Show Posts
Your idea is useless because there can always be ASICs that are better than generic hardware at specific tasks. Which is why they are called ASICs.
You might be confused about the state of art of certain classes of integrated circuits. I'll try to make this simple, as related to cryptography.
Speeding up the processing of a memory-hard algorithm requires two things: (1) faster memory (clock speed), and (2) more memory (parallelism and minimization of data set movement). Consumer RAM ("Memory" as it were) is nearly already AT the state of the art in terms of speed (DDR3 and soon DDR4). Adding MORE of it simply means adding more sticks of RAM. From a customized machine standpoint, this means adding more of the DDR SDRAM ICs (the constituent chips that make up a PC's RAM modules) and optimizing their data transports.
The argument that I recall the Scrypt paper making (and that I see the Momentum paper makes [2nd paragraph of introduction]) is that it becomes economically infeasible to design a system that outperforms a standard PC by such a margin that makes it worthwhile to develop said system. In other words, it costs too much to design a specialized system for a memory-hard algorithm when desktop PCs typically already perform really well with readily-available, relatively cheap hardware.
Q. Is someone going to develop an ASIC to handle the specific functions that the CPU in a desktop PC handles? Are they going to be able to do it faster and cheaper than Intel's latest tech?
A. Probably not, developing for the latest transistor size would be difficult and immensely costly.
Q. Is someone going to develop a memory ASIC that performs better than consumer RAM?
A. Probably not, consumer RAM is already near the state of the art.
Q. If someone DID actually build the above two ASICs and also built an efficient platform around them on such a scale that the (alt-)coin mining market would actually support, would it be economically feasible (that is, would you get at least 100% ROI)?
A. Most certainly not. The licensing alone would kill the hopes for feasibility.
I hope this makes sense. If I have misspoken or misinformed anywhere in the above, please do not hesitate to correct me.
The argument that I don't see made often enough is when economic feasibility isn't the goal, what happens? For instance, if a government wanted to build a system to take over and crumble a cryptocurrency network and [fiat] money was no object -- then yes, they could probably develop such a system. But any economist who knows about the engineering involved (quite a rare subset I would imagine!) would just tell this government to buy as much consumer PC hardware as they could rather than develop new tech. "Why re-invent the wheel?"
p.s. BombaUcigasa, you're coming off very trollish. You ask good questions, but try to lighten up a bit on your accusatory tone and people might take you more seriously. Thanks.
