But LTC? If there were services for it, however, it'd be a perfect backup currency to BTC.
Under what circumstances would BTC need a backup? Say merchant xyz wanted to accept crypto-currency. Why would they choose LTC over BTC? The reality is they wouldn't which is why LTC has no value.It's not a back-up so much as an alternative. LTC is more resistant to ASIC mining due to massive memory bandwidth requirements. ASIC mining will probably make up almost all of bitcoin mining in a few months time. |
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AES-256 ASICs can significantly outperform CPUs with AES-NI. When you don't have to do all the other things a CPU has to do you can stamp a lot of AES-only cores onto relatively little silicon.
The idea of Scrypt is it requires lots of low latency, high bandwidth memory. It's completely uneconomical on an FPGA. An ASIC using external DRAM wouldn't be much faster than a CPU with external DRAM. An ASIC with on-die RAM would be very expensive in terms of silicon and therefore monetary cost.
In other words, Scrypt already is pretty close to a CPU-optimized hash. GPUs can accelerate it some, but not tremendously because memory is still a bottleneck. ASIC versions wouldn't come out enough cheaper in $/Hps or J/H to justify the development; at almost any level it's easier to use cheap commodity hardware. I'm not saying it's impossible; you just won't see the massive speedups like are possible with SHA.
Scrypt would probably benefit from an increased memory requirement. Adjusting the memory requirement based on difficulty would probably make it an adequate CPU (and to a lesser degree GPU, which are just specialized CPUs after all) friendly hash for the foreseeable future.
Increasing the memory requirement of scrypt will just push it to either the ddr3 on the mobo or the gddr on the graphics card. Obviously the gddr is faster. The reason the current implementation works quickly on cpus is because it fits into the level 2 cache well, which has a bandwidth that is about 30% of that of a gpu. Writing an encryption algorithm that runs faster on a cpu than a gpu is a much more difficult task than most people realize -- Intel is constantly trying to battle the gpu companies and show that a cpu is at least as fast as a gpu at many parallizable tasks, but has had extensive difficulty actually proving any algorithms behave like this even for well studied algorithms like sorts or pathfinding algorithms. |
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Litecoin is ASIC resistant, not GPU resistant. Mostly because you need a lot of fast memory and GPUs usually have the fastest.
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Scrypt is easily mined by anything with high integer processing power and high memory bandwidth... The latter is most often lacked by fpga devices like we see used to mine bitcoin. As high memory bandwidth is very important to gpus for 3d applications, gpus will probably remain better than anything else for hashing Scrypt in the next long while. For instance, the spartan 6 fpgas have memory bandwidth amounts an order of magnitude smaller than current generation amd gpus.
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I think I have a rapidSSL cert that I didn't use if you want it, message me
Just give me the LTC or BTC equivalent of 10$ USD
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LOL! Is that your feeble attempt at "social engineering"?   |
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No one has studied the effects of electromigration on 40 nm chips for a decade because they haven't been around for a decade! But if you run them on stock clocks at undervolted settings, my money is on that they will last a decade.
I've had a 1055T overvolted to 1.5v and loaded for pretty much all of its couple year lifetime, and no problems yet... Keep it cool and it's hard to fry. The problem is probably insufficient cooling and cheap PCBs/MOSFETs/chokes. |
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Not a lot of people have been paying attention to LTC lately, however as the price continues to go down the hash rate has paradoxically been increasing over the past week. I'm kind of wondering if LTC is hitting the floor of its "dead cat bounce".
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What? The first 4TB enterprise hard drive was just released. This is more or less where we should be at: http://zedequalszee.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/hd-vs-year.jpgWe hit 1TB in 2009 and it looks like we'll be at 5+ TB by 2013... Sure looks like exponential growth to me. From the wiki: 2007 – First 1 terabyte hard drive[16] (Hitachi GST)
2008 – First 1.5 terabyte hard drive[17] (Seagate)
2009 – First 2.0 terabyte hard drive[18] (Western Digital)
2010 – First 3.0 terabyte hard drive[19][20] (Seagate, Western Digital)
2010 – First Hard Drive Manufactured by using the Advanced Format of 4 KiB a block instead of 512 bytes a block[21]
2011 – First 4.0 terabyte hard drive[22] (Seagate) Kinda looks like a doubling every two years-ish, no? |
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headers.h:40:20: fatal error: db_cxx.h: No such file or directory
It's pretty clear on what's going on
I believe this file is included in the litecoin source
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Isn't memory the main reason CPUs are good at litecoin mining? Nothing except cost stops an ASIC or even FPGA from having/being connected to large amounts of SRAM...
It's memory bandwidth that defines the hashing speed. The cpu cache has high bandwidth, but only one fifth of that of the amd gpus. Hence, making asics for litecoin will be somewhat of a nightmare because finding something cheap with higher memory bandwidth than a gpu (which use the fastest ram technologically available) is difficult. |
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ltc is alive. People trade lots of it everyday. It's difficult to asic mine due to the heavy memory requirements, and still remains the only memory hard currency. It's probably worth more now that it's not botnet mined, and it's one of the longest lasting alt chains in existence.
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Yes, there is to early adopters, and that is block reward halving much quicker.
Broseph, try to stay relevant. Block speed has nothing to do with block reward, and litecoin is designed to halve the reward at the same ~4yr pace as bitcoin. Litecoin's reward halves at 200k blocks. edit: Okay, maybe if Cosbycoin's confirmed it that isn't true. I had thought coblee didn't change it, but I must be mistaken. |
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The number of confirmations to accept a transaction is up to the user. Assuming an identical hashrate, it would take 24 confirmations in litecoin to equal 6 confirmations in bitcoin. And one confirmation in litecoin is 4 times easier to reverse than one confirmation in bitcoin. There is no advantage here.
The confirmation is an entry recorded in each valid new block that confirms that a transaction has occurred and is valid. Why would 6 valid new blocks for litecoin be less valid than 6 valid new blocks for bitcoin? In terms of probability, they should be no different. Bitcoin uses 100 blocks for confirmation of newly discovered blocks by any client and the same is true for litecoin. edit: Further, it's known that by probability the 24 confirmations equivalent temporally to 6 bitcoin confirmations should be more secure as long as the rate of orphan blocks is not high, which it hasn't been lately. https://github.com/coblee/litecoin/wiki/Comparison-between-Bitcoin-and-Litecoin |
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I scanned the thread and there is nothing enlightening in it in regards to faster blocks, mostly just you going off about how the world is out to get you and can't understand how great your idea is.
There is no massive downside to 10 minute blocks; there is no massive upside to 2 or 2.5 minute blocks.
Yes, there is to early adopters, and that is block reward halving much quicker. |
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the number of confirmations is the same as for bitcoin.
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I would add that what will make or break Litecoin will be how many new exchanges start supporting trade with them. I think if there were more places to exchange them, there would be more merchants taking them. +1 How difficult would it be for the likes of MtGox or Intersango to add LTC support? A difficulty of between 10-50 thousands dollars or so. |
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