During peak summer times the building struggles to keep cool and then everybody cranks the A/C up. When I had my GPUs running it would be too much current for the building and throw a circuit breaker. Needless to say, my neighbors were not happy.

I moved in to that place because it was supposedly renovated. Turns out they did everything but the electrical system and even just a few extra KW is too much. Great. Anyways the electric company didn't so much as threaten me as ask me to reduce my consumption to avoid brown outs.

I sold off some of my GPUs to get down to a level where I'm not tripping the breaker, but they still bother me about it every month. I will be going the ASIC route very soon. Gridseed was the first but many more will be coming this Summer.

wat?

I still can't do more that 500Kh with my 290, so you're lucky ;-)
To disable frequency throttling, try this tool:

http://epixoip.github.io/od6config/

+1

X11 is also easily targeted by FPGAs, which will significantly outperform GPUs.

Let's instead consider the resistance of my Cuckoo Cycle proof-of-work (https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo):

An ASIC for something like cuckoo728 (graph size 7x2{28} ), which requires 7GB for a single instance, could not be self contained. It would be like a vastly simplified CPU with perhaps 1024 cores, that runs 32 instances of cuckoo728 at once, each one running with 32 threads. It would have to be connected to 32x7GB, or nearly 256GB of memory, which would totally dominate the cost. Intel is already planning to introduce cpus with hundreds of cores, so such an ASIC would not offer enough performance advantage to justify its development cost.

Similarly, no current GPU card has enough memory to run cuckoo728, and future ones with twice the memory of the current max (6GB) would only be able to run a single instance (the algorithm doesn't allow a time-memory trade-of). Even that may not be competitive with a CPU, which has much better memory latencies. The vastly superior memory bandwidth of a GPU is mostly wasted on Cuckoo Cycle, which makes completely random accesses. Another problem with GPUs is that they cannot deal well with data dependent code flow, which features prominently in Cuckoo Cycle.

switch to X11 algo

I haven't kept up with this thread daily, but pop in every now and then. I heard people were considering switching from Scrypt, so I had to pop in here.

WTF would you do that? Because of the fear of ASIC? You guys realize hashpower = security, right? ScryptN ASIC is under development, I estimate Q4 you will see them.

Go find me coins which have serious value which have completely switched algo's and design and have stayed alive. Go on, I'll wait. I might be waiting until eternity. The biggest death of any coin is lack of use, not ASICs eating it up. Shoot, being listed on Cryptsy has done more to harm the value lately than ASIC's mining the coin.

Instead of being worried about block value and being "raped by ASIC" (lawdy lawdy), you guys need to study successful coins and business uses and focus on deploying toward that. There's no feasible/reasonable reason to completely change the foundation of a coin to avoid hashpower security, especially when the coin is still in its infancy.

You'll always have dumpers, you'll always have pumpers, but stability comes when volatility is minimized by volume of legitimate use and increasing hashpower.

Also, less power and more heat? Seriously? Please tell me that was a 12yr old who posted that, and not an adult who can do 2+2.

The GPU mining landscape is about to change drastically and many have not woken up to this fact. KNc recently took $2m in pre-orders for their 100MH Scrypt ASIC. These may start coming on to the network in Q2/Q3 of this year. There is no doubt that these will be turned on to many of the small Scrypt coins out there to strip them, sell the coins and then leave. This is going to leave many small coins unusable, many have less than 1MH. People do not seem to be aware of the problems this is going to cause and perhaps were not around for the SHA-256 ASICs turning up. This left many small SHA-256 at the time in a state where they had to hard fork to resolve the issues and others just disappeared. It is possible to move hashing algos in those coins.
Some may remember that Terracoin was a target for the SHA-256 ASICs, with the very large hashing power Terracoin was left no alternative but to hard fork its way out of trouble. For all that they tried to dodge the ASICs these devices were used again to run some very devastating attacks on Terracoin forcing them to amend their code again and hard fork. The additional hard fork was an exceptional case as their attempts to introduce smoother difficulty adjust left flaws in their code.
There other hash solutions out there the best known of these being Scrypt-Jane and Adaptive-N which for the most part are the same. They both use a variable N factor which is locked to 210 in Scrypt. This is the memory requirement, 210 works out to 1024 bytes. Vertcoin a very popular Adaptive-N coin currently uses an N factor of 211 which works out to 2048 bytes, every time the N factor goes up the performance of miners drops by half. Vertcoin currently has half the performance of Scrypt and has a maximum N of 232 which works out to 4GB, most graphic cards cannot even do work at that level and with the current hash rate the difficulty of Vertcoin could not go low enough to support that level of N. Scrypt-Jane and Adaptive-N may be ASIC hostile but they are also GPU hostile.
There is an alternative that has been largly over looked which was created by Even Duffield. This is the chap who created DarkCoin which looks to include the DarkSend feature that will allow anonymous transactions. X11 uses 11 well known and high performing hashing solutions chained together to generate the hashes required to generate new blocks. Since it uses 11 different hashes it is complex and unlikely to see a ASIC for it any time soon. The good news for miners is that they can use X11 right now to avoid multipools and start gathering coins that are going to become very important when the Scrypt ASICs hit. Mining X11 gives 3-4 times the hash power of Scrypt, uses less energy and generates less heat. This is the solution that people have been looking for.
There is also Hirocoin that has launched recently and adopted X11 as its hashing solution. Hirocoin does not have the DarkSend feature but has been meticulously coded and fully featured on launch including DNS seed and binaries for different platforms. DarkCoin uses an inverse difficulty reward which means that the higher the difficulty the lower the reward. More miners means less coins, Hirocoin is more conventional in that it has 400 coins a block and is likely to be the first choice for miners.
For all that there is the X11 alternative for GPU mining there does not seem to be any Scrypt coins who are seriously talking about changing their hashing algorithms. They may soon have their hand forced in the same way that Terracoin had no choice but to fork. However many small Scrypt coins do not seem to have an active developer in site, just communities of users who may soon be left without a working coin.

Quote taken from here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Hirocoin/comments/215lkd/changing_landscape_for_scrypt/


I think if possible we should change to X11 before script asics tear us apart. I think we are already suffering being strip mined for BTC and BC and our price is suffering for being up on coinwarz/poolwarz. I think if we make this move early enough in our existence we could set ourselves apart early from the other coins, especially from the clone POTcoins. Avoid being strip mined because it will become very easy. KNC already accepted 2 million dollars worth of orders for their 100Mhs script asic miners.

As soon as we set ourselves apart and make it difficult to mine for asics, we could then also take advantage of the price boosting effects of a multipool.

Scrypt N is total crap GPU killer and uneconomical. X11 is superior. 50% less energy consumption and heat, 11 hashing algorithms for super secure hashing and asic resistant if not proof.