Bitcoin Forum

In governance Ethereum is far more centralized than bitcoin, they have Vitalik both as a celebrity and a spiritual leader and believe it or not they have a roadmap  :D

IMO, a cryptocurrency with a leader,  is not reliable in the first place, but when the leader turns out to be a PoS believer in charge of a PoW coin things get even more confusing. I believe that Eth 2018 falling down 3 times worse than bitcoin has some thing to do with this fact.

Still there are good news as well: Vitalik is growing up and stepping down, well, not officially and completely but there exist signs. Most importantly, in January 5 latest Ethereum core dev meeting ended with a long-waiting admission, tentatively tho, of implementing ProgPoW as an anti-asic algorithm to retire Ethash. ProgPoW is designed to utilize gpu strengths such that it is almost impossible for asic manufacturers to build a considerably more efficient chip for mining it and not ending to to a gpu design project.

It is an important event in cryptocurrency and I think we will be witnessing a new wave of debates and discussions in bitcoin community regarding the situation with ASICs and the potentials for an anti-ASIC fork.

There's no wrong time, but it might be best time, especially following momentum sometimes is good idea. Even so, there are many problem that must be overcome such as :
1. Get community support, especially most people are against hard-fork
2. Make sure Bitcoin network isn't vulnerable during transition, there are few things that should be thought seriously such as initial difficulty
3. Get miner support, which is unlikely because SHA-256 ASIC pretty much only can mine Bitcoin. Even BCH only have 3% of BTC's hashrate, so their ASIC essentially become expensive heater.

But while ProgPoW is great idea, i don't like the fact it's utilized for GPU.

if we follow the recent 51% attack (5-Jan-2019) on Ethereaum Classic (ETC) [1] we could say now this is even late for such upgrade. ASIC devices were always harmful to the PoW, and like many others, I have explained it in several threads too [2]. there is also detailed information about ProgPoW in link bellow:

https://medium.com/@ifdefelse/understanding-progpow-performance-and-tuning-d72713898db3

but this would not be enough to upgrade into a ANTI-ASIC algorithm. for example, using the RSA alone as public key infrastructure is not enough to provide security. there are lots of REQUIREMENTS and CONSIDERATIONS [3] that we should take during implementation to provide the security.. generally decentralized projects need to design new data structures and work flows that are more focused on opportunity cost factor of providing 51% attacks. I could see how users of ETC are in trouble these days.

[1] https://medium.com/@TokenHash/why-i-am-still-optimistic-about-ethereum-classic-etc-ef1ebe13c44b
[2] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5072301.msg48111338#msg48111338
[3] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3447

UPDATE: hope someday soon we see that there is a PRIORITY TAG added to the tasks that bitcoin should take ahead and people in community vote on them. this would be a good idea for better decision making.

I think we cannot do the anti-ASIC fork in bitcoin since companies already invested a lot of money in SHA256 ASIC. If you do the voting (1 BTC = 1 ticket), there is a strong probability that ASIC supporter would win. Moreover, a fork without miner consensus will lead to more negativity towards BTC. For example, BSV/BCH might say miners don't matter in BTC.

I support algorithm hard-fork if and only if SHA256 is no longer secure.

As of ProgPow being gpu friendly, the inventor has argued that it is somehow inevitable because she believes there is always a possibility to crack any algorithm by ASICs and it is more safe to design it for an ASIC from the beginning and gpus are ASIC! They have a lot of specialized circuits and PogPoW utilizes them to make it almost pointless to design a chip just a bit more specialized than a conventional gpu, smart girl!

I don't believe in the first part of the above argument, that any algorithm is breakable by ASIC, you can always have a truly memory hard algorithm that resists parallelization, actually I've been working on one for a while, yet I do believe that gpu is a better choice than cpu because of another reason: sequential, cpu-friendly PoW is vulnerable to botnets as hackers would be able to get control of large processing powers and damage profitability of miners, for the least. A cpu-friendly algorithm is more adequate for hashcash like applications where wallets add work to transactions (and not blocks as the case with miners) and contribute to security partly with a replace-fee-by-work policy.


I'll come to your other points later ;)

I've to disagree with your argument about it being such a HUGE project form the technical point of view:
ProgPoW is not that immature, bitcoin core code is not that messy and Ethereum will provide a test bed. We need to get ready. :)

I think there are a few socio-political issues to be addressed tho. @ETFbitcoin and @mu_enrico have reminded some.

Of course there is such an allergy, but that part of my reply is not against your decent argument, I was just trying to express my objection to people who believe that there is no anti-ASIC algorithm, people like the ProgPoW inventor.

My point is a cpu-friendly algorithm is feasible to implement but a network totally based on such an algorithm is not necessarily secure and decentralized as taking control of large processing powers by botnets is feasible as well. Monero case, ase you've correctly reminded, proves it.

On the other hand gpus are interesting devices, taking control of enough gpus to cause serious damages is not feasible either by implanting botnets or installing large mining farms.

I have a use case for cpu-friendly PoW tho: attaching work to transactions when they are generated by wallets which is another topic and for now we could simply ignore it.

I don't think ASIC supporters are the same as btc holders but I do agree with your point, we need to do something about the investments made in ASICs because it is what cryptocurrency is about: responsibility and consensus but we need not to let in greed and centralization instincts, as well.
So, this is what I propose:

Firstly, I think we should draw a line between ASIC manufacturers and ASIC miners (all btc miners) to distinguish them, both have invested in ASICs but in very different senses. I feel less responsibility for Bitmain as this company has made enough up to now but miners are another story. I think there is a solution for keeping them safe and profitable enough to rebuild their business in the correct direction: gpu mining.

I've been discussing it in different situations, we don't need to force ASICs out immediately, with a very little effort it is totally feasible to have both SHA256 and ProgPoW active for a very long time.

Unlike what many people think btc miners are not happy with ASICs, difficulty surges with a crazy rate even when price is dropping bad! ASIC manufacturers install proprietary mining farms and compete with miners (their customers!) with unfair advantage of using newer technology earlier than it has been even announced to exist. In 2018 bitcoin price tilted down from 20K to 4K and meanwhile network difficulty has surged like 2.5 times! It nets to a 1200% loss of profit for miners! No, miners are not happy with ASICs they are running, they are slaves of Bitmain and they need to be set free of this slavery.

For this to happen, I've proposed a multi-algorithm PoW using both SHA256 and ProgPoW with a 10:1 ratio respectively in the start and a predefined re-adjustment of this ratio in a 2-3 years period to have it at 2:10 i.e. allocating 1/11 of blocks to ProgPoW in the beginning and improving it up to 80% within 2-3 years, by applying just one hard fork.

This will be even more profitable for ASIC miners because puts an end to Bitmain (and others) projects and decreases supply of ASICs substantially. It guarantees a more stable and continuous profitability after the first shock . Miners would be able to retire their ASICs gradually and instead of buying new ASICs to invest on gpus.

Although I'm personally running a small mining farm, in spite of some positive feelings about such a transition from sole economic perspectives, I've not done a thorough assessment on socioeconomic impacts involved, I confess, and I can't speak on behalf of mining community.
It will be highly appreciated if more serious mining stakeholders would tell us about how such a proposal looks to get support from their side.

I personally am still pro-ASIC mining for various reasons. Mainly because it increases the stakes that miners have in Bitcoin; to a lesser extend because it decreases the vulnerability of Bitcoin's PoW to future quantum computers (under the premise that early quantum computers will be even more centralized than early ASIC miners).

Given the size of the industry nowadays I also have my doubts that a mere switch to GPU / CPU mining would help decentralization all that much; at least not without additional measures to make pool mining significantly less attractive. Regardless of this, economics of scale would still apply and whether big miners buy ASICs or GPUs wholesale seems to make little difference to me. However I'm not quite up-to-date with the current mining hardware market and Bitmain's stranglehold may be worse than I think.

It would be interesting to see what sharing mining hardware with Bitcoin would mean for alts though (and vice versa).

I totally get your point, but I also could remember how two things happened after second bailout for banking system in 2009. 1st, the bitcoin. 2nd, a phrase about climate change with this message: "we can't eat money" [1]. both targeting the need of tighter regulation in banking and climate areas. if we all just think about money, there will be a day that we all lose hope and trust in a moment. bitcoin is important because it is going to be an answer for the broken trust of people about their future, now the same problem (everybody just look for money) is going to break it down.

and also look at these calculations and the inversion of incentives for miners of ETC:

block interval= 10 second
block reward= 4 ETC (20$)
blocks (last 24h)= 6,108

block reward (last 24h) = 24,432+24.45+34.13+34.13 ETC ($105,506.96 USD) [2]
stolen amount (less than 24h) = $1.1 million worth of the currency [3]

and put them all behind the tweet of ETC team:

"We are working with Slow Mist and many others in the crypto community. We recommend exchanges and pools significantly increase confirmation times (400-4000+)"

you see? if I be a dishonest pool and have 51% of the process, then I could gain 10 times more benefit that being an honest pool at the same time. I call it the inversion of incentives. who and how could guaranty such an inversion of incentives never happens to bitcoin?


being mathematically broken is not the only matter of security, being available is also important in the context of security. ASIC devices sometimes could bring a kind of denial-of-service to the network (51% attack). nobody is happy with this situation, but this is a bitter fact that we should face it.


misunderstood. I agree that equipping by ProgPoW would not be that hard, but getting the desired result is another issue here. you know, when we have ASICs for sha256 and some other ASICs for ethash, none of their owners could perform an attack against the other group. but, if we all destroy our ASICs and get back to GPUs then we have a large army of multi-purpose processors that have no loyalty and just look for a coin that bring more profit for them within an specific period of time. then imagine a guy (proof-of-keys [4]) that suddenly appears in youtube and asks all miners to join his pool that is planning to attack bitcoin, just for fun or any reasons else.. this is where we need the REQUIREMENTS and CONSIDERATIONS part..


[1] https://me.me/i/when-all-the-trees-are-cut-down-when-a-the-3803512
[2] https://bitinfocharts.com/ethereum%20classic/
[3] https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/612728/hackers-just-stole-1-million-from-the-ethereum-classic-blockchain-in-a-rare-51/
[4] https://www.proofofkeys.com/

I don't follow how ASIC or gpu based PoW would have anything to do with QC vulnerability. Actually I believe they don't.
I assume you are speaking of SHA256 immunity to QC attack but it is the same for ProgPoW and many other gpu/cpu friendly algorithms, they are as resistant to QC as sha2 if not even more. QC is supposed to crack ECDSA encryption in the transient phase in which pub key is disclosed by user (to claim the utxo) and has nothing to do with mining.

You are absolutely right, and you may be already aware of my other proposal, Proof of Contributive Work, PoCW which is presented in a topic titled as Getting rid of pools ... (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4438334)
Obviously, we are discussing a hard fork here and it is totally possible to have both at the same time but we need to discuss each issue separately. I'm afraid getting into pooling problem would be a distraction here.

GPU industry is far more competitive and healthy than its ASIC counterpart and more importantly, gpus are distributed around the globe more evenly. A gpu friendly algorithm of any type has a large memory footprint (to resist being cracked by ASICs like what happened to bitcoin) and memory banks are a rare resource with limited global supply, a scene that is unlikely to change for near future.
IMO, there is nothing to worry about gpus being monopolized, nobody could afford such a huge investment because the demand for mining is a fraction of the total demand for gpus and manufacturers won't sacrifice their market for a tricky one time business.

As of altcoin gpu miners, I believe it is really interesting because they can act as another stabilizing factor.

In cryptocurrency we have no assumption about loyalty, all in all it is about being rational instead of loyal. I know you are aware of this point I just don't get it why should you make such a weird argument tho.

@HeRetik has already mentioned the interesting consequences of mining industry being homogenous mainly in terms of using same hardware, gpu. My first impressions are encouraging. I think we will have a more stabilized mining scene for both bitcoin and alt coins.

Let's forget about 50%+1 attack, not everything is about such an attack and it will never happen for a big fish like bitcoin or ethereum and smaller ones should take care of their business by smart measures, I've proposed one earlier: require more confirmations for more precious txns.

There are a lot of other socioeconomic problems and issues to be addressed:

-Is it possible to have current ASIC miners' support?

-Is it possible to make a hard fork without leaving behind a significant portion of users and miners?

-Do we have to get rid of pools simultaneously?

and I need you guys change this point of view [1] - especially when you try to disable ASICs in a crypto network. in the field of decision making, scientist follow new patterns that match better to human mind that first came with Behavioral Economics:

"Behavioral economics studies the effects of psychological, cognitive, emotional, cultural and social factors on the economic decisions of individuals and institutions and how those decisions vary from those implied by classical theory"  [2]

"conventional economics assumes that people are highly-rational—super-rational—and unemotional. They can calculate like a computer and have no self-control problems."  "People often make poor choices—and look back at them with bafflement!" "We do this because as human beings, we all are susceptible to a wide array of routine biases that can lead to an equally wide array of embarrassing blunders in education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, happiness, and even the planet itself." [3]

if cryptocurrency is going to be a competitor of monetary, banking or payment system, needs to include a wide range of irrational behaviors (misbehaving [4]) in the equation.

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5072301.msg48113411#msg48113411
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Thaler (He won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2017)
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misbehaving_(book)

I do not agree with people saying ASICs are a threat for x coin, it's not true. the actual treat is the control of hashing power regardless of where it comes from.

if we fork against ASICs those with access to enough GPUs will still be a  treat to the blockchain , if we fork against GPUs, same thing applies to CPU, if we fork away from CPU those with most pens and papers + brain will be the new treat.

pos does not offer a much different protection against "power control"

And WE have to disappoint you, sorry.

Giving up with rational behavior assumption gives us nothing other than chaos. Without such an assumption we have to forget about game theory and without game theory, we are left alone with almost nothing to solve Byzantine Generals Problem in a trustless, open environment.

I appreciate your courage for thinking out of the box, but I think it is not the right place to discuss such an elementary issue. If you are really interested in developing a new class of cryptocurrency which is not based on rational behavior of participants, you are welcome to do some paperwork including a mathematical model comparable with what bitcoin is built around. My advice: Don't even try, you fail.

ECDSA is definitely the more worrisome factor, but I'm indeed referring to using quantum computers for mining.

While quantum computers don't have any apparent computational advantage over classical CPUs as far as SHA256 is concerned, they are also not especially disadvantaged. With classical computing reaching its physical limits and quantum computing just getting started, it seems rather likely to me that quantum computing (assuming it doesn't hit a wall itself) will outperform classical CPUs / GPUs in terms of SHA256 hashes within our lifetime -- with ASICs offering a much wider margin of safety.

I have to admit though that this point becomes utterly moot under the assumption that Bitcoin's future PoW scheme is as resistant against QC as it is against ASICs.



I'm aware of your proposal and didn't mean to distract :) I just think it's worth keeping in mind that not ASICs per se are the problem, but the centralization that they enable (ie. nothing is gained if we get rid of ASICs only to be re-centralized soon after).



Is it though? The GPU industry is essentially a duopoly of NVIDIA and AMD, with Bitcoin's GPU mining era having been an AMD monoculture. Additionally the 2017 bubble had enough of an impact on the GPU market that regular gamers were facing a supply shortage and prices inflated way beyond the original release date prices. And that was just alt coin mining, even excluding Scrypt-based coins.

GPUs are definitely wider distributed than ASICs, but don't underestimate the market impact of crypto. Given a crazy enough market high-end GPUs (ie. the ones that are relevant for mining) can become just as hard to attain for the common mortal as ASIC miners.



Funny, I personally assume quite the opposite as I'm instantly reminded of the BCH / BTC hashrate fluctuations and the recent 51% attacks on minor alt coins. Not necessarily a problem for Bitcoin, but definitely not stabilizing for the ecosystem as a whole.

That's just my thoughts though, what leads you to the conclusion that Bitcoin sharing hashrate with alts would be stabilizing?



If your investment is at stake and you can't use it for anything else (as is the case with ASICs), loyalty becomes the rational choice. Granted, it's the kind of "loyalty" that only lasts until the hardware becomes obsolete, but that's still a couple of months of hashing that you would otherwise need to continuously compete for.



Requiring more confirmations is the obvious solution, but also an incredibly impractical one. Having your customers wait for a day worth of confirmations on the off-chance that a someone is about to mount a 51% attack is rather crippling, even if you only apply it to larger transactions.

How is that? Taking over of hashing power is just a matter of decision making for a company like Bitmain with ASIC mining being dominant while there is no way for any entity in the globe to dream of controlling like 10% of gpu power. GPUs are globally distributed and controlled by hundreds of millions of people and manufacturers like AMD or NVIDIA have no meaningful presence in cryptocurrency marketplace and there is almost no possibility for this scene to change regardless of what happens next.

Let's don't argue about indisputable facts: GPU is afar better choice than ASIC for any cryptocurrency.
Actually ASIC is a crack against cryptography, it has always been since WWII and nothing has changed, when a cryptographic algorithm get ASICed, it should be considered a failure and fixed instead of being justified as 'inevitable', 'not a big deal' or even 'a good thing'!
It is just ridiculous how is it possible to have a cryptographic system of any kind being cracked by a specialized circuit and considered safe meanwhile?

For an algorithm to be "cracked", we'd first have to agree that designing hardware to perform a task more efficiently is effectively breaking some sort of implied lock.  I'm still yet to be convinced there's a lock to break, let alone that ASICs are somehow breaking them.  It's unlikely we're ever going to see eye-to-eye on this.

Perhaps if an algorithm was specifically designed with ASIC resistance in mind, then you could make that claim.  But that doesn't apply here.

One ASIC 'trick' is pipelining. I don't know if GPU's support it ? Sounds like they should frankly.. But if they don't.. their Resistance Is Futile ;p

You build a circuit that does SHA256. Great, you can now run SHA256 at the speed of a hardware chip. But only ONCE per iteration. So you can run it once and then when it's finished, check the result, and then run it again. Normal programs will do this. It's very fast to do 1 sha256. A GPU can do this. Lets say it takes 1000 clock cycles.

Or - you build an ASIC that does does sha256.. BUT you can run a separate thread through the circuit per clock cycle. You start one, and then before it has finished, and before you have a result, start another thread one clock cycle behind IN THE HARDWARE CIRCUIT. It takes 1000 clock cycles to get the first result, just as with the first version, but after that you get 1 result EVERY clock cycle. That's 1000x faster. If the algo takes more steps say 10,000, then it gets 10,000 time faster.

That works against any algorithm that isn't running on pipelined hardware.

And we are done with QC issue, because ProgPoW is absolutely better than sha2 in this regard.

You are right about duopoly, but it is not a threat. NVIDIA and AMD are not stakeholders in cryptocurrency and gaming industry is very high profile ways more important than mining. We are speaking of a 200 billion dollars market which is doubling every year and is supposed to keep the pace for a decade. Neither of the two giants have any plans to quit this industry or undermine it in favor of mining.

Still, you are right about it being a problem, having two manufacturers as original source, but it is the same for most essential parts of computing industry RAM, CPU, GPU , ... and when it comes to choose between Bitmain and NVIDIA I rather choose the latter for so many reasons: not being a mining company, absolutely no ways to implant backdoors, potentially subject to a comparably strong competitor (AMD), having a much wider market to be worried about, more transparency, ... you say.


Although I propose a gradual migration, in the beginning it would have disruptive consequences on gpu market and altcoin mining both, but once the dusts are settled we have nothing much different than what we already have right now.
And yes, it is good situation with gpu mineable coins, despite all the hype about 51% attacks. I don't care about this attack at all, as you know.
Let's don't worry about this attack for a moment, and realize that it is a very strong stabilizer mechanism in altcoin mining industry right now. Professional miners, don't switch between coins just because of temporary price fluctuations as reported by coinmarketcap or other indexing services, they consider choosing coins with stronger infrastructure and long term perspective as well. As a result we have an objective measure regarding actual value of coins. When something bad happens for a coin, both price and hashrate will drop and vice versa and mining industry acts more coherent with basic incentive system designed for bitcoin...

On the contrary, ASIC mining is subject to manipulation by the manufacturer. It is why we have experienced a long term weird pattern in bitcoin mining in 2018. Despite steep price decline for months network hashrate and difficulty figures were climbing sharp and stopped just when mining bitcoin proved itself not to be profitable and miners were no longer able to tolerate losses. It is what happens when you have miners as slaves of a manufacturers, even worse.

Let's look closer to the recent event in ASIC industry, Bitmain is launching its 7 nm ASICs while bitcoin is in the lowest price levels in a year, now what do miners have to do other than buying new hardware and dumping their now useless ASICs? See? It is worse than slavery!

This is very different for gpu miners, when the whole market is down, there is a chance to assign other jobs to gpus and more importantly, there is no force to install new hardware.

Unfortunately, I have not made a deep assessment regarding this issue and I have no statistics to present right now, but according to my own experience, ASIC miners are easy targets for the manufacturer but gpu miners are not slaves of NVIDIA or AMD, they have a better chance to back-off or at least not to sink even more.

Please note, having a good balance between incentives and costs is the essence of what makes cryptocurrency a decent industry, so, I'm not talking about miners interests here, I'm talking about how keeping miners safe and secure is critical for a long term stability of the whole ecosystem.  
The way I see it, gpu mining provides a better mechanism for regulating the balance with cryptocurrency total value and its total costs (energy consumption mainly) and a better mechanism for distributing this costs between different coins.

I understand miners being trapped (because of using a specialized device) sounds like kinda 'loyalty' but it is not a good kind, it is even bad because of fragility. Naturally when there is no flexibility we are dealing with fragility, aren't we?
Investment is about opportunity cost which is just one factor and not the most important one. We have electricity, labour and overhead costs involved as well. A miner remains loyal up to the point that other costs have not surpassed the incomes minus opportunity costs substantially and in long run. They start to halt their operations at a certain point while in the same time, ASIC producer pushes for new hardware, hence the gradual elimination of small mining facilities won't act as a relief because the total network hashrate remains high or even climbs up! So the elimination process escalates even more. The net result would be a highly centralized mining scene.

I think people who insist on this kind of 'loyalty' just forget the basics and mistakenly suppose this kind of loyalty, accidentally is good for security of bitcoin because of miners (slaves) who are trapped in the network and are securing it for free!
It is not how it works in socioeconomic systems. Such a security is not considered sustainable and is doomed to centralization. When a coin price is tilting down, you need less hashpower to keep it secure and vice versa. It is the rule and as much as having such a system in its pure form is impractical, violating this rule intentionally or justifying such violations as "fortunate accidents" is not acceptable.

I disagree. 51% attacks for the soul purpose of double spending one or few utxos do not put ordinary txns in danger unless they spend coin base of orphan blocks. Maturity of a coin base txn should be delayed enough proportional to the costs of attacks and if it is not tuned properly, user wallets should issue a warning for such txns (my proposal) so, it is all about how and when the recipient is satisfied with number of confirmations. For ordinary low stake txns there is no risks (supposedly not originated from a recent coinbase) involved as after the re-org it will be re-confirmed if it is not already, for high stake txns, it is totally acceptable to analyze the risks and wait for a substantially higher period of time (number of confirmations).

I think it is all about exchanges and their poor software designs: typically they do not distinguish between a multi million dollar and a one hundred dollar txn and use a same stupid parameter as the number of confirmations. it is really crazy, you don't need to wait like two days to be convinced about my deposit of like 5 etc but if I had enough money to buy like 1,00,000 etc from you, I wouldn't release the funds sooner than a week after the first confirmation. When two entities have chosen a low hashrate coin to do a high stake business, they need to treat it properly.

I have to insist on the above arguments once more: When bitcoin was started 10 years ago and in the first couple of years no body accused it of being insecure, while any data center owner was able to commit a 51% attack against it! As long as we are discussing bitcoin as of its design principles, it is secure not because of its absolute security against 51% attacks but because of the equilibrium between the incentives and the costs involved. Lower prices reduce incentives and attack costs altogether and higher price acts contrarily. it is true because in an idealistic scenario, we have network hashrate and price that are regulated inversely and network hashrate is what determines attack costs.

Cheers bro, long time no see  :)
Excellent contribution, as always:
Although GPUs support pipelining, it is not the feature one can use in mining because it is typically a part of specialized rendering/streaming and video related modules which is not programmable. 

Essentially an ASIC is composed of a series of combinational circuits typically managed by a sequential one which is pipelined specially just like pipelined rendering operations in gpus.
To make it infeasible for such a chip to use pipes, we have to note that, this architecture is effective as long as 1)all the operations are supported by the combinational units, and as far as 2) each step is not dependent on the result of previous step.

1) the first mitigation to such a pipelined ASIC attack is using a memory hard algorithm which carefully uses a large memory footprint and lot of FETCH operations. FETCH is an operation which no combinational circuit could help with. I say carefully because it is possible to have a large memory bank designed specially to do simple operations in-place on memory words without fetching them to processing unit, like when you do a simple xor between adjacent memory words, etc.

2) To make pipelining even more inefficient an algorithm may impose a pseudo random series of basic (with 1 cycle cost) calculations that consume previous step results.
This way pipes become practically useless.

There are a lot of other techniques including SIMD, Single Instruction Multiple Data, which ASICS use but GPUs are far more specialized in.

ProgPoW combines all the above techniques plus a lot more and current consensus among experts confirms it as being highly difficult to beat when running on a commodity gpu. Intensive analysis suggest that a hypothetical ASIC wouldn't be able to provide more than %20 efficiency and it is not enough to justify design and manufacturing costs of such a device. It seems to be even more unlikely to have such a chip around ever because of it being worthless for other applications and vulnerable to further algorithm changes.

I strongly recommend you to take a look at https://medium.com/@ifdefelse/understanding-progpow-performance-and-tuning-d72713898db3

And this one is also a very interesting reading: https://medium.com/@OhGodAGirl/thank-you-alexander-for-your-constructive-feedback-d39078079186
Author of the second article, K. L. Minehan is the main inventor of ProGPoW, she introduces herself this way: Author. Artist. Aussie. Asshole.  ;D

Of course it does break a lock, how would it be possibly considered otherwise? We are talking about cryptography after all!

Satoshi was not an expert of chip manufacturing industry and had no clue about how a stupid algorithm like sha256 is vulnerable to ASIC attack. This is it.

Suppose as a result of ignorance, whatever, nobody have attempted this attack until now and we have still gpu/cpu mining of sha256 with like 2,000,000 gpus installed. Now you manage to build a s9 which outperforms a gpu by being like 10.000 times more efficient with almost the same price and instead of selling your miner you choose to run a farm consisted of just 100 s9s. As a result difficulty surges like %50 and you have access to 1/3 of total network hash power and your profitability is 10,000 times more than other competitors. Now are we allowed to consider it a failure and sha256 a bad choice for PoW?

SHA256 was a bad choice for PoW, it was designed to be run by average users with commodity hardware in a one-cpu-one-vote manner but it failed to do so because it was cracked by ASICs. Period.

And how do ASICs break the cryptographic hash function?  The idea of mining is to solve the nonce.  Finding a way to do it as efficiently as possible is not breaking any cryptographic element.



So ASICs are bad but GPU mining is okay?  It's nice to see where we draw the arbitrary lines.  The centralising element doesn't come from the hardware used, but from the quantity of units one person can utilise.  If I mine on my home CPU, while some billionaire has 50 warehouses dotted around the globe with 10000 CPUs mining away, it's literally no different in terms of centralisation.



It would be a bigger failure if we switched the algorithm to one that could allow that to happen in future.  Attempting to restrict ASICs and someone managing to do it anyway is the only way this scenario could occur now.  For me, personally, your ideology isn't worth the potential cost to the network.  Others may feel differently.

He has no choice as Ethereum centralizes more and more away from him, and to Infuria running and controlling most of the dapps, and the nodes. Hahaha.

Vitalik will become something like a mascot.



Ok.


Or, in Ethereum's situation, will it be an assurance that there will never be another anti-ASIC hard fork again?

QC hypothetically can solve ECDSA problem and ECDSA is about to be considered as a failed algorithm already.People are working hard to find an alternative instead of denial or justification.

Believe it or not, there is a line between NVIDIA/AMD/Intel/... on one side and Bitmain on the other side.

I think I could explain it in other words.

each threat must assess in 2 different ways: "1- severity 2- expanse". the problem with ASICs is because of its severity in a possible threat, but this could not prevent the expanse of a threat that you mentioned it very well - and in fact this is what I try to express. Disabling ASICs is necessary, but not enough. an example for the arrangements that we could take for controlling the EXPANSE factor of a thread, would be flash-back-pinning:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5089384.0

So the question then becomes:

Is your issue truly with ASICs?  Or with Bitmain?

My stance remains that it's far more practical and safe to encourage a larger number of companies to get involved in the production of ASICs, rather than trying to stuff the genie back in the lamp, burying it and then hoping that the clear and obvious financial incentive to let it back out again is never discovered.

Competition works best when there isn't the potential for one competitor to obtain a major advantage over the others.  This is why you raise the bar and not just politely ask the competitors to perform to a lower level than they're capable of.  Sooner or later, their desire to win will override your desire to lower the bar.  If multiple manufacturers can make ASICs, no one company has a major advantage over the others.  But if you make a supposedly ASIC-resistant algo, you open the potential to one company "cracking" it (it's not really a crack, though) before the others do.  And the companies with the most disposable income will have the best chance of gaining the advantage.  That's a weaker system than the one we currently have and I will continue to argue against it.

I mean, you've seen movies, right?  That overused trope where the good guy and the bad guy agree to settle their differences with a fair fist fight, but then when the bad guy is losing, they pull out a knife/gun/whatever?  You can't trust hardware manufacturers to agree to a fair fight.  It won't work.  They want to win and I sincerely doubt they'll lose any sleep if they don't conform to your noble ideals.  

Mining is an arms race.  It was an arms race long before ASICs.  It'll continue to be an arms race if someone comes up with something better than ASICs.  But at no point will it be ever be safe to believe that everyone will lay down their arms and go back to a fist fight.

They don't.


Hash algorithms are broken when you find a collision, efficiently. "Efficient" in practice means devising a different algorithm to SHA256 that can find collisions on a practical timescale. SHA256 ASICs cannot be used to look for collisions efficiently, they are designed to do one thing only: perform the actual SHA256 algorithm on data being fed to them.

It's possible they could find a collision, but checking that would have to be programmed by the controller, not an SHA256 ASIC. It's unlikely though, and certainly has nothing to do with making SHA256 unusable for authentication etc. That would require an efficient method of finding collisions, not an inefficient method (i.e. brute forcing). If you want to man-in-the-middle someone, using a hash farm to brute force their connection's shared secret key is going to be frustratingly expensive if the target renegotiates their HMAC secret at almost any frequency more than, say, once every 1000 years.

There's never been a report I've heard of an SHA256 ASIC being used to find even 1 hash collision, despite the inconceivable number of hashes performed in Bitcoin mining since 2009.

َWho says that?

Breaking a cryptographic system, is just about finding a solution much cheaper and faster than what is expected as the processing cost and time by the inventor. SHA256 ASICS are not cracking the hash function, they are a crack against how bitcoin is using it as a cryptographic system. They are breaking PoW, not SHA256.

To be more specific, a cyberpunk Satoshi Nakamoto, devised a one cpu, one vote system for a decentralised system named bitcoin, instead of finding a collision the problem was defined to find a nonce that hashes to a value close enough to a target. just like collision problem which is hard to find the new problem was supposed to be hard, not that much but reasonably hard to solve, the inventor designed the whole system on this simple concept: AS the problem is equally hard for all the participants, the ones who consume more energy and allocate more cpus have more chance to solve it sooner and deserve to be rewarded more.

It is what then happened, some greedy douche bags found a flaw in Satoshi's schema: the whole algorithm (SHA256 being its core but not the whole) has very small memory footprint and can be accelerated dramatically by a specialized chip, an ASIC. End of the story.

The thing with people like you is that you are addicted to this situation at the same time that you are taking advantage of it. All those stupid and worthless arguments that you guys repeat over and over about how inevitable are ASICs because every algorithm is vulnerable to ASICs, ASICs are not a big deal, GPUs are not that much different than ASICs, ASICs are good because they can't jump in/out the network, ASICs are good because they are immune to botnets, bla,blah, ... they are just pure garbage, they do not deserve to get an answer, they are just some desperate justifications mad by some addicts who have no choice other than living in the jails made by a bunch of greedy crackers who are mocking them at the same time that are making money out of their misery.

And yet this is the first time I've ever heard this definition.  Curious.  Someone might think you just came up with it.   ::)

An inventor can't protect their invention against the passage of time.  There's no cure for progress.  It's what people do.  We find solutions to do stuff faster and cheaper.  Why is this such an outrage all of a sudden?



This seems to be more of an opinion rather than a statement of fact.



Arguably, the system was devised so that the incentive to build a valid blockchain is greater than the incentive to attack it.  A multitude of other coins with different algorithms thought they could do better and subsequently fell at this very hurdle.  What's the rush to repeat their mistakes?



Opinions again.  You haven't actually countered any of those arguments.  Calling them garbage does not constitute a rebuttal.  Thanks for repeating some of reasons why changing the algo has downsides, though.

you're backpedalling the above claim, and you knew you were wrong when you made it. I won't be replying further

Still, it is the most correct definition ever. Cryptography has always been about time and cost and crack is always about designing special circuits to surprise the cryptographer. It has always been so and will remain always so.

It is no progress, who told you making ASICs is progress? Progress is about a technology that solves human kind civilization to produce better and cheaper goods and services. In cryptography, ASICs are just used for one purpose: stealing money from miners.

Nop. It is absolute fact, the bare truth, bitcoin PoW was broken by these douchebags and nothing can ever change this fact. Satoshi invented a way to compare the amount of energy and resources miners allocate to mining and to distribute rewards according to this comparison then some cracker showed up by an ASIC that was thousands of (and not two or three) times more efficient than average commodity devices laughing at Satoshi and bitcoin miners. Definitively it was a crack and deserved mitigation, immediate mitigation.

Nop. Incentive mechanism is irrelevant in this context, we are discussing PoW, it is about how much resources are required to do a job socially.

I don't GAS about such arguments that have been made up AFTER the event to be used for justification purposes only. If ASIC was a good idea, Satoshi or the community should have been discussing it long before douchebags started secretly using it to get rich enough to make a better version and sell the old one to stupid people. I personally never bought an ASIC other than for experimental purposes, not a stupid after all.

So, you are happy with Bitmain and the stupid mining scene of bitcoin? Good for you, but pleas don't try to convince me about your reasons, there is no reason other than giving up and being a coward for being a supporter of an entity that its business by definition is ruining PoW algorithm and taking cryptocurrencies as hostage and turning miners to its slaves.

This seems to be the important question. What tangible benefits can we expect from ensuring the viability of GPU or FPGA mining? At large scale, how different are the economics of general purpose vs. application-specific processors? In both cases, it seems like mining hardware production would still be fairly concentrated among a few giant producers. Also, if we look to historical pool hash rate distribution of, for example, Ethereum vs. Bitcoin, the former is not necessarily less concentrated. So, what's the goal here?

I think a lot of people look at the advent of ASICs in 2013 and the subsequent rise of Bitmain, and they automatically blame ASICs for how the industry developed. However, I think a lot of it has to do with industry consolidation and concentration of capital that you'd see develop in any growing market over time.

No. look my friend, there are many reports that show us the speed of providing processing power now is more than Moore's Law [1] and the processing power that is available is at the level of a mouse brain. this is also expected that after 2020 we will enter the age of processing by optical, quantum and DNA computing that will lead us to the singularity point. I am not going to elaborate the technological aspect of singularity here (this is obviously off topic) but I personally believe that cryptocurrencies could survive economies within age of singularity and PoW is vulnerable here. this is one of the most clear visions from the future that shows us how machine could overcome the human kind.

this is very simple to see that PoW rewards the density of processing power and who provides denser processing power than 51%, the whole network will move under his control (in ETC case, better say extortion [2]). really, what happens if we sleep and tomorrow morning when we wake up, see top 3 pools of bitcoin are joined together and have the majority of processing power!? then we just ASK them to divide their power and we pray in silent they do that?! till now the crypto world was in its earliest stages, but in the beginning of 2019 how we ever could call it a consensus model [3]:


byzantine generals problem never been based on "thanks to good relation among our generals (pools) a traitor could not threaten the consensus model.."




[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law


[2] https://www.trustnodes.com/2019/01/13/etc-block-rewards-go-crazy
[3] http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/184427-one-bitcoin-group-now-controls-51-of-total-mining-power-threatening-entire-currencys-safety

Come again?  Maybe you've taken too much crack or something.



CPU -> GPU -> ASIC appears to follow a technological progression.  Each faster and more efficient than the last.  Ergo, progress.  ASICs can't be uninvented.



Even if that were the case (and I don't think anyone here is convinced that it is), I'm still yet to hear anything other than how you think ASICs are bad.  Your ASIC-proof unicorn has yet to materialise here in the real world.  



Are you sure?  You're taking all this rather personally.

---

There's also the notable issue of a number of other hardware suppliers at the time being shady as shit.  It almost seems like there were more manufacturers and suppliers embroiled in scandals and frauds than there were legitimate companies operating in the scene.

ASIC's are just a logical step in Bitcoins evolution, since it is designed to have a value and optimizing hardware/code to achieve more value is unavoidable.

Plus proposals to hard fork to disable ASICs will never gain wide consensus from the community. Never. Who wants to amputate the network of nodes and hashing power?

we could consider self-driven cars as an evolution for man-driven cars. vehicle detector cameras could also consider as an evolution for classic speed cameras. but my friend, how could we consider vehicle detector cameras as an evolution of cars at all? a camera is an environmental threat (or opportunity) that is growing out there - out of control of car manufacturers.. now if you drive faster than declared speed limit in a road (do not regulate yourself and improve your driving algorithms), then you will penalize by the speed camera (a consensus fork happens).

ASIC technology always exists and grows out there - out of control of bitcoin. if you want to talk about the evolution of bitcoin, you need to bring a new idea as a BIP. bitcoin is just an algorithm. BTW, evolution is not only about survival, it is also about perish and letting others survive..

Reminder:

"it is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself -- Professor Darwin"

UPDATE:

it is alright. this is enough for everybody to know the truth that the PoW will die when Moore's law dies. accepting a problem is the first step for providing a solution.

No, it is not about more value. Any single progress in technology always have been about bringing in some kind of value to the society, bitcoin ASICs being exceptionally excluded! I'm not aware of any "invention" in human history being eventually adopted/commercialized in spite of having zero social value/utility like bitcoin ASICs and it is really, really insane. Let's dive in :

Ordinarily, when some person/company invents something there can be just two reasons: private use cases (as for having a leverage in producing other goods/services) or public use cases. It is possible to have combined use cases of course, privately taking advantage of the product primarily and selling it to public eventually.

In cryptography, having access to the invention privately and exclusively is always a bad thing. People are using an encryption system with some presumptions about the state of technology and infeasibility of some calculations and an evil comes with a device that breaks the code secretly and takes advantage of this against public interests. It is what makes technology progress a nightmare for cryptographers and why they cautiously use harder mathematical problems unlikely to be vulnerable to technological progress but it happens anyway like in the case with quantum computers.

QC is a disruptive technology progress that threatens ECDSA based cryptography which is the core algorithm used in digital signatures but how do cryptographers approach it?

Firstly nobody calls it an evil move, why? Because, once it is commercialized, it would have a series of other socially valuable applications, actually disruptive applications, secondly we are actively investigating QC resistant asymmetric encryption algorithms to be prepared for the D-day, aren't we?

Now let's consider what we have with bitcoin as a cryptographic system and SHA256 ASICs. They are evil because they have nothing to offer to industry neither other industries nor bitcoin mining industry! All in all they are useful just for the entity who has invented it both in the secret phase in which it is used as a weapon against other miners and in commercialization phase in which it is used to retire other hardware and do exactly the same thing that they were used to, with zero improvement!

It is odd, but it is what PoW is. PoW is an extraordinary mechanism, miners are not solving a meaningful problem and advances in technology does not make bitcoin mining as an industry more productive because in PoW we are not concerned about number of calculations, amount of resources consumed is the main concern. It is what overlooked by people who try to justify the situation with ASICs in bitcoin.

Bitcoin is not a mathematical problem it has nothing to do with computing industry as long it is general purpose and available to people, bitcoin wants miners to be able to participate and withdraw freely and consume energy and pay rents as part of its basic game theory model.

Obviously, SHA256 ASICs don't offer any utility or value to bitcoin mining industry (I would go even further to show they have negative impact on this industry merely) and we know that they have nothing to offer to other industries as well. So, Why should they ever be invented after all? We know the answer already, don't we? They are invented by crackers just in their own private interests, it is why they are mere crackers, nothing more, not a bit.

I know, I've behaved a little harsh against guys who are mostly innocent and still say things in favor of ASIC disaster but I'm short of options in this regards really. There is a lot of money at stake, shills and mercenary authors are hiding among honest community members who have been exposed to misunderstandings and worthless ideas for years. What other choice do I have?

Then why are we having a discussion about changing the environment to benefit those who haven't adjusted?  This topic is advocated reverting back to an earlier stage in evolution in the vague hope things evolve differently this time.  You don't encourage weak species by removing all the predators and pretend that's how it was intended to be.  Current generation ASICs are the top of the food chain.  For something to no longer be top of the food chain, it either takes the introduction of a more advanced predator (the preferable option), or an extinction-level event (the likely outcome of changing the environment).  Older mining hardware eventually dies out, new hardware replaces it.  Life goes on.

---

Changing the algorithm to combat something that actually has the potential to break the cryptographic has function is a different proposition to changing the algorithm because of your skewed notions of fair play and closing the stable door several years after the horse has already bolted, lived it's life and subsequently died of old age.

In a way NiceHash made switching between coins due to short term price fluctuations their business model. It was also their hashing power that was used for the 51% attack on Bitcoin Gold. That's only possible due to a lot of free-floating multi-purpose hashing power. Accordingly I'm not sure whether the assumption of professional miners not switching between coins based on short-term profitability quite holds. Obviously they likely won't switch for intra-day price fluctuations, but on a weekly scale it may make sense to simply go for the most profitable coin and exchange for your target currency from there.



For people mining as a hobby, using their gaming GPU, sure. Once mining is not profitable anymore, they'll simple continue using their GPU for gaming.

But any commercial miner still has to upgrade their GPUs regularly, as GPUs are no exception from Moore's Law. As far as other jobs are concerned I doubt that dedicated mining rigs will see many uses besides mining other coins. I guess there's a market for computational power outside of mining (cracking passwords? training neural networks?) but I doubt that it's mature or profitable beyond the occasional hobbyist.

So short of selling your GPU to an unwitting buyer (I personally wouldn't want to be the one buying a GPU that has been slaving away in a mining rig for months on end) the "chance to assign other jobs" is realistically speaking rather marginal, even for GPUs.



Sure. But on the other hand we are also lacking hard rules in terms of confirmation counts for vulnerable networks. You can't expect proper implementations if there are no proper recommendations (ie. like Bitcoin's 6 confirmations).

---

It's an incredibly interesting discussion and there's definitely a conflict of interest between ASIC manufacturers vs miners (ie. ASIC manufacturers being miners themselves) that doesn't doesn't apply to GPU manufacturers. Still I doubt that this problem is inherent to ASICs. Given a strong and stable enough market, GPU manufactures might just as well enter mining eventually (there's little risk to their core business after all, beyond the risk of mining). And the ASIC market might become more competitive and diverse in terms of available vendors.

Inevitability of ASICs is a hype and a lie made by Bitmain. A memory hard algorithm is not theoretically vulnerable to ASICs. Bitmain invested like millions of dollars to prove otherwise against Ethash and has not offered anything better than 2-3 times better efficiency which is tolerable and gpu mining of eth is not abandoned no matter how much Jihan has invested for political reasons like providing evidence for spreading FUD against ASIC resistance.

There is no horse and no bolting, some stupid person has managed to do a silly thing against the most decent modern age invention of humanity, bitcoin, we are not discussing few years of being a smartass in this business, if there is anything inevitable in this context, it is just one: smartass frauds will be kicked out of bitcoin.

As of the strategy, I've proposed one: gradual migration from ASIC dominance to GPU dominance.  I believe that such a strategy is capable to have support of both camps because ASIC miners are really becoming desperate with their fate being in hands of irresponsible corporates, I've done some math and surprisingly found out that it is even more profitable for ASIC miners because it reverses the irrational behavior of network hashrate and eliminates the threat of introduction of new ASICs  substantially.


I don't think NVIDIA or AMD would ever be able to take advantage of their premier in gpu development to be used  in mining. It is because gpu industry is not just like ASIC, new technology in gpu is very expensive and as a common practice people wait like months for cards to become more reasonably priced before installing them on their rigs. Most importantly, Game industry is just in its infancy and shows no sign to cool down, NVIDIA and AMD are dominant but not done with other competitors, most importantly Intel has every potential to kick in, not to mention ARM and others.

I don't understand why you guys see the crypto-world with the eyes of an ASIC miner. please try to see the crypto-world from a crypto's point of view. this topic never says "lets do something to block evolution of processing power out there", it is about "lets evolve bitcoin in a way that doesn't get hurt by evolution of processing power out there"..


no, no, this is where you do mistake. look, in the aspect of a crypto-world the bitcoin seats at the top of food-web. in the terms of biology, ASICs just enroll as parasites and leeches in this ecosystem. so this is very legitimate that species (cryptos) try to get rid of parasites that try to attach them and this can't consider as a devolution for cryptos.



or you could buy them in half of the price (or less) and statistics show that the most problem with GPUs that has been in a mining rig is their MOSFET component that could get repaired with something around 30 USD.

Looks like ASIC and non-ASIC discussion won't stop, but people should remember that it's easy to put backdoor on ASIC (such as antbleed) as it's closed source and allow government/actor to control PoW-based cryptocurrency easily.
Without ASIC which is fully open-source and have good efficiency, GPU is clearly superior in this case.


The market is bigger than you think and there are more fields from astronomy to medical fields. But i doubt they'd buy second-hand GPU, only hobbyist or budget users who would buy second-hand GPU


Little risk? Both Nvidia and AMD suffering from overstock after various coins price crashed. They need to think ways to sold older GPU series while there's no way they delay their GPU launch.

I don't know about AMD, but Nvidia now focusing their product for gaming, deep learning & anything related with GPGPU. So i doubt GPU manufacture would enter mining unless party with power (government, banker, etc.) took interest with cryptocurrency or mining become popular again to the point where they'd take the risk again.

I see the crypto world as a permissionless one that can't be stifled.  Social contracts can't enforce limitations.  When it comes to running code, people will only enforce and adhere to the rules they agree with.  The manufacture of hardware is a different matter.  It isn't something you can easily regulate.  And from the perspective of a cryptocurrency enthusiast and believer in permissionless freedom, I don't think it's something we should try to regulate.  If you want to try to build a new coin using the 'honour system', where you trust participants to agree not to use the most efficient means of mining it, then by all means go for it, but in my view that's weak and I won't support it in Bitcoin.



Except that it does advocate suppressing the most efficient way to mine and it would absolutely hurt Bitcoin if we ended up in a situation where some miners were stuck using inferior technology while others manage to obtain ASICs for whatever new algorithm was chosen.  You keep portraying it as some form of injustice that ASICs exist, but the real injustice would be the inevitable disparity of some mining on inferior hardware when others had a major advantage.  Say what you like about ASICs, but any manufacturer can make them for SHA256, so no one company can gain a major advantage now.  You would also likely bring more financial harm upon Bitmain's competitors than you would Bitmain if you pressed the reset button and undid all their research and development before they can achieve return on investment.  It's not remotely the simple change you describe.  There are real and tangible consequences.



Perhaps we need to stop anthropomorphising hardware here.  We're talking about machines designed and built for a purpose because there is a financial incentive to do so.  Nothing more, nothing less.  These overly emotive pleas to define them as "parasites" are not productive avenues of discussion.

Ok, it is getting really insane  ;D
There is no "most efficient way to mine bitcoin" what the hell are you talking about?
Mining bitcoin is a social activity with a built-in regulatory mechanism that responds to game theoretic driving forces and has nothing to do with technology and efficiency. Is this that hard to understand?

To mine ~1.25 btc/minute the community needs to consume a specific amount of energy and other resources that their cost should fall in a threshold that the value of bitcoin is the main driving force behind it. It is absolutely irrelevant that the community uses penta hash/second magical devices with 0.0001 j/s efficiency or cpus 1 mh/s with 100 j/s efficiency. The whole mining process should burn resources that their cost is determined by the noble game theoretic approach built deeply in conceptual design of bitcoin and PoW. Understood or I have to use bigger fonts?

And now you are back pedalling on the big lie about inevitability of ASICs. Of course one can conventionally call a gpu or even a cpu an ASIC. The thing is it is easily provable that there is no way to do what Bitmain did with SHA256 with ProgPow, they just failed to abandon Ethash gpu mining (a 5 years old technology) and it has been like a year since they proudly announced their Ethash asics. Bitmain ASICs retired gpus from mining bitcoin like in weeks. E3 is no more than 2-3 times efficient than an old generation (rx 470) gpu rig and a modern gpu almost beats it!

Please! You are legendary figure bro, stop shooting in your head by saying weird things just because you have chosen a weird position in a debate that you can't ever win.

They have been profiting from the market ever since Bitcoin got GPU-mineable. There's simply no other game in town for GPU mining other than NVIDIA and AMD. In Bitcoin's late GPU-mining days it was even worse, with AMD's cards being the only option to mine profitably.



NVIDIA has utterly dominated the GPU market for more than 2 decades; they've essentially invented the market. AMD / ATI joined a bit later but is just as dominant. I wouldn't expect Intel or ARM to join the top ranks any time soon, especially since developing new GPUs is very expensive and requires a lot of expertise as you rightfully pointed out. Additionally NVIDIA has been only upping their game with their involvement in the development of autonomous cars.



Ooh that's neat. Wish I'd been aware of that sooner.



*cough cough* SPECTRE *cough cough* MELTDOWN *cough*

CPU and GPU architectures are closed source as well. GPU drivers mostly too. Heck we've had two critical CPU vulnerabilities just a year ago.

Not that it makes Antbleed any less bad. It's just that that's a general problem we are facing with hardware and drivers nowadays.



I have no doubts that it's a huge market, but what good is a huge market if you can't make use of it? Can you profitably sell computational power (ie. as in a paid folding@home, not as in selling hardware)? Serious question btw. Apart from some half-baked ICOs obviously.



I doubt that NVIDIA and AMD suffered much. NVIDIA's cards simply went back to the price point that they were 2 years ago at time of the GTX10xx's series' release. Let that sink in. A whole generation of GPU's not getting cheaper for 2 friggin years. Not sure about AMD though, I didn't keep track of them as much.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that NVIDIA and AMD will start mining themselves anytime soon. But there's little stopping them from doing so if the market reaches a high enough level of maturity.

Also be aware that I don't think GPU mining is bad. I'd be very interested in seeing a GPU-mining based Bitcoin hard fork that isn't a mere cash grab. I'd just like to point out that the grass is not necessarily greener on the other side.

Not comparable at all. A GPU/CPU manufacturer has no clue about the application you wish to run and has very little if not zero space to do anything bad against you as its customer.

What @ETFbitcoin is talking about is a hypothetical open-architecture miner like what in this forum has a history, a community miner, as I remember, I'm pretty sure @ETF is specially mentioning that project which never materialized anyway. He (she?) says only such a hypothetical ASIC may be considered more secure than cpu/gpu miners that are obviously closed architectures.


Sure it is greener. Well not super green but much green.  ;)
We do better with general purpose devices, not a heaven but more easier to live.

Opening a 10% segment of bitcoin market on gpus and leaving it unchanged for like a year and incrementally increasing this share in next 2 years, all prescheduled, would help gpu industry to adopt and be prepared and let ASIC manufacturers to find a way out of their scammy business too. Mining crypto is an industry and industries come with hurdles and difficulties, no doubts, but it is ways important to keep things as transparent and fair as possible.

You know, I am working on a new consensus model "PoCo" that works with PoW in its first layer but is also neutral against processing power. What we are doing here in this post is about sharing our latest knowledge and forecasts about the future of crypto and bitcoin, then everybody could make the best decision that better suits them. nothing weird is going to happen.


Bitmain company is not my problem. ASICs (or any other processing devices that can do nothing but calculate one thing in one way) are my problem.


True. I prefer to read more about these consequences. as I said above, these all are about sharing forecast to better understand the upcoming trends in crypto-world.


these analogies are necessary for "SYSTEM DESIGN", but the most close machinery example here could come from inverted pendulum.. systems behind inverted pendulums are dramatically similar to consensus algorithms of cryptos. and please don't worry about using the word "parasites" here. I already have a plenty of these hardwares in my lab. this is a scientific chat.

Reality.  Name something more efficient than an ASIC that you can use right now, at this very moment, to mine Bitcoin.    



Now that you mention it, I would love for you to draw more attention to your irrationality and faulty reasoning with a larger font.  Go nuts.  I'm particularly fond of the "magical devices" bit.  Let's hear more of that.



That or your reading comprehension needs some work.  ASICs are inevitable.  My point was that it's unlikely all manufacturers would manage to release them at the same time for a new algorithm.  The company with the most income to invest would likely get there first.  Your proposed actions would open the door to the potential of one manufacturer gaining an advantage over the others for an unknown period of time.  We've clearly moved beyond that stage in SHA256, where anyone can manufacture an ASIC for it now.  So why turn back the clock by choice and take the chance of creating a larger imbalance than the one we moved past ages ago?  It's a baffling stance.  

If the cost/reward ratio works out, no matter how much ingenuity a given algorithm has, a static obstacle invites progressively advancing ingenuity to overcome it.  The static obstacle is unable to adapt to the efforts of the person or group attempting to overcome the obstacle, allowing ample time to probe for weaknesses and workarounds.  Ergo, it doesn't matter how good someone is at designing a puzzle, more often than not, they tend to be solved given time.



And you're willing to reassure the entire world that no matter how much time, money and research Bitmain, or any other manufacturer, put into development, they won't achieve anything more than 2-3 times efficiency?  Bold claim.  However, bold claims are not nearly sufficient to sway my view on this.  

What's IfDefElse's budget on ProgPow, out of curiosity?  How many people are working full time on it?  And for how long?  Can they dedicate more time, money and research into creating it than hardware manufacturers can into "cracking" it?  What information can you give us that might bolster your stance and convince us that your proposed action will actually be worth the considerable upheaval?

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Call me paranoid, but if there's going to be any talk of a new algorithm or consensus mechanism, I'd personally rather see something battle-hardened and not some new and experimental idea fresh from the drawing board.  Kudos for your efforts and all, I certainly don't mean to diminish your work in any way, but the security of the Bitcoin network is hugely important.  Obviously I can't speak for everyone but, for me at least, security easily takes precedence over some vague idealism about how ASICs are considered by some to be a problem.

OK then. This is how you want to play, I'm in:

Suppose we have this game X and it has rules:
1- In each round, you can join by burning any amount of electricity that you can ever afford paying its bill.
2- When a sum of specific amount D of electricity is consumed by all players, points will be calculated for each player proportional to his burnt electricity.
3- At the end of the day, points are calculated and players are paid by some coupons.
4- Total coupons paid in each round is fixed. like eternally.
6- If coupons happened to become more popular and valuable more players may join and vice versa.
7- After each n rounds host decides about D as the needed total sum of electricity burnt.
8- The electricity you and other players burn have absolutely no use case just a waste.

Now a fraud comes to you
The fraud: Hey  I got some device that you can use more efficiently.
You: But efficiency is not a concern in our game, just a waste of electricity that the counter shows.
The fraud: I know, I know, it is actually about kinda cheating, I've built this device that its counter shows like 100 times more waste of electricity, isn't it great?
You: Why don't you use it for your own benefit?
The fraud: Sure I do, actually I've been using it for a while, and now I'm selling it to you to make even more money out of it, capitalism it is, you know
You: I knew it, recently I'm not happy with my profit rate ... so you are now selling your cheating device to me?
The fraud: Yes.
You:To me and and other guys as well?
The fraud: Sure you and other guys!
You: But then the host would assume more players has joined and increases D, wouldn't he?
The fraud: Sure he would! But no worries, I'm working on a more advanced cheating device, it manipulates counter even more like 300 times, I'll sell it eventually to you.
You: Me and other guys?
The fraud: You are asking too much questions, who are you a communist? it is capitalism told you before, you want it or not a lot of people have bought it and many others have ordered it ... buy or back-off!

Does it sound familiar  ???

I just don't believe you are so naive not to understand it already, unless it is because you talk too much and don't read enough and now you are trapped bad. Aren't you?

Sure I'm. ProgPow is an enhanced version of Ethash ways more specialized and improved to resist optimization and your giant corporate and its army of researchers and millions of budgets have not done better than 2x improvement against Ethash. ProgPow is provably unfeasible to be improved more than 1.2x.

Are you sure about here, a bitcoin discussion forum, being the right place for you? Not everything is achievable by money dude, why are you so confused? Are you a noob?

I can write down just 100 lines of encryption code that neither Bitmain nor NSA would be able to dream about breaking it, what's wrong with you?

What sounds familiar is that you didn't answer the question.  I'll repeat it:  

Name something more efficient than an ASIC that you can use right now, at this very moment, to mine Bitcoin.



"Provably unfeasible", eh?  Well that certainly sounds impressive.  But I could have sworn IfDefElse themselves (https://medium.com/@ifdefelse/progpow-faq-6d2dce8b5c8b) described those figures as "estimates".  Are we deeming estimates valid as proof now?  Is that how this works?

They also state this assumes no one makes an ASIC with High Bandwidth Memory when the cost for that comes down over time.  In which case, they concede x4 against Ethash and x1.5 against ProgPow.  Not exactly what I'd call comfortable margins.  And this is just the technology they can foresee.  Perhaps when ProgPow has been around for as long as Ethash, it'll be more like x4 for that too.  There are any number of variables in this that can't be predicted.  As such, I don't think there are many things regarding the future that are "provably unfeasible".  It's more of a "wait and see" kind of deal.



So in other words, you don't have anything else to reassure us with?  Got it.



ASICs are not breaking encryption code.  I thought we had established this already.  What's wrong with you?  

Your car/camera analogy makes absolutely no sense.
You need to understand, that people who are able to make money simply by running a computer, will always try to optimize their ROI. Means, that coders always will optimize mining code and their hardware (i.e. CPU-->GPU-->FGPA-->ASIC-->Asicboost...) to raise their ROI. Bitcoin has raised enough attention, that even computer hardware companies jumped on the crypto train (the good old gold rush/shovel supplier analogy).
There are yet ASIC resistant coins out there, but if their value raises enough to make it worth to develop an ASIC, it will be done.

of course you are not paranoid. I personally support both approaches: 1- upgraded 2- brand new work flows, with different forks. each technology could best serve us in specific duration of their life cycle and R&D entities should provide better solutions anytime.


with this method you can't even explain why coins with PoS consensus model still exist and grow in the market. in the field of PoW, we could see how Monero constantly blocks ASICs and its price remains unchanged. We could also see how Electroneaum followed Monero and blocked ASICs, but after drop in market got back to ASIC-Friendly algorithm again and this time their price in market dropped even more. We could see how market responses to Ethereaum these days. in all these examples I could see ASICs are somehow out of equation of pricing - except the recent 51% attack on ETC that ASICs were actively involved and the whole market has taken effect from.

when price of a coin is high enough to reward ASIC miners, they mine properly, but when they do not benefit from regular mining, they decide to become the majority and attack the network and this time benefit based on double-spending and then extortion. this is another way to OPTIMIZE mining:


now to fill the gap of block rewards and stolen amount ($1 million), ETC is rewarding (/ higher fee amount) each block with something around 200 coins [1] per block!! I call this hostage situation as extortion-after-51%-attack. this is not security.

[1] https://www.trustnodes.com/2019/01/13/etc-block-rewards-go-crazy


UPDATE:

please read this carefully. the problem with ASICs is they can't go anywhere else to mine. once they can not gain enough benefit, they decide to attack for ROI. but if we only get GPUs in the ecosystem, they could simply switch to other coins for more benefit. this changes the way miners proceed for optimize mining.

There is no need to complicate things as you are trying to do obv. Let's short it all up to one word: Greed

Edit: I see, maybe this was a little too short.
If there was no greed in the game, Bitcoin people would have accepted CPU mining with the integrated miner as the only method. No one would have written optimized mining code and no one would have developed FGPA or GPU mining. But, as the world go round, people like to have an advantage over other miners. This goes on and on from one step to the next.
There is a lot of information about why Satoshi and the core devs have chosen PoW as their prefered method, so I'll leave that for your own research.
Now what happened with Altcoins is a different story, because they all are based on the Bitcoin idea. People found out how easy it was to create a new coin just by changing a few lines of code and give it new name. Some of the coins even presented some innovations and some of them also have their use cases, but still they are nothing more than a copy of the original idea because of greed.

Bitcoin works fine as it is and still it is in a process of changing with time. It has proven to be resistant against a lot of types of attacks until now and if it fails, there are thousands of Shitcoins waiting to dethrone the King and to prove they can keep their method on a large scale, which I doubt.

Edit 2: https://mapofcoins.com/bitcoin
Edit 3: https://www.coursera.org/lecture/cryptocurrency/short-history-of-altcoins-nyp82

the word "Greed" is just part of the problem and ends with something like ETC, my friend. please give us a solution with one word..

See my edit.

@AGD, @Doomad
Guys, enough is enough. Although it is not a self-moderated shitty thread, as the op I do have some voice here, not a loud one but it deserves to be heard

1- You have made your point about ASICs being kinda progress an act of free market (I suppose), thank you. But this claims are strongly refuted above-thread. There is no progress, bitcoin is not about efficiency in solving a processing task. On the contrary bitcoin loves deficiency and deliberately makes the problem more difficult when someone finds out a way to solve it by a more efficient device. So, bitcoin is not an ordinary computing application and does not encourage progress.

2- Your points about competition, greed, ... is correct but not relevant enough. Bitcoin is about managing such instincts by means of a protocol and when the protocol fails to accomplish its job it should be improved instead of justification and making excuses about how hard it would be because of human nature.

3-Your claims regarding ASICs being the king is absolutely void and nothing worthier than Bitmain commercial advertisements and worse I would categorize it as FUD. We have Ethash on the scene that has mined billions of dollars in last couple of years and despite huge investments, Bitmain couldn't manage to beat it by its luxury ASIC and now we have ProgPoW that is a hardened version of Ethash ways more resistant and practically ASIC/bullet proof.

So, please put an end to such arguments and inform us about any other point you possibly got.

What? I believe that Moore's Law's "death" doesn't have anything to do with Proof of Work. I might have misunderstood, because if ASICs or GPUs have reached the most density, and efficiency for the most processing power it can make, how does it kill POW? Mining will not stop.

If you want to change the Bitcoin Core code, you can do it anytime you want. Did you already make any solid proposals, that found their way into Bitcoin Core? Or maybe you want to simply fork Bitcoin and include your idea of ASIC resistance and find enough people to support it? Go ahead!

Edit: But please ... don't call it Bitcoin.

I think it is time for bitcoin to improve and adopt. It has been 10 years, and not everything is manageable by soft-forks or other hack tricks. But I'm not interested in rebellion as a premature option. We need to have this option on the table but we need to discuss and negotiate before committing anything stupid.

Recently I went through a discussion with Greg Maxwell and I became convinced even more that the guy is such a valuable asset for bitcoin, I've same feelings for Andrew, Peter, Luke, Matt, ... they are invaluable and we need to convince them to join. It is why we write and discuss here, we need to reach to a consensus and help these guys not to hesitate and being more open to change. What we say here matters, imo.

If it didn't work and Core team didn't behave properly, I would consider more responsibilities to take, no hesitations, I just guess we have a bit more time to decide about it.

"You think", therefore it is an opinion, and therefore it might be wrong.

"It as been 10 years"? Some forms of money, in human history, took hundreds of years to be adopted as a store of value, medium of exchange, and as a unit of account. I believe there shouldn't be a "set no. of years" for Bitcoin's adoption.

Bitcoin is something new. The Core developers are making more of the right decisions than wrong by being very careful. If you want to "break" things, make an altcoin.

It is not money, yet. For the starter, you guys have given up with "bitcoin as money", already. I'm not a scammer and have no plans to do a shitty fork, I'm thinking more strategic and I want bitcoin to receive what it deserves: mass adoption.

For people like you, having your fiat system as back-up bitcoin is something fun an investment you have no incentive for a true "p2p electronic cash" but my people are in an urgent desperate need for such a system.

In early 2013 I become familiar with bitcoin and It didn't took me more than few hours to understand how promising it would be for my people and billions of people all around the world. Now, it is 2019 and bitcoin is anything other than money, centralized in pools and seized by asics.

As I said, I have respects for devs as well but I'm not confused or distracted about the cause, I need more, my people do and it is not something to be compromised or forgotten. Bitcoin as a system is in its infancy, systems evolve and adopt. 

For me Bitcoin is money, because I can pay with it, I can transfer it to any place in the world with a very low fee within minutes and it is secured by math. On top of this usefulness it is limited, which makes it a good store of value too. Also adoption rate is already raising more than people thought a few years ago, so I don't think we need a faster adoption rate.
Just have look what is happening when the BTC/USD price goes down below a positive ROI:
https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/01/15/unknown-bitcoin-miners-cryptocurrency/

Good for you, but WE do! And we can't wait like forever! Nobody knows what happens in next couple of years. Crazy ultra right populists are overtaking politics all over your world in US and EU and they are really, really dumb ass, a depreciation and economic collapse is coming and we people in third f**ng world need a much more decentralized, scalable alternative to current monetary/banking system. There is no excuse to stick with failures in such a circumstance.

I'm following this trend in other cryptocurrencies too. Investors and whales have an illusion of dominance and decision making and they make devs to follow their illusion. Meanwhile the only legitimate force in the world with a rightful voice in governing bitcoin is people.

"Analysts" are simply wrong or they are deliberately spreading misinformation. It is a known Bitmain practice that spawns subsidies to hide its dominance which is inevitable considering ASICs and pools being in charge.

Mining never stops, but centralization happens.

the Moore's Law means: "the number of transistors on a chip doubles every year while the costs are halved."
now the death of Moore's Law means: "the number of transistors on a chip reaches the saturation point."

so at the saturation point, while people like miners only could have access to chips and regular processors, Quantum or Optic,... computer manufacturers (that do not follow the Moore's Law) could totally defeat them in a processing (and therefore mining) race and become the majority. even an ASIC manufacturer could utilize his new devices in a mining competition and after a complete ROI for his R&D costs, now send them to the market for sale. this means regular miners are always one step back. before ASICs involvement in mining process, a fairness existed over all miner entities. this fairness is important for the existence of hobby miners that constantly support their coins in good and bad days, not industrial miners that turn off their facilities with the first drop of price.

please see the future..


there is also another observation that shows while ASIC-friendly coin's hash rates get hurt by a decrease in prices (a downgrade from 60 to 30 TH/s - something around 50% of bitcoin processing power), ANTI-ASIC coin's hash rate like Monero remained untouched. this shows the absence of miners who equip themselves by higher performance devices (because of the bigger tolerance that they can provide), could jeopardize the whole network. your link was the most scary report that I have seen these days that shows how misbehaving of ETC ASIC miners could extend to BTC miners too. emerging of unknown miners with 23% of processing power is a threat.

Then you, out of nowhere, want the Core developers and the whole community to listen to you because you believe you have the "solution"? It will not happen, sorry, not without consensus.


For people like me? What world are you from? Where would you be if Bitcoin fails?

You would be back to the fiat system too. You are STILL in the fiat system, how else would you be living?


Your people? What is that?

Bitcoin is very useful as a "P2P electronic cash" for gambling online, buying drugs online, money laundering, regulatory arbitrage, and other illegal stuff banks won't serve.


But your solution is? Yes, risk amputating the network of nodes, and hash power. It will not get consensus. But if you truly want to experiment on ASIC-resistance, I suggest you talk to Bitcoin Gold developers.

Hello there Mr. Craig Faketoshi Wright  ;D

For you money is what feds has full authorization over it and banks are authorized to oversee it and decide about its transactions to be considered legal or not. But I'm curious, what do you find in bitcoin attractive?

Let me guess, you have bought few bitcoins and now you want it skyrocketing to sell your deposit and buy a yacht or something, don't you?

But like it or not, bitcoin is not yours, it is not meant to be such a stupid 'investment' opportunity for adventurists and gamblers. So, better not to speak about a technology that you have no clue about its basic axioms. Specially don't bullshit improvement proposals like a hired shill whose job is simply shutting down any anti-ASIC/anti-pool discussion. We are not a bunch of fools here, we see you dude, take care.  ;)

Seriously,  don't "community" me, you are not representing bitcoin community such a thing does not ever exist to be represented by someone like you a bitcoiner who thinks banks are legal and p2p e-cash is illegal!.

If you mean bitcoin whales I don't care about them, if you mean Bitmain I hate it, if you mean Core devs I'll do my best to convince them but with all due respects, I'm not married to any of them.

Who is 'WE'? You and ...?

Anybody who is not happy with banks and US feds and global monetary system:
including libertarians, socialists, intellectuals, suffered people of under-developed  countries, any american or EU citizen who has less then $100K worth of assets and deposits, citizens of Iran who are bullied by Trump/Netanyahu/Bin Salman alliance due to stupid US sanctions, ....

We are too many and we don't GAS for people who has illusions of dominating bitcoin worst of them being the ones who are  not cautious about the cause: resisting banks and feds by setting money free of central control.

Oh, so your anti-ASIC paranoia is somehow a humanitarian issue now?  Honestly didn't see that one coming, but okay.  Let's see where this goes.  Should be entertaining if nothing else. 

And how, exactly, is getting rid of ASICs going to increase adoption and help with scaling?  I'm sure it must make sense in your head, but you appear to have skipped ahead a few points in your explanation of... whatever it is you might be going on about?

Oh Sorry, I constantly forget with what level of ignorance I'm dealing now, you are right I need to teach every single point here, ok then:

Besides the fact that centralization due to ASIC is one of the most important hurdles we need to take care of along with pools which both happened to be concentrated in China and under almost unlimited authority of  Xi JinPing, I have realized up to now that we need a complete package,  dealing with ASIC problem being a part of it.

I have done a lot of work on pooling pressure problem and some scaling issues not exactly related to this topic but once enough support is provided it won't be an impossible mission to have a better bitcoin in terms of decentralization and performance it is how people would really accept bitcoin as something provably safe and secure.

I am highly suspicious that with current state of the system we would ever experience true bitcoin and its potentials as one of the most important events in human history.

It is a shame, advocates for shitty ideas like PoS or Universal computer are now much more successful in agitating people and giving them some sort of a purpose. The conservatism and hesitations from keeping system in its promised state of decentralization, has turned us bitcoiners to kinda old fashioned people who are polluting the environment just for a maximum of 3-4 txns/sec throughput with no future of serious improvement.

It truly makes me sad. PoS is the most worthless idea in cryptocurrency and still it looks more promising than PoW. A smart contract that is written in a Turing complete machine/language supported by blockchain is an absolutely stupid idea with almost no future and is advertised as a genius disruptive achievement ... it is bad days for bitcoiners we need fresh air and we need to show what really bitcoin is instead of preserving an experimental/alpha version of the idea and avoiding to adopt and improve.

It is why bitcoin adoption is delayed, we are playing very bad!

Starting with the name-calling, are we? 8)


Then you follow up with a "you are not a real Bitcoiner". ::)


It would be more foolish to take your anti-ASIC plan without debating it.


I dislike the situation with the mining cartel, and mining centralization as much as anyone. What I was debating about is, if a hard fork for a POW change would get consensus or not, because I believe we will never do in this matter under normal circumstances, with or without the support of the Core developers.

OK. So you are speaking for big crowd of people. Do 'THEY' actually know, they have an anonymous speaker on a random forum on the internet? Did you confirm, for example, that the 'citizens of Iran' (only those that have less than '$100K worth of assets and deposits, of course) agree with your anti ASIC campaign?
If you could mobilize only these Iranian people, you would have a strong support base for your ideas. Maybe you could create your own currency...but, please ... don't call it Bitcoin.

If you want to make changes to the code, use GIT or GITTFOH (couldn't resist  ;D )

Sorry to interrupt, but I have something to speak:
The problem here is, nobody is interested in keeping their BTC as they are mostly viewing it as another money-making opportunity (here: get rich quick scheme) and so, it's not possible for anyone here to impose the actual mentality on them that what is Bitcoin all about. About this centralization thing, it isn't limited but a cycle that cannot be broken now (considering that everyone is looking for "regulations" to take effect as they believe that putting everything in the hands of "Central Authorities" will get their Bitcoins' value to sky high levels, which is somehow true as well).

How is it a centralization cycle?
Keep it to ASICs or even CPU/GPU mining or even take it back to those times when USBs were used to mine BTC, everything can be controlled by big firms when they've got the money and power both to buy the equipment (or if they already have them) and keep it in their hands - fully controlled. It's not just limited to the machines that are eating hell lots of electricity to generate these coins, but it also takes in the PoS (unless there's a mechanism installed to stop the misuse of the system, which can not happen as if you'll stop them from getting their complete share, they'll not let it rise in terms of value).

Well, how PoS?
Simple, just as they can buy the equipment, they can easily buy the pre-mined coins either in ICO by buying a big share or by buying in small parts through weaker hands (this is also considered centralization). This way, they can eat a very big share they'll get through the stakes and control the whole market, though people will stop looking into that "investment" anymore which also stops the further development of that coin as devs see that there's no more interest remaining and they continue with the current version seeing no need of upgrades. The way US and Russia are playing with public's sentiments and trying to get their hands fully on BTC (just like China did, as you mentioned) shows that each country is looking more into making bucks rather than the technical aspects of the technology underlying. This statement supports the quote from your comment I'm putting below:

---

It's next to impossible for Bitcoins to ever be used as proposed (the main purpose of it was to be used as a "DIGITAL CURRENCY - A GLOBAL CURRENCY) and what we're doing currently - trading it as an asset playing in the markets with those ups and downs, speculating every now and then about "when the next pump will begin". There's nothing actually that could prevent Bitcoins (or any alt or tokens) from centralization as everyone here wants it, stopping the Governments is not possible for us, but for them to stop us is like eating a piece of cake so easy for them.

this regulation part is very important here and actually talking about an upgrade to an ANTI-ASIC algorithm is a kind of regulation_by_code.. which means being code_central wouldn't be a kind of centralization that everyone tries to stay far from it..

UPDATE: one good example of regulation_by_code that already exists in PoW is the procedure of difficulty setting among block creation..


with PoS please use the term pre-defined instead of pre-mined coins.

People don't really know where they're heading towards.
Bitcoin was meant to free everyone up in keeping their financial history to themselves (at least to some extent), but after all this REGULATION and LEGALIZATION thing, everyone will hand over their rights, their freedom to use crypto to their Governments (just like surrendering even without any crime). Mind well, these regulations and legalizations may get us to have these cryptos' real use cases come into action for what they've been released; but whatever will be done, will be done under the effect of total centralization (trust me, these things will literally not be in your good, and you'll experience it once they come into effect). So, instead of just speculating about the so-called upcoming pump times, why not discuss about how more and more adoption can take place in crypto world as well as how super real use cases can be built to show these people that Bitcoin is not just limited to price fluctuations and trading alone, it has its own space to be explored. And with the involvement of these big funding institutions and Governments, I believe we're ourselves letting them snatch away our Independence that was given to us by Satoshi. We need a bullrun, not in terms of its value but the amount of adopters. Remember, what happened last year changed most people's views, and IMHO, Bitcoin changed from being a speculative asset alone to now a Brand itself.


Ah, my bad. I was too emotional while writing it as everything said here have had been what I've felt during best and worst crypto days.

So in your subsequent screed, we establish that the discussion contained within this topic has absolutely nothing to do with scaling or adoption, but in that regard, you have even more sections of the code you'd ideally like to tamper with (as if the part in this thread wasn't controversial enough already).  I'm so glad we got that straightened out.

If you're going to change everything and the kitchen sink, why not launch an altcoin and prove beyond doubt that your ideas are actually workable?  Or, at the very least, let's see a Bitcoin testnet first.  If there's a working concept to draw direct comparisons with what we currently have, to actually see the purported improvements in action, people might be more receptive to the ideas.  Definitive proof is infinitely preferable to some well-intentioned suggestions of what you think would be better.

I see and it is sad, though I have reasons to be rather optimistic:

Firstly we need to understand that Bitcoin is not a joke to be narrated by clowns or opportunists. Craig wright has spent millions to change anything about bitcoin and look where he has ended, almost nowhere. Bitcoin has a solid conceptual design, forget about the code and implementation details, the underlying basic idea, producing money by work, securing and transferring it by work and doing it in a decentralized consensus based p2p network, it wouldn't be a feasible strategy for any party no matter how powerful/delusional to take over it.

Secondly we have Core devs, still officially committed to decentralization which is a good point to start from. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of these guys neither I think coding is kinda magic on the contrary I don't GAS about technical part it is about a far more important thing: HISTORY.

I mean, just  look at Gregory Maxwell, he is a living encyclopedia of bitcoin, he has been involved in almost every single important event in this ecosystem and although I don't like his super conservatism and passiveism against ASICs, pools, bootstrap/synchronization nightmare, on-chain scalability, ... (you say) and I'm absolutely against downward compatibility and too much soft forking which (is his holy grail btw), no doubts he has a lot to share because he is committed to decentralisation and privacy as far as we are discussing intentions and incentives and ethics. And it is almost the same for most of these guys. All we need is finding a non-hostile decent approach to this, a compromise. I see potentials because I see good faith.

Well, it is not how I understand the problem.  We have this power law distribution of wealth , you are right but PoW is resistant against it if we could have it implemented flawless, unfortunately it is not the case right now.
We have two majors flaws in bitcoin that need immediate fix:

1- Small memory footprint of the naively direct way bitcoin uses sha2 in its proof of work and its consequence of being vulnerable to ASIC attacks which we are discussing here and should be improved indisputably.

2- Winner-takes-all incentive system that inevitably leads to mining variance and proximity premium flaws which are responsible for pooling pressure and the situation we have with pools. I have been working on this issue since a while:
An analysis of Mining Variance and Proximity Premium flaws in Bitcoin  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4687032.msg42296802#msg42296802)

Getting rid of pools: Proof of Collaborative Work  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4438334.msg39653860#msg39653860)

Of course there are other problems:  the disastrous situation with setting up/synchronizing full nodes from scratch, spv wallets, wallets not actively participating in security of the network, ... to name few, but I think the above two problems are BIG bad flaws that has escalated centralization threats to the dangerous levels we are experimenting nowadays.

Conclusively, my point could be summarized like this:
Despite power law distribution of wealth and its natural force toward centralization, an advanced implementation of bitcoin is not defeatable easily by means of simple factors like economy of scale. Centralization is mainly a consequence of flaws in detail design/implementation of core concepts and delayed improvements.

Bitcoin is an open, permissionless system. Anyone can participate in the system in any way and/or capacity that they want. You can have your opinions, but you cannot judge another person, or impose how they should participate in it.


Why are you picking him out? Gregory Maxwell is only one of the Core developers, not Core. His views does not represent the whole.

There's one developer who wants a POW change, Luke Dashjr.

Greg is the one who bothers engaging in public discussions, Luke hasn't showed up here since eternity and btctalk is the reference site for such discussions, still thanks for heads up. From his P2P pool I understand he is against centralized pools as well, good news, now it is encouraging even more.  :)

Yeah, BTC Core developers are heroes, regardless of the fact they have different opinions. They always defended right things, like not increasing blocks, etc. Decentralization is the core value for all of us. PoS is centralized for sure (https://cryptodetail.com/blockchain-consensus). But as for ASICs cancellation, I am not quite sure it's the best solution.

Not true.

Not true.

Sure it is.

Yes, and they are very busy and intelligent people. We should be trying to keep the conversations with them as intelligent as we can, for wasting their time in the forum. No more demanding that "we need a POW upgrade now" like a social justice warrior. The matter was discussed before many times.

Plus Luke Dashjr has said that he will support a hard fork for a POW upgrade, but only if there's consensus behind it.


Who wants centralization? No one.

And ened to such a ridiculous situation? Bitcoin being taken hostage? I wouldn't really give any credits to such a "discussion". Please quote one solid argument from this epic discussions that is not already refuted above-thread.


This "consensus" thing is another joke. ASIC manufacturers would pay some shills to play a naysayer role in any debate. I don't GAS for "consensus" who made this word from the first beginning? This consensus game was over when bitcoin started to prove itself as being an opportunity to make easy money and was attacked by ASIC manufacturers.
Luke is great in coding but obviously he has no clue about socio politics and economics. In bitcoin, you don't need "consensus" for a hardfork, you need reason and good faith and being loyal to the cause, let a corrupted 'community' go to the hell they deserve.

Who cares about decentralization? Obviously no one!

Ok, then do you believe that there is a conspiracy, involving Core, to centralize Bitcoin for you to find reason to fork it without consensus?

Is that what this whole topic is about? You can say it, I won't judge.


Then you should start working on your hard fork for a POW upgrade immediately. Good luck!

But honestly, listen to yourself.


Ok.

I like this spirit.. just I am not sure how we could have a laboratory to have quicker transitions of ideas to running codes.. for example, having a fork and call it "bitcoin lab" as a real coin in market that changes itself quicker than usual may be another option for bitcoin community.

UPDATE:
what I really care about is the fact that ideas can't wait too much to be effective. all ideas that can bring an improvement have their own expire dates, and after that they will be useless, which means, such slow approach to upgrade just kills the active entities of any societies.

Who said anything about conspiracy? I'm just rejecting your "consensus" argument.

It is like 6-7 years that this term is not applicable to bitcoin since it is no longer an innocent scientific experiment. There is no way to build such thing and Luke is just wasting our valuable time by making such a naive statement about "consensus". What they should do is giving people a choice instead of making decisions on behalf of them. Noted? I'm not talking about this goddamned "community" I'm talking about people!

If hypothetically at some state of the art, we have gathered some gamblers and speculators  as users for bitcoin it does not mean we need to listen to them and just them, we need to improve bitcoin to attract other groups by giving people a better choice :

1- A truly decentralized bitcoin that they can mine and secure directly (solo) at home without such a noise and hit and slavery for pools.

2- A much better performing network that utilizes average technology for average people more efficiently.

3- A system free of spvs and bloated full nodes both, auditible/verifiable by millions of full nodes that could be setup in few minutes and keep running with reasonable cost.


It is not only about ASIC resistance but also a series of postponed improvements and it needs a serious contribution but not in the consensus level that you are discussing or Luke Jr is talking about and I'd do it with no hesitation, not when a magical consensus happens when enough contribution is in the sight.

That much has been evident from the offset.  Like it or not, change doesn't happen unless others agree.



Reject whatever you like, but it's not us who needs to convince you of anything.  You're the one proposing the change.  You need us to stop rejecting your argument.



There's that "we" stuff again.  If a proposed idea don't have consensus, then it categorically isn't "we", it's just "you".  But, by all means, make your improvements, put 'em on a testnet and give people that choice.



And no one is stopping you from going ahead without hesitation.  Just don't expect everyone else to automatically tag along for the ride.  You can make absolutely any changes you like.  Some users may like those changes, others may not.  It's just a chance you'll have to take.  There's no "magic" involved.  It's just people running the code they want to run.  

If you're convinced that your code is going to be better, then good for you, I guess.  But some of us don't share your enthusiasm and would like to see it in action first before we decide.  Feel free to keep arguing, but at this stage you'd probably be better off just concentrating on your code.

He said he was backed by the people of Iran, which makes it a 'we' until there will be an actual voting. In this case it might be reduced to singular.

@Doomad, @AGD, @Wind_Fury
We are done with "consensus" argument now, I don't believe in it and you are fans, ok. Good luck with your consensus oriented community  ;D

I'm not just part of it, are we clear?

I write in this forum just for one purpose: to discuss about what is best for bitcoin as a revolutionary monetary system for the future of humanity and for resisting against corrupted financial and banking system right now.

I'm not part of your community and do not care about speculative investments honorable members of this community possibly have made and their expectations for prices to bump.

So, let's discuss what matters for bitcoin rather than anything else, thank you.

And how does Bitcoin resist against a corrupt financial system if you weaken its security?  Some might argue what matters for Bitcoin is that sweeping changes are put on testnet to make sure you don't wreck the network.  Are we permitted to discuss your timetable for putting this on a testnet?  Is that allowed?  Or do you just want some friendly "yes-men" to inhabit your topic and tell you how great your radical and unproven theories are?  'Cause I'll be honest, you don't really see that around here.

To quote a popular adage:
"extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

This has nothing to do with speculative investments or prices.  Bitcoin has numerous contributors who all believe in what they're doing.  I can promise you that you don't have a monopoly on wanting what's best for this little project of ours.  The only difference I can see is that the other contributors tend to spend less time arguing about what should be done and more time developing, coding, testing and demonstrating beyond all doubt that their ideas are viable.  They don't just lay out a roadmap, they actually go and build the road and then see who follows it.  

Don't ask for permission.  Don't wait for people to pledge their support.  Just do it already and let the code speak for itself.  Not only is this about as encouraging as I'm capable of being, it's also likely to be the only way your idea is going to move forward.

Decentralization is the key to security of bitcoin. If you are discussing drops in hashrate it is more complicated than what people usually believe ...
The incentive system of bitcoin keeps it secure enough in very hard situations,  it has always been secure despite very low network hashrate in the start. It is because there is a sophisticated equilibrium between hashrate/value/price/severity-of-threats and brilliant design principles of bitcoin keep it in safe thresholds as long as we are dealing with rational behavior of players and remaining in the game theory domains of application.


You are free to say whatever you wish to, no doubts. I just politely asked  for more constructive discussion rather than sticking with one issue and rehashing it ever and ever.

As of your inquiry for a timetable, I'm considering a demonstration of dual ASIC+GPU mining fork of bitcoin on a testnet and it will be launched in April 2019 expectedly. But it is not anything related to a fork attempt because as I've mentioned above-thread there are other issues to be included in a hypothetical hard fork.

We need to discuss everything in details with prominent Core figures and have their support or at least to become absolutely sure about it not being considered a hostile act or a shitty ico/altcoin attempt. Without this condition being somehow fulfilled there will be no fork as far as I'm concerned.

Now you're talking. A proof of concept would surely help your cause. Good luck.


I believe nothing about it will be considered hostile, or a threat, or a hard fork attempt. Why would it?

Godspeed to you! While I doubt that a PoW-scheme change will make it into an "official" upgrade-hardfork any time soon (at least without an acute state of emergency) I'm looking forward to see a working PoC.

You mean PoCW?

I mean Proof of Concept :) (as in working prototype, not as in Proof of X consensus algorithm)

But yeah, that too! ;)

I was thinking about this.

Why do you need the Core developers' permission? The beauty of cryptocurrencies is it's open and permissionless. You have your right to freely make your own thing and release your own software. Linus Torvalds did not need to ask permssion to develop and release his own version of a unix-like OS did he. 8)

Obviously, permission is the most ridiculous thing one would ask for in this context  :D

But as I've mentioned above thread, they are carrying bitcoin history and what I want is inheriting this history not just the code but the full history and the culture. I believe applying a hardfork every 10 years or so, is absolutely justifiable, once it is carried out properly and as an evolution motivated by current system feedbacks and challenges and discussed enough by people who are familiar with the field.

Well, it's true that nobody can put a "cap" over how much one can attain and what capacity they need to keep with them; but then, what about the 51% attack and even more hash power than that gained by any one entity or institution? What if their intentions are not good? That won't affect the network alone, but the value in everyone's mind for BTC is just because it can't be attacked that damn easily and be used as a borderless currency, what would happen if everyone's faith will be shaken up if some stupid statement comes up from big shitheads like Craig Wright or Roger Ver? Sometimes, these people don't try to manipulate everything including hashrates to market values on their own, but rather influence people on doing what they want these people to do.

---

Well, then what would come up would be called an alt like Bitcoin Cash which is not Bitcoin itself. It doesn't really need any Core devs' permission, but we need to come up with that consensus thing over the decision on whether any/many of the miners would actually support and run your developed software or would they continue with the ongoing one? This only gave birth to many alt (or I should say shit) coins due to having no support from people during the beginning and even now. Remember, it's us in the end who are going to use it, so decision over supporting such proposals need to be taken with too much care. Else, asking other devs to come up with an alt to show what they've got (through testnet first) would be highly preferential.

Like the intentions of Jihan Wu?

Where is he? What happened to him? 8)


They "manipulate" yet they are the altcoin.

Bitcoin is the people. What makes Bitcoin "Bitcoin" is the social construct, not the code, or the network, or the developers.

---

aliashraf will deploy on a testnet.


Where were you this whole thread? Read 5 pages back. Everything has already been discussed and debated.

Conclusion. A hard fork for a POW upgrade will never get consensus.


You want the Core developers' validation so that the community will listen to you, is that what you want?

No, I want them to join and collaborate because I want the history. Bitcoin is disruptively new tech, very high tech, yes, but it is just a system, a decentralized system. Like any system bitcoin needs to evolve and adopt. A lot of things happened since 2009 and it is the time, I believe.

I'll launch the testnet nevertheless, but the actual hardfork won't happen until we could get Core devs onboard because a row of other important issues are in the agenda as well:

-We need to take care of pooling pressure flaw and getting rid of pools.
- SPV nodes should be eliminated and replaced by fast bootable pruned nodes.
-We need to improve performance like 10 times at least

and the fork should take place once by an all-in-one package to have a stable next version coin for like another ten years. It is not simple job and not gonna happen overnight or without vast contribution.

Bitcoin is not people, it is for the people. And it's an open-source code only that's being worked out as a digital currency just because it is a token that has value, and that value is given by people. Sorry to say this, but IMHO, you're wrong in your words, if social construct is what makes Bitcoin ^Bitcoin^, then the code (which makes it able to show those numbers correctly in your wallet and stop double spending), the network (that keeps the transactions going smoothly and securely without any intervention) and the devs (who are responsible as well as working hard behind BTC's back to keep it secure and let it remain the number 1 cryptocurrency are all equally responsible in the making of this beautiful crypto.

Ofcourse, SPV wallets are nodes anyway.

Suppose we have a pruned node that maintains like 1000 blocks height and is setup to work with minimum bandwidth ( Blocks-only mode,  maximum connections set to 5 and -listen = 0 ) with the exception of storage and bandwidth requirements for  bootstrapping  phase,  such a node would be as light as most spv wallets and still it is highly secure and trustless and directly connected to p2p network and It would be easy to make such a node more secure by switching its peers more frequently or increasing its connections in critical circumstances or when there is spare bandwidth available.

Now the only remaining step would be fixing bootstrap problem which is absolutely feasible and I've discussed it in many occasions. For instance:
 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5046152.msg46692966#msg46692966 this post and my other posts on the topic are mostly focused on bringing the feature to bitcoin with a soft fork which is not necessary anymore because once we are getting our hands dirty with a hard fork it would be rather straightforward.

I might be nitpicking, but define "Bitcoin node". A true node, in my definition, is something that should validate transactions and blocks, then relay them to its peers if they follow the consensus rules.

SPV wallets or "light nodes" can't be called "nodes" by that definition.


What the people believe is Bitcoin, by social consensus, will be Bitcoin in my opinion. It is why Roger Ver's debate that "Bitcoin Cash is Bitcoin" won't win.

yes, you are nitpicking  :D

What you are calling "true node" is a full node operating in full functional mode. You can tune full nodes to operate in blocks-only mode and to use limited number of connections (both inbound and outbound) and most importantly to prune historical chain data.

SPVs are nodes just not full nodes and as part of my hardfork wishlist, I think they should be eliminated from bitcoin and replaced by pruned full nodes with built-in fast bootstrapping using UTXO commitment techniques.

What about wallets on smartphones and other portable devices?  I wouldn't want to see people forced into using custodial webwallets because there was no option to utilise SPV.  Even a testnet is unlikely to convince me that's a viable concept.  At least until technology progresses to the point where even people in developing nations had mobile devices capable of being pruned nodes, anyway.  That feels like a fairly long way off at present.

Sure it is realistic. How would it possibly not be? let's discuss it in more details:

A bitcoin (Core) pruned node in blocks-only mode and with 1000 blocks height needs  4 GB storage for the blockchain and another 4 GB for the UTXO , it doesn't maintain a mempool at all (not interested in transactions) still it is able to participate actively in consensus by full validation  of blocks. Such a node utilizes very low bandwidth if other considerations are taken properly (maximum number of connections set to 5-8, -listen = 0 ) totally feasible for a mid-range mobile device to afford almost seamlessly.

As of fast sync, a SDUC compatible node with 1000 chain height would boot as fast as a conventional spv plus necessary time for downloading a 8GB (an average of 1000 seconds for typical 4G)  secured UTXO and blockchain plus the  time needed to validate the chain (~1000 seconds) it is like 2000 seconds (~30 minutes) for already old generation  technology.

I need to emphasis here: such a node is provably as secure as any bitcoin full node as far as we are discussing resistance to long range attacks up to 1000 blocks deep which is a huge security level breakable only by attacks that cost more than 50 bln dollars with current prices.  

Another point to mention: SDUC (Soft Delayed UTXO Commitment) was proposed by me  with soft forking in mind as the name implies, with a hard fork there would be no need for a few considerations as the protocol enforces commitments and validation of commitments as well.

the act of discussing more something is about picking options more wisely.. and when a thread asks for more prominent people's opinion about something critical like BLOCKING-ASICS, this could observe the TRUST of people, more and more. and being permission-less doesn't mean you can begin coding and after 6 months of hard working, you suddenly understand that it was all about wasting of time.

so this is about modeling before implementation [1] that we rarely see in crypto-world. after having an idea we somehow used to jump in implementation and don't care about modeling. sometimes I ask myself, why don't we have a DFD [2] approach within BIP steps!? introducing a distributed modeling language may be the next improvement in decentralization efforts.


but in crypto-world, a coin carries a certain amount of value not a process. you can manipulate a process so you innovate, but what would we call it if we manipulate a value?

---------------------------------------

reading the history of Nokia could be useful for the future of Bitcoin. a shift in technology and user experience out of sights of Nokia simply lead them to bankruptcy. Nokia CEO ended his speech saying this "we didn't do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost" [3] and this thread is going to discuss it, if such a thing is going to happen for Bitcoin too, how we could prevent it.


[1] http://agilemodeling.com/essays/modelingApproaches.htm
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_flow_diagram
[3] http://fun.putidea.info/2016/06/nidokidos-nokia-ceo-cries-during-his.html

Hahaha sorry. I just want to make it crystal clear for all the newbies who are reading the thread that "any node that does NOT validate and relay blocks, transactions are NOT nodes".

The best example I can come up with are the Ethereum "light nodes". Those poor users might be fooled into believing that they are "nodes" because they thought they are doing a service for the network. They're not.

then may I have your (and other skilled contributors) opinion and reply with the idea of flash-back-pinning:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5089384.0

I think such improvement could lead us to another stage of co-existing with ASICs and mitigate the threat.

In your theory.


https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DyFRrLFUwAACKvW?format=jpg&name=small https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DyFRr7tUwAA6I77?format=jpg&name=small


Another theory would be, Moore's law's saturation point might make Bitcoin mining's competitiveness become more moderate, and more economical, causing hashing power to be more distributed.

wrong analysis..

the first ASIC emerged in bitcoin in 2011 [1][2] but ASICs widely got used in 2014 [3] and your first graph shows how harmful are ASICs. your graph of 2019 is decentralized because of crash in market and price level of bitcoin, so industrial mining farms shut down their facilities. the next increment in price level changes the distribution of process again.. ASICs role as Sword of Damocles.


[1] https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/02/02/a-brief-history-of-bitcoin-mining-hardware/
[2] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/List_of_Bitcoin_mining_ASICs
[3] http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/

By definition it is always possible to implement software routines in ASIC. And ASIC will always outperform other forms of hardware. All that is possible is to make current ASICs obsolete.

Not true. I have provided explanations and reference materials up-thread, take a look.

Because the technological advantage of one group greatly surpassed the rest of the other groups.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DyFRrLFUwAACKvW?format=jpg&name=small


Hahaha no. The hashing power in the network didn't fall by much. In fact, it's rising again now. 8)

As one group's technological advantage diminishes, causing mining's competitiveness to moderate, hashing power will be more distributed.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DyFRr7tUwAA6I77?format=jpg&name=small


Then let's see, and talk again.

@ٌWind_FURY, the diagrams you've included have nothing to do with hashing power and its distribution, pools are intermediary entities and belong to another class of centralization threats and I've read something about Bitmain hiding its dominance behind fake names.

But it doesn't change the debate that Bitmain's technological advantage is not as dominant as what it was before. Making of ASICs is more distributed today, and hashing power is also more distributed.

A hard fork to change the mining algorithm would be an opportunity for a highly capitalized company to be a dominant force in making ASICs for the new algorithm. It would be back to the same problem again, and with one company having the technological advantage.

Your claim about the end of Bitmain dominance is not supported by facts. The most crucial problem with such companies is not the lack of competition tho, it is more about the lack of transparency and accountability and conflict of interests.

As of your argument regarding the algorithm change having bad impacts on competition, it is based on a false assumption, a hype about some magical rule that says every algorithm is breakable by an ASIC. It is discussed and refuted above thread already:

ProgPow for instance is provably safe against such an attack because it is designed for a commodity ASIC from the first place: a GPU. Attempting to break ProgPoW by a hypothetical non-gpu ASIC is highly de-incentivized because the feasible efficiency gains would be lower than 20% which comes with very high R&D and manufacturing costs that users should compensate for by paying very high prices. Nobody invests on such a project ever.

But they're not merely claims. Ebang International Holdings and Canaan have been catching up on Bimain technically, and they are also planning their own IPOs.

But again, we can ask the people who know. The miners. I will open the topic later.


Nothing has been refuted.

Why don't you refute "ASIC-resistance is a myth".


It's not. Sorry but that's a fact.

do we have any hard numbers to support that? there were some new entrants to the market over the last couple years (including some very disappointing flops) but is anyone really competing with bitmain's scale at this point? is anyone even close?

i'd echo the attitude that hashrate distribution is pretty opaque. it's hard to know how much bitmain really controls.


i sympathize with that position myself. however, there is a distinct possibility that implementing such a hard fork would act as a deterrent against bad actors like bitmain in the future.

there's no precedent for this stuff. is there?

@WIND_FURY

We have been thru this for a while, your assumption about ASICs-eventually-win is false and an advertised hype. There is no way to make FETCH_MEM operations to be ASIC friendly, no scientific way, not speaking of magical and mysterious powers of Bitmain  :D

Above-thread I've extensively discussed why and how ProgPow is provably safe against ASIC optimizations higher than 1.2x and I've provided supplementary resources as well, why don't you bother researching a bit more instead of rehashing Bitmain ads ever and ever?

If it's opaque, then it's hard to know if Bitmain truly controls most of those pools. But I'll open a topic in mining speculation and gather information from the people who might have an idea what's going on.


This is what aliasharf wants. He wants to risk amputating the network of full nodes and hashing power by having the network hard fork to a new mining algorithm, ProgPow. What is his assurance that there won't be an ASIC developed for it?

Best example I can give, Monero. Their network hard forked to stop ASICs. Guess what, there are ASICs again mining their network. But their network and community is small, and they can arrive to consensus easier. I believe it will be harder to get consensus for something like that in Bitcoin. It would split the chain again.


In theory, it's "provably safe", not actually proven in practice. I believe the Core developers would agree. They will never listen to your proposal.

My non-technical logic says: we apparently have historical evidence that, given enough motivation and resources (shall we say, Bitmains appetite and technician workforce as a prime iteration of this), there will always be ability to develop a piece of specialised hardware that will deliver what an ASIC does.

So I see anti-ASIC as ASIC-resistant, not ASIC proof. Fully cognisant that there can be no ASIC proof.

The question to ask is not can we make it ASIC proof, but can we make it so continued ASICs development (or whatever tech will replace ASICs) are not easily profitable? Should we even?

I see the same argument with quantum computing. Bitcoin cryptography is highly computing resistant, but never proof, theoretically. I think we can safely assume Bitcoin will upgrade security before quantum computing threat comes close to reality. I'd be afraid if it didn't!

Also food for thought. Bitmain didn't really get to where it was because it had superior tech or because Bitcoin was easy to game... it did because it had a great business model.

It sold older tech and pre-sold hardware that wasn't even ready yet, to fund further research. Great model if you think about it. Research Version 3, using funds collected to order and make Version 2, while operating with income from sales of Version 1. It ensured Bitmain was not only doing corporate mining, but that almost any other independent miner somehow fattened Bitmain.

It didn't even have to be a "great" business model, it just had to be better than all the sketchy hardware vendors out there who defrauded their customers.  Companies like BFL and GAW set the bar pretty low, in fairness.  If Bitmain have a dominant position in the market, it's because the position wasn't really contested back in the day.  Things are improving now, though.  

The importance of strong competition can't be underestimated.  We could use sport as an analogy.  I got a silver medal in a Judo tournament once.  That's not a brag, since there were a total of two people in that particular weight division  :D .  Suffice to say, I wasn't very good at Judo, so it wasn't difficult for the other guy to take 1st place.  But if there had been a greater number of skilled competitors, it might not have been as easy for them to win.  And obviously, I didn't earn that second place.  Someone more deserving would have taken it if there had been more participants.

Bitmain, similarly, have had a pretty easy ride until recently.  They didn't have any real competitors to go up against.  Hopefully, as time goes by, there will be a greater number of successful companies fighting for market share.

And my technical logic says: it is not the case, imho.  :D

First of all 'historical evidence' shows otherwise: Ethash was fully implemented in 2015 and used to mine billions of dollars worth of crypto in 2016-2018 and ASICs never managed to take over Eth mining scene in spite of high incentives and Bitmain's almost unlimited resources. All they could manage to gain was less than 2x advantage against rigs built of mid-range commodity gpus.

Most importantly, ASIC design is no magic, you need to break down an algorithm to giant instructions and implement them on die besides conventional pipelining and Single Instruction Multiple Data techniques to accelerate parallelization. When an algorithm happens to be truly memory hard, no matter how smart you are, you never manage to break it down to large enough macro instructions because they need to halt and fetch memory for continuation. I've discussed this issues above-thread in more details.

This is what Bitmain wants us to believe and unfortunately is adopted by many community members but it doesn't change anything about its fallacy.

Firstly, by ASIC proof we mean an algorithm being ASIC resistant enough to de-incentivize special hardware designers and keep them out of the mining business. This is it! We are not discussing in a pure scientific context, it is game theory and costs against incentives.

Secondly:
Every cpu/gpu on the market could easily be called an ASIC! GPUs are ASICs, definitively! They use a lot of specialized circuits for many jobs , so what the heck?

What makes an ASIC miner bad is its status as a specialized device made by a company that is targeting mining industry and nothing else. To understand why it is bad you need to read following paragraphs very carefully.

For a company to be a legitimate player in a market, besides anything else, it needs to offer a 'utility' to the value chain which it is present in, eventually. Innovations should help people (other entities present in the chain) to do their job more efficiently in the first place. Innovation is not about competition between consumers it is about competition between producers.

When Intel produces a chip with higher MIPs and more reasonable prices while competing with AMD, it is offering a utility to its customers, this is how  and why competition is justified as a good thing for consumers and the society as a whole. It is how capitalism is justified and is tolerable in spite of lot of problems and paradoxes.

Bitcoin mining but is an exceptional industry. There is no need for efficiency, actually bitcoin mining is designed to be inefficient. When companies offer more efficient miners they are not doing anything good to the industry or human being or the planet. Miners don't find themselves happier when new ASICs are announced, on the contrary a new ASIC is always bad news for professional miners because they need to pay a lot of money to the manufacturer without any improvement in their incomes, even worse with a long period of pain and stress because of the consequent rapid difficulty growth before they could manage to liquidate their assets, take loans, ... to pay manufacturer for new generation of miners.

ASIC manufacturing for bitcoin is a vanity fair, a black hole that sucks coins from miners and does nothing good for them, a serious centralization threat because of its privileged access to large hash powers.
Bitcoin should get rid of this situation, it leads us to nowhere, sticking with crackers and people who do nothing useful and still suck last coins from miners.  

What assurances are there that it won't improve? Or maybe Bitmain will not commit itself on Ethash because of Ethereum's planned switch to Proof of Stake.

I believe a better example would be Litecoin's use of Scrypt. Wasn't it used because it was supposed to be designed to be resistant to GPU, FPGA, and ASIC?


::) Not in the context being discussed.

Technical assurances. You can't just do anything disruptive about memory bound algorithms with large footprints by ASICs. You need to improve the bottleneck, memory buss, and it is already pushed to its highest boundaries and out of the ASIC business scope.

Scrypt is not a good example, they needed to keep the memory footprint small because otherwise the validation process would took too long and it is the basic weakness of this class of PoW algorithms. Scrypt didn't fail because of the magical power of Bitmain, it failed due to its inherent conceptual and design flaws.

From what I have learned, those mining algorithms that were designed to use more RAM were designed to prevent GPU mining, but it doesn't prevent the development of specialized hardware for them.

Plus my point truly is not to debate about the technical. It's about the naiveté of some people believing that "this algorithm is ASIC-resistant", but history has shown us that nothing is truly resistant from specialized hardware development. Developers have tried and failed.

@WIND_FURY, you are rehashing the same argument ever and ever.

Neither any established technical argument nor historical events support your assumption/religious-belief-in-ASICs that "nothing is truly resistant to specialized hardware development", it is a myth, nothing more, no matter how many journalists/uneducated-bitcoiners have faith  in such a claim, it is just false.

I suppose I have to admit that I know very little deep understanding of Bitcoin so cannot offer but the most superficial comments for anything outside of Bitcoin, but I wonder if that's part of it? Ethereum miners very seldom are as well serious Bitcoin miners (in my understanding and vice versa) so it was simply to me a case of deciding to focus resources on Bitcoin vs an alt people like me still need convincing about.

And with that lessened priority, to gain still a 2x advantage seems a lot to me!

Say if we took as much interest in mining Ether as we did Bitcoin, mayhaps these mid-range miners would very quickly find themselves edged out? Maybe we'll never find out with their impending algo switch.


I don't think anyone disagrees! But I've always seen ASIS resistance as directly attacking Bitmain and their ilk and maybe that's simply not necessary because Bitmain's model, or any chip manufacturer model for that matter, cannot possibly sustain because of eventual inefficient mining. We seem to be witnessing this unfolding even now.

You are missing a rather obvious point ...

Some recent miners cost as much as $1000 or more.
So, what stops someone making an 'ASIC' that has the necessary hardware to match some other PoW similar to CPU+RAM+GPU
Of course it would have aspects similar to a full computer, but would end up costing less, and well, that's not a sudden jump in cost or price vs current Bitcoin ASIC miners.
Edit: and anyway, all ASIC miners have a small computer in them already anyway.

--

FYI this is the Bitcoin part of the forum.

Sorry, that's false information.

Scrypt was kept small purposefully by Charlie Lee so that he could GPU mine it while claiming it could only be CPU mined.
Go read the Litecoin thread (coblee is Charlie Lee)
I even made comment early on about the scrypt settings being too low and should fit in a GPU, thus the CPU-only claim being incorrect.

He did this for a very long time.
Then finally the GPU code, he'd been using all along, was released.

Litecoin using scrypt was a scam by design by Charlie Lee.

What? Hahaha. History has proven of just the opposite of what you said. ASIC-resistance IS a myth. Once a cryptocurrency becomes successful enough, there will always be dedicated hardware made for it because it's simply profitable for some companies to do it.

Thanks for the comment. I Haven't followed Litecoin and Charlie Lee story in details and Lee being such a douchebag doesn't surprise me.

Still Scrypt is not Litecoin and it suffers from a more general problem:

I believe Charlie Lee used Scrypt because of Tenebrix's claims of its resistance to GPU, FPGA, and ASICs? How was it Charlie Lee's fault that Scrypt was not resistant to the development, and creation of specialized hardware for it?


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=45667.0




https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=47417.0

8)

How much memory should scrypt have required in order not to fit on GPU?
And how long would it take to verify then?

the real reason behind ProgPoW is to eliminate bad actors from Bitmain
It's much more accessible to make an 'arms race' using GPU than having to rely on buying chips from China

IMO this will be an inevitable step on bitcoin's road map
Ethereum and other coins might be the first to experiment with, but it will eventually make it's way into bitcoin's code

Sorry,but I overlooked this post. Your argument is wrong, Bitmain just can't make a more specialized thing for ProgPow without ending in a complete gpu technology development project and competing with AMD, and Nvidia it is the same for RAM and memory bus architecture.

Good to know  :D but who told you bitcoin is SHA256?

What assures everyone that there won't be any more efficient hardware developed for ProgPow. It would bring Bitcoin back to step one again, instead of staying with SHA256 to make it easier for different companies to make ASICs, and make mining hardware creation more distributed.


Inevitable is the fork-causing chain-split. But there is Bitcoin Gold. Plead them to experiment with ProgPow.


::)

Scrypt has setting that decide how much resources are required.
The Scypt setting used in Litcoin were too low and allowed it to fit in a GPU.

Charlie was GPU mining long before the GPU code was released.

I posted about this before Litecoin started in the Tenebrix thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=45849.msg548778#msg548778
September 28, 2011, 03:35:01 PM

There are other comments there about it.

Litcoin launch post was: October 09, 2011, 06:14:28 AM
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=47417.0

He knew exactly what he was doing ... and even made comment about Tenebrix being a good choice of algorithm in the LTC post.

You keep saying Bitmain ... there are many better, faster, more power efficient miners available than Bitmain miners.
Bitmain lost their main hardware guy years ago, that's why they've produced nothing new for years since the S9, until the recent releases.
He now runs Poolin after the contractual agreements finally expired.

You clearly have some weird idea about what is in RAM and a GPU ... and how no one could replace the simple hardware in a GPU with other designed hardware customised for any PoW.
Unless your PoW uses absolutely every piece of circuitry in a GPU (which nothing does) you certainly cannot argue something cannot be replicated and made more efficient (though it probably could anyway even if it did)

However, ASIC SHA256 miners use way more power and require very specific design constraints that the GPU companies clearly cannot match.
If making miners was so much easier than a GPU, AMD and nVidia would already have been doing it - Bitmain clearly made a crap ton of money (and profit) that can be compared to the GPU producers.

I don't believe you here. S9 was out like 3 years ago and now they've launched S11 and S15, the delay is not due to lack of expertise or some genius engineer leaving a multi-billion dollars firm, nonsense.

Going down from 28 nm tech to 14 was hard enough and getting to 7-8 nm was a nightmare. It is not about design it is about chip making industry, Bitmain designs shits and orders chips to its manufacturer.

Plus, Jihan is smart, he knows how sensitive is bitcoin community about monopoly, and it is absolutely reasonable for Bitmain to maneuver in a sophisticated way to hide their dominance but it is real and undisputable: Bitmain is the dominant party in crypto ASIC industry.

Your idea of modern gpu and RAM architecture, looks to me pretty much weird too ;D
GPU/RAM design/manufacturing industry has their own markets and rules and competition sphere is overloaded already, believe me  ;)

There is no need for utilizing absolutely every piece of circuitry in a GPU, we are engineers and would be  satisfied with %80.
Let Bitmain or any other cracker try making a multi thousand core thing that  saturates a HBM memory bus and its cores simultaneously while running ProgPow and making it more efficient and/or cheaper than AMD by eliminating the unused 20% percent circuits. Little chance to succeed tho, but what would be the gains(just in case)?
A semi-gpu with 20% better price/efficiency and no application other than mining! Does it worth shit? A S15 is thousands of times more efficient than a gpu based system with comparable price, remember?

It is what I mean when I say ProgPoW is  ASIC-proof, it is provably safe against ASIC attack not because because it is impossible to make a hypothetical ASIC chip with a slightly (1.2x) better performance, (of course it is possible) it is secure against such an attack in the same way that bitcoin is secure: game theory and rational behavior of parties guarantees its security.

Crypto is not a mere engineering/programming domain, mathematics and socioeconomics are kings here, ProgPoW is secure by virtue of its brilliant game theoretic concept: making it infeasible for ASIC attacks to be started in the first place by de-incentivizing such attempts.

AMD/NVIDIA are leaders in gaming market which is a 200 billion industry that is doubling every year and is predicted to keep the pace for near future, they just don't take mining that serious.  

Gpus are widely adapted many many many gamers.  not to many many many asic miners.

I look at this as an economical issue not a tech issue.

So I will not be as tech savvy as most on this thread.
I think  a fusion of sha256 with ProgPow  would be a more elegant solution then an either or either.

Simply make a way to mine btc with:
sha256 with an asic  be paid whatever
ProgPow with a gpu  be paid whatever
or mine with both an asic and a gpu be paid a bit better.

the bonus payment for mixed mining would be subject to some type of proof of gear linked method

But frankly  guys with  10,000 S15's won't like this idea.
and guys with 10,000 gpus won't like this idea.
only a mixed mining farm would say yes to it.

I was hoping the truth to ASIC-resistance would purely be technical. Because if you included socio-economics, socio-politics, and game theory into the debate, it would only be a question of incentives for an ASIC company.

I believe an ASIC company will build dedicated hardware, if the coin is successful enough, and when the price of the coin is right. If it pays to build specialized hardware, then someone will.

It is not about price of the coin.

It is about mining profitability which is and remain marginal with the exception of short periods of price surge. Even in the case of a permanent highly profitable mining industry, costs of designing and manufacturing a special gpu-like hardware with 20% advantage, won't be compensated by the profits, as gpu industry would be competing with the manufacturer at the same time to produce a more powerful real gpu.

aliashraf mentioned a transitional asic to gpu transitional idea earlier in the thread.

I riffed on it saying  don't remove ASICs and sha256 figure how to blend it with ProgPow  to mine a coin from now on.

with 3 tiers
all asic
all gpu
a blend

this allows for the gamers which are many to coexist with the asic miners.

best of all asic builder have no incentive to crack ProgPow  as the most profitable way to mine is an asic sha256 such as bitmain's s15 linked to say a nvidia 2080ti doing ProgPow

there must be a way to link or pair the two pieces of gear to one another so that the pool mining sees the combined algos are linked to 1 of each piece of gear.

kind of  like 2 ssds or 2 hdds can be linked  into  a raid.  Once  done  speed and size in a striped raid are faster and bigger, but you could still break the pair up and of course sacrifice both speed and size.

As i said my technical expertise is meh on how to do that idea but if you did it asic builders lose the incentive to beat the gpu ProgPow incentive.

I suppose an identifier/ tag on each gpu and each asic would be needed to allow the linking of the two
pieces of hard ware for the better payout .  that would not be so easy and you would need to prevent faking the gpu with a copycat asic.  would be nice if technically possible

as bitmain/avalon/bitfury/whatsminer/innosilicon    would all have an incentive to partner with amd/nvidia/intel    rather then attack each other.

but what the heck I just a guy typing on a keyboard in NJ and my tech skills at math and coding are not those of OhGodaGirl or Kano or -ck

Still ould be nice to see some joint effort among the builders.  

They keep missing the big picture :

using this tech to better the world and make money at the same time.

I'll take that to mean the rest of your arguments are bullshit also ...

https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financial-results-for-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-2018

Edit:
That says nVidia was 9-10 Billion
So you could maybe argue 20 Billion

This: http://fortune.com/2018/07/30/bitmain-valuation-profits/

says Bitmain was 2-3 Billion
Bitmain was not the only one to sell miners in 2018 there are other manufacturers.

َAnd I'll take that you are not able to read, not a big surprise for a pool operator  :P

I'm talking about gaming industry (not gpu market), I say gaming industry is an order of magnitude bigger and more promising than mining industry Nvidia with like $10B revenue is active in a $200B industry and won't jeopardize this for an already destroyed (thanks to your friend, Jihan) mining industry, got it?

Lol - change your argument when you are caught out :)

My argument is quoted by you isn't it?

If you want to jump to saying that the total gaming industry revenue including selling consoles and games and all the online stuff is relevant deciding if nVidia or AMD would bother to make miners, then I guess the total Bitcoin industry is what you are failing to compare against.

In which case your argument still loses:

~2 Billion in bitcoin mined last financial year (though it was a lot higher, I'm just using today's value)
~2-3 Billion in miners sold by one company (Bitmain) I've no idea how much was sold by the other companies ...
~2 Trillion in trading on exchanges
https://bitcoinist.com/bitcoin-trading-volume-2-trillion/

OK, so I'm not sure what you are comparing then ... ... ... ...

Bitcoin Trading statistics in exchanges are both fake and irrelevant. Other figures conveniently show how small is the whole cryptocurrency market (total stakes involved) compared to gaming industry not mentioning uncertainties and institutional ambiguities.

What I'm saying is, Nvidia/AMD won't jeopardise their reputation and market share to act maliciously in crypto ecosystem. They won't run private mining farms with secret gpus for few more bucks and risk conflict of interests accusations and its legal consequences. On the other side Bitmain and its clones show no obligation to such a rule.

Actually an ASIC manufacturer has no obligation to sell its product, Bitmain cleverly did this to keep bitcoin in a sublime status: neither dead, nor alive. It was necessary for Bitmain to keep milking us.

Lol, ignore it coz it doesn't suit your argument :)

Sigh you really don't know much about the mining industry do you.

Canaan existed well before Bitmain and made FPGA miner and of course made ASIC miners before Bitmain.

As for calling every other mining manufacturer a clone, then I guess ATI (bought by AMD) must be a clone of nVidia right?

Making the grossly incorrect assumption that all other miner manufacturers act the same as Bitmain clearly shows you don't know what's going on.

No I don't and don't want to know more about what you call "mining industry" and I call ASIC manufacturing industry.

Actually, I've learned anything I need about this "industries" for not buying your sanitizing propaganda about them.

thats kinda already here(ish)

smallish FPGA gpu accelerators, specifically sqrl acorns, or later the BCU1525s and other big block (for want of a better term) FPGAs to accelerate GPUs.

pool sees one miner for several discreet pieces of kit. mix and match for best results per algo. a BCU could accelerate a lot of gpus. acorns only one or two perhaps.

just takes time and devs, which are admittedly in short supply in the sqrl ecosystem at the moment. that will change IMO. well i sure hope so anyway  ;D

part of the reason I mention what I did is OhGodaGirl made progpow algo  and was involved in the acorn project.
She could be looking to develop  the s15 + rtx2080ti + linking fpga  to mine  a sha256 + progpow coin

Of course it is, if taken in the right context. Let's pretend that Ethereum made the change to ProgPow, and the coin has rallied to $10,000 per ETH, a huge success for the cryptocurrency. Would the ASIC companies not develop any specialized hardware for it? Impossible. They would risk millions in investment to be the first in the race to build one.

Which is why  making a coin to have an asic and a gpu linked via an acorn type controller for max profit. Would make the asic company think twice, instead they have an incentive to cut a deal with  amd or nvidia and with an fpga builder.

that holy trinity concept  fuses  companies together.  You can then use the mining tech as a financial tool to expand renewable power.

But Bitmain is already eliminating itself. Jihan Wu has already left the company, and they are deep down in seas of bags of the BCH fork (the Ver side).

So as a result, they are now closer to bankruptcy than ever before. Perhaps this is part of the incentive-game theory mechanisms of Bitcoin at work. They got involved in the wrong end of the fork and paid for it.

As far as more exotic approaches, it would need to be implemented in some altcoin first but I guess that would still be useless since only when things are running on Bitcoin you can tell if they are fit or not for survival in the wild, and it may be too late for this now. How do moons align and a hard fork gets all the network effect from the legacy chain switching? think about all the incentives and game theory behind it.

PS: Im not against research of ideas that could be added in an hypothetical hard fork, I am just realistic and interested on the game theory behind and hard forks and how unlikely it is that the new fork gets enough consensus.

On the surface at least progpow looks like straight up corruption. If ethereum users won't fall for it, there isn't a chance in hell bitcoin users would.

It appears very unlikely that "asic resistance" is even possible, but putting that aside: there is also little evidence that it would be desirable.  Absolutely asic mining has created a multitude of problems but something having problems doesn't suggest that any particular alternative is better... the alternatives to common practices with known issues are often much worse.

In particular, essentially by definition every "asic resistant" approach I've seen shifts costs to from highly commodity energy (the overwhelming majority of the lifetime cost of a sha256 mining device is power) to highly illiquid upfront manufacturing. (e.g. bitmain s9 last year hit power cost = purchase cost at about 3mo of operation) The economic arguments for mining potentially producing a secure and decentralized system depend on an ongoing cost-- if you reject those models you end up with something more like a quorum of trusted signers (e.g. "bobchain").

Manufacturing centric costs also seem highly prone to even stronger monopoly pressures both due to  government granted artificial monopolies on manufacturing techniques as well as natural monopolies arising from first mover advantage for a highly amortized R&D heavy cost model compared to a commodity energy cost model.

This speculation about the trade-offs also seems to be supported by prior efforts at "asic resistance"  (including litecoin, ethereum's work function, zcash's work function...):  In spite of many hypes and claims they have not actually turned out to be asic resistant at all and have in actuality resulted in a less diverse ecosystem than we've seen for Bitcoin. And enormous windfalls for secret operations...

Perhaps even more fundamentally: every commodity computing device is itself already an "asic"-- just one with extraneous parts (and a lot of patents required to build it, the "commodity" is something of a misnomer as a result...).  Simply taking an existing design and stripping off the extraneous area and power wasting I/O components alone is usually enough to make standard parts uncompetitive. After all, mining by its very design seeks to result in near zero returns for the _most_ efficient participants-- you don't have to be much less efficient to be hardly earning at all (or even operating at a loss). 2x the efficiency can mean 20x the profits, if the market is actually competitive. This is especially true because mining devices operate in a very different reliability region than other computing devices: it's typical for a mining device to get the best good-put at a percent or even more incorrect computations because the speedup/power-reduction more than pays for the wasted work. This sort of operation wouldn't be acceptable for virtually any other application, so a lot can be gained simply by designing for that alone.  In practice, every attempt so far (though much hyped, lauded, backed by academic research, and what not) has actually had orders of magnitude more efficiency gains than you'd get from stripping down a generic part. ... but even just the stripped part is likely enough to fatally wound the idea on its own... Before considering the IPR monopoly, amortization-centralization, risk of accidental trapdoor optimizations, or the speedups from customized architectures.

To me it seems that the idea doesn't work in theory and it doesn't work in practice.  It keeps re-occuring because the constant influx of suckers who will buy into things that merely claim to solve things which intuitively sound problematic, even if the solutions are barely credible (or even if they were tried previously and already failed!). There is little interest in actually reasoning out the tradeoffs, e.g. what makes for a good work function and a vested interest to not bother and keep churning out new flavours of snake oil-- because no matter how you want to cut it the picture is not that rosy for these efforts-- at best you might be able to say that with a lot of careful work you got a DIFFERENT set of tradeoffs that were potentially useful something with its own benefits but own serious downsides, far from the panacea that people want to sell-- and that isn't good for shilling the latest scamcoin.

That's everything that I have been struggling to say done in one post, but in a very articulate way of presenting it. Thank you, gmaxwell. 8)

Here we are again: saint Gregory Maxwell never made a mistake and our situation with ASICs was destiny, as the situation with pools and the synchronization nightmare.

But it is not true Greg and you know it already, don't you? you are a scientist after all. I wonder what kind of a scientist argues like that: "because Scrypt, Equihash and Ethash failed then it is unachievable"! Firstly,  this is a technological problem, in such a context induction is the poorest reasoning choice and secondly, Ethash is not failed. It has been somehow damaged but far from being a failure. Bitmain spent $$ to beat it but all they could do was a 2x efficiency gain over low-end gpus and a truce with high-end ones and falling behind of advanced gpus.

So, you are using a poor reasoning technique: It happened the other days, SO, it will happen forever (or not happened and won't happen respectively) and yet you fail to use it fairly, because you are biased. It is by no means a useful contribution, are you sure your account is not hacked by @WIND_FURY, it is what he is rehashing all over this thread and it really sucks. :D

It is open-source. Bitmain and ASIC manufacturers and their army of shills say things about Nvidia class of gpus fitting much better to ProgPoW which is not true, I expected more from you, a political propaganda against an open-source project. On the surface, we have money and power that speaks, in the depths we have science and reasoning.


It is the most unacceptable and misleading argument I've ever heard regarding ASICs. Congrats Jihan, you got a genius on your side!

The lifetime cost of a SHA256 ASIC is not electricity, who told you that? ASICs become obsolete by their manufacturer regularly. Miners need to renew their farms everytime the manufacturer releases a new version.  I have a RX295-x2 in my site, I bought it second-hand and it is mining Eth from the first day (2015), it has made ROI multiple times and is mining Eth in-spite of everything (ASICS, prices, multiple new generations of gpus, ... ) and competes in profitability with a brand new gpu. I have rx470s with same history. When I bought my rx295 it was still S5 erra in bitcoin, now my S9 is to be stocked and replaced by S15.

It is sad. As a prominent figure you shouldn't do this. You are using the classical arguments against ASICs in favor of them. Don't do this, stop weighing on ridiculous ideas like:
:o
It is absolutely nonsense. Pure garbage. No government in the world can do anything about commodity devices like gpus simply because they are commodity devices for the god sake!
And there is no such thing, commodity energy, you have just made it up to use in the context of this debate for making everything foggy and uncertain.

With all due respects sir, you are spreading FUD against ASIC-resistance.

Heavy cost R&D projects end to highly priced gpus that are not a threat to average gpu mining rigs because their supply is short and their efficiency gains does not justify the price. It has always been the case in this industry and will get even better because gpu-friendly algorithms are typically memory bound rather than computation bound. Governments have nothing to do with commodity devices like CPUs and GPUs, advanced, top secret technologies are expensive and do not ROI even close to what commercial (commodity) devices do and are not part of the picture in mining industry.

Right from the start of your reply, there are already personal attacks. It might make everyone question your motives in the forum.


Can you please attack the debate, and avoid attacking the person? Thanks. There some people in the forum who wants to learn more from this topic.

He calls me and people who are in favor of ASIC-resistance "a flux of suckers" who are like newcomers that do not understand anything and buy hypes and fake stories and are so stupid to fight for it and they don't know that Greg the great and his paws have deliberately put this agenda ASIC resistance aside and refuted it, in ancient history of glorious bitcoin  ;D

Gregory Maxwell is one of the best things happened to bitcoin, I like him more than you, but he made a LOT of arguments in that post which are very dangerous and misleading, I'm ready to fight, it is an official declaration of war and he is probably ready for the consequences.

 

If anyone needed yet another example why the world of cryptocurrency is a cesspool... and why thoughtful people usually run for the hills-- and leave tech forums looking like ghost-towns with little interesting traffic left, well then I guess one has been provided.  I thought I gave a brief but reasoned point by point argument that made the case both from first principles and then again drawing from actual results. I might have expected a response in kind but instead, the response is a litany of abusive invective and personal attacks making it clear that my time-- and everyone elses here-- is just being wasted.

You dare not challenge the strongly held prejudice of the forum warrior. You just don't.

I originally thought this thread was likely to be a train wreak and didn't bother commenting. But I was in a good mood this evening... some day I'll learn.

@gmaxwell, just step down from the horse already.
You made weird and harsh arguments and you got the proper answer. You are welcome to choose hills for residency but the battle is happening right here, in the watersheds.

As part of decentralization agenda, ASIC-resistance is not a joke to make fun out of it by forging terms like "commodity energy" and reversing all the established discours around it like what you did by claiming commodity gpus being vulnerable to government control and Chinese made ASICs not!

You are not an ordinary forum member, you are the most distinguished bitcoin figure, you should better take care of the political implications of what you say and what you weigh on instead of jeopardizing your reputation by weighing on such baseless arguments.

If it wasn't @gmaxwell saying weird things with the famous tone, I wouldn't go that far, I had no choice other than reminding you this simple fact that you are used to forget: You are Gregory maxwell!

Can you look beyond that, and make a constructive debate for ASIC-resistance? It might end up in both of you "agreeing to disagree", but I believe it would be productive for everyone to pick something from it, and learn something.

Try again please, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5095048.msg49844670#msg49844670

You are implying that I've not answered Gregory Maxwell's arguments and instead have attacked him personally, It is not true:

1- Gregory Maxwell inductive reasoning: "ASIC resistance has not happened and is very unlikely to happen in future" has been refuted strongly by me:

• Induction is a poor reasoning instument in a technological context
• Even with such a type of  reasoning, one of the premises: Ethash being a failed ASIC-resitant attempt does not hold, actually  Ethash should be considered a success, so,  the conclusion is false. Ethash is a success because it is not basically broken by Ethash Asics as they aren't more efficient than 2x and they have not managed to overtake the network within a year

2- I refuted his allegations against ProgPow and made it clear that it is an open-source and public domain project and such claims are absolutely void. It's really absurd, how in the hell an algorithm would be considered "corruption"?

3- Greg Maxwell says gpu mining is investment-bound but ASIC mining is cost-bound. After my reply, he added an example to his post:

• The example is confused and misleading: What was the price of a S9 "last year"?  What is the electricity cost? What happens when Bitmain is out of stock? I've seen prices in 2000$ range "last year" on ebay for used S9  without PSU. ASIC prices are more sensitive to both manufacturer market manipulation and bitcoin mining profitability.
  
• It is admissible that a gpu rig is like 2-3 times more investment intensive compared to an ASIC with same power consumption figures but it is compensated by:
  
  • Maintenance/repair costs: ASICs break much more frequently unlike gpus that typically work for years without a single glitch. My experience: 30% failure, more than half irrecoverable.
  • Lifetime: ASICs do not last profitable typically for more than 2 years, the manufacturer releases new versions with much better efficiency and forces the miners to upgrade, it is why we've experienced exponential total hashrate surge without comparable increase in total power consumption.
    GPUs remain tolerably efficient for much longer times when they are mining a memory bound pow algorithm.

4- He goes further and argues (because of patents and first-mover advantages involved), gpu mining is more prone to central control and monopoly, while:

• Fresh cutting-edge gpus coming out from research labs would never disrupt gpu mining industry for many reasons:
  
  • They are highly expensive and do not justify their costs in mining.
  • ProgPoW is tunable to become less computation intensive (it is an open discussion topic right now, I'm arguing about it with ProgPoW community), once it is tuned properly, it would make advances in gpu core technology almost irrelevant to mining because memory remains the king as the bottleneck and it is not something you could improve every couple of years, we have GDDR5 technology on the edge for almost 10 years! It is why we can continue mining Ethash with a r9 270 (2011 tech AFAIR) with still tolerable costs and it is why NVIDIA luxury GPUs don't dominate Eth mining scene, AMDs do.
  • As a commodity device a gpu is available to public and average user, without such an availability it is hardly a gpu at all.
    Government control is absolutely irrelevant in this context, no government would/could ban manufacturing/trading gpus because GPU manufacturers have a much larger market than mining: gaming/rendering/machine-learning/AI/...
• Comparatively:
  • New generation of ASICs, appear every 2 years with 2-3 times efficiency. manufacturers have incentives to take advantage of their products in an obvious conflict of interests practice and decide about how and when enforce miners to replace their stock.
    
  • ASICs are highly vulnerable to first-mover advantage it has been proved historically and can be realised logically
  • ASICs definitively escalate government control because they are application specific and it would be easy to ban or restrict their manufacturing/use by law/regulation/...

Most of what I've presented here is thoroughly discussed in the post that you take it as a personal attack to Gregory Maxwell.

It wasn't my intention to "attack" him, I didn't insulted him personally, I just accused him of being biased and making up justifications for one of 2-3 mistakes in bitcoin history: not resisting ASICS.
People make mistakes, it just happens, people deny and try to justify their mistakes it happens too.

But there is no obligation for Maxwell or anybody else to make excuses about the situation with ASICs or pools.
Bitcoin is young and we are all learning and experimenting but Gregory Maxwell was just opening a frontline no matter how flimsy it would be, just vague enough to be used as a "there are some arguments and excuses for bitcoin being ASIC-ed " thing.

 

I believe we should get gmaxwell's attention to read your latest post, and hopefully he replies to continue the debate. That's if he did not put you on ignore. There's so much to learn in my opinion, and it would be bad if the technical debate stopped because of personal attacks.

@WIND_FURY,
I understand besides his undeniable expertise in the field, Greg Maxwell is a political figure and should be handled more carefully, but what I don't understand is how to manage the situations like this, when he shows up with "case dismissed" verdicts and accuses me of being part of a "constant influx of suckers" who have no clue about anything.

Anyway, I'm sorry about what happened in last few posts and I do my best for this not to happen again.  :(

Political figure? Gmaxwell is not doing anything "political". He is viewed by the community, like some of the other Core developers, as a "leader" because of his competence, not politics.

Roger Ver is the one trying to put politics into everything. But when debated on more technical matters, he spins the argument, and makes it like he's right and everyone is wrong. He's a gaslighter, and an altcoin scammer.

I guess it's important to at least give something to back up what you are saying, rather than yet again making claims with no proof, that are also incorrect.

Just to pick the above quoted example:

Saying that ASICs don't last for more than 2 years is easy to disqualify.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1493601.0
S9 "May 31, 2016" - 2 years 9 months ago and still profitable to mine with them - and still a large part of the Bitcoin mining network.

Meanwhile I have a Canaan A741 that I use as a heater in winter since they can do the equivalent of a heater by slowing them down enough to make the noise sub 50dB but of course mine BTC as well as using similar power to heat a room ... they are about 2 years old :)

On the other hand, using bitmain miners to decide that all ASICs break more frequently than GPUs is also incorrect.
Simplest example to refute that is Canaan miners - that have nothing like that 30% failure rate. Well under 10%

GPU scamcoins do not get the equivalent growth that Bitcoin has - so with scamcoins it's the lack of growth that make GPUs last longer, not some inherent design that makes GPUs better.
If an algorithm has enough growth it will get ASIC hardware designed for it and then bye-bye to GPUs.
Most all altcoins are scams and thus they rarely invite any sort of growth to make this happen, so that discounts that argument of yours also.

Aside - as an example of not knowing ... S9s have been in the $5k price range around the time of the top of the BTC price spike a year ago :)

Who told you S9 is profitable? S9 doesn't pay off for electricity in most countries where it costs more than  $0.05/kwh. It is how you are trying to disqualify my points?  :D

Bitmain has delayed S11 and S15 for other reasons and now they are out and miners have no choice other than buying.

No comments!

today I have received this link about the cost of Progpow and ASIC design and could give us more useful ideas for further discuss:

https://medium.com/@ifdefelse/the-cost-of-asic-design-a44f9a065b72

"Introduction

The speculation about hardware design and development costs as it pertains to both ProgPoW and Ethash are usually followed by a statement of authority: trust the author, because they have previous experience in <field>. Sometimes, it is cryptocurrency-ASIC production, other times, it is integrated-circuit design.

For the audience who is more familiar with code rather than fan-out and rise-times, a level of perspective on why this statement of authority does not apply to ProgPoW may be helpful."

Anything computers can do (to solve PoW) will be casted into ASICs or how ever u want to call These. 

This is a dead end.

I'm all for increasing decentralization and involving as many parties as possible to securing the network, but I also despise the feuds that follow forks and the brand confusion that always seems to follow. Knowing how the bitoin developers think, their top priority will be security. As long as this can feasibly be done with widespread user and industry consensus, I'm all for it.