videogames and occassionally turning of the game to whip up some quick coin" are people too, and don't know better now, but some will grow interested and enthusiastic about peer-to-peer trustless system, Bitcoin itself later. But if they just want to grab some coin, they aren't more than a reflection of the adults. Or do the ASIC owners "invest" $1000, $5k, $10k+ with the purpose of altruistically process Bitcoin transactions and secure the network at operational cost?

I'm mine HVC . best for my gpu

Correction: primecoin is not GPU resistant anymore.

ASICs are the best way to secure the blockchain.

Yeah bring on the asic miners! The scrypts I have been mining for months will come into their own! Necessity being the mother of invention, a new coin will pop up for graphics cards. Thorcoin is already jane scrypt. Maybe it will get some love from the out of work graphic card miners.

ASICs supporters can say all they want, GPU miners will continue to GPU mine on new algorythm coins
It's the only path to ROI while ASICs is the path to ruin and manufacturers scamming

Mining is work and is taking a lot of time, and really imo currently it is not even worth the time if you are not a "believer"
Though people may be willing to work for almost nothing, nobody is willing to work for loosing money...so no sane GPU miner wants ASICs

Crypto is not only about technics, it needs to not fuck up almost every early adopters...and with all the scams, steals, exchanges failures and this bear market, i'm sure LOTS of early adopters/investors got raped
Really i don't think that would not be too much if all the miners from november/december, like me, could at least ROI or...you can keep your cryptos for the few survivors of this huge mess for years or decades

Did you do any research into the quality of those things? $20k is a lot to dump on something that could be fried in a month or two.