Yeah. I know. 128kB (1,024,000 bits) per hash per core, if I remember correctly, which would require 1,024,000 flip flops (plus some overhead from the various calculations that have to be done). Remember that memory usage only starts to get gigantic when you run multiple cores. Each modern ASIC chip has as many cores as they could fit on the die. As for GPUs, my 7970, for example, has 2048 cores. 2048 times 128kB equals just over 262mB, which is right in the ballpark of how much GPU ram it uses while hashing. Divide the number of hashes/second (700kh/s) it runs by the number of cores (2048), then by the number of memory accesses per hash (I forgot), then take the reciprocal of that (divide one by it), and I'd bet you would come up with a figure somewhere close to the memory latency of the GPU's ram (googled for an hour, still can't find it).

But can you fit that many flip flops on a chip, you might ask? Well, I figure, if you can fit it on an FPGA, you can fit it on an ASIC. Look at page 10-11 of this user manual. According to that, you can get up to 2,443,000 flip flops on an FPGA, and that's just that brand/series alone, so it can certainly be done on an ASIC.

I had a relatively simple design idea a while ago about how to speed up the hashrate of any asic/fpga design by a couple of magnitudes at the expense of a lot more logic. While I don't know if it was genius or retarded, I've been keeping that idea to myself in the hopes that someday I'd learn enough about chip design to make my own FPGA, and then later that I'd make a couple friends in the industry that would let me make a small run of asics at a do-able price.

Unfortunately, my interests have been moving in a different direction lately, and none of those hopes I had have come to fruition. So, I might as well share the idea with some of you fine folks. Just promise me that if you're a developer out there who wants to implement it in your design, you'll reserve me a spot on the pre-order and maybe give me an employee discount. Of course,  I can't make you do anything, but it'd be nice.

Anyway, on to the idea: The main problem with designing a fast scrypt ASIC is the fact that scrypt is memory intensive. We all know that already, right? Well, what you probably don't know is that the problem doesn't have so much to do with the physical amount of memory needed as much as it does with the amount of individual memory accesses needed. Why? Because memory, or more specifically, external RAM/cache memory, is slow. Really slow. And, if you design one, you'll find that the speed of your ASIC soon becomes the speed of your asics memory, divided by the number of cores you implemented, plus or minus a small bit of overhead.

So, my idea is, why use memory at all? Just because we have to store a bunch of bits at various points in the hashing process to use later doesn't mean we have to resort to a different chip entirely. Just build your own memory, in logic! Why use slow, multipurposed, RAM when you could use fast, application-specific, memory instead? After all, "application-specific" is in the name of the thing you're designing!

All you need is a bit of clever design and a whole shitload of flip-flops (as in 2 NOR gates feedbacking into each other, not the shoe). There's no seek time because you know where each bit is located, and now reads and writes are less complicated than adding 1+1. Memory latency is now just as fast as the rest of the circuit.

So... Good idea, or bad idea? Because I assume someone had to think of this before me.

I've been mining on the p2pool at anomalypool.com for the last month and a half straight, I'm on the correct chain (I checked the hash, and I'm currently on block 69763), and I can confirm that the pool went on a different fork no earlier than 9:57 PM EST, as that is the time of my last received payment. Usually, I receive payments within 5-10 minutes of each other, and that was 1.5 hours ago, so something is definitely not right.

shit.... Tried to make some extra money selling cross market at a profit.... bought 10 CGA for .0031 BTC each, then tried to sell them on allcrypt at .0041 each, or so I thought.... ended up selling 10 cga at .00041 BTC each... I was wondering why no one tried that yet...

I guess it's about time I get new contacts.

Yeah, I do. My received my last payment 9 hours ago at 1:43 am EST, which is wrong because I've been mining for 7 of those hours. The payments have been getting less and less frequent in recent memory, but the gaps of time between them really started to get huge around 3 days ago.

Btw, my address is AFnYPruQpNqzi4UEquWPmA4vV2xf6gNGa1 .

Bought 44 points and got the vote count from 788 to 1008. Got 10% more votes than usual with this strategy and also I saved 15% on my car insurance.

I just want to start out by saying, I really appreciate all the work that's been done so far to solve the issue and pay everyone back. I'll give the dev the benefit of the doubt and assume he's not out buying a new car or scheduling a vacation with all the BTC Polenex just lost.

Anyway, I know that withdrawals and trading are both frozen, but what about altcoin deposits? I deposited 4 CGA shortly after everything got frozen and before I found out about it. After 3 hours and 446 confirmations, the CGA I sent still hasn't shown up in my account. Now, I have enough in my personal wallet to be fine with waiting for a while, but I need to know if I'm gonna be able to get that back sometime in the future. It isn't just lost in the blockchain somewhere, right?

Two things: First: Yes, removing the bonus blocks would prevent the multipool problem, but it would also remove one of the main reasons this coin is attractive. If cryptographic anomalies are no longer a real thing, all the mystique behind the coin would disappear. It's a brand new system and, really, not a lot of people know how it works; when something knew comes along, a lot of people want to know how it works, so they either come here or go to the website to find out, and by then, they're already far more involved in CGA than they are with most of the other coins, and because of this, these curious people are significantly more likely to become loyal miners and investors. It's the reason I'm here. If we lost this feature, CGA wouldn't attract nearly as many curious people to it as it would have, we would be losing a great deal of our ability to grow, and I don't think the multipool issue is likely enough to risk this. I think we should still reward 1/diff for non-bonus blocks, but I don't think that it would be wise, especially early on like this, to remove the bonus blocks altogether.

Second: Sorry if this comes off like nitpicking, because I don't know how likely or possible this is, but, looking at the code you posted, if the difficulty is exactly 3, every client on the network is going to run into an exception, which would be disastrous. Just change either "if(diff < 3)" or "else if(diff > 3)" to "if(diff <= 3)" or "else if(diff >= 3)". I only know python (and g-code, if that counts- I used to program CNC machines), so I don't know if C++ just handles this automatically- sorry if it does.

That's a major problem then... If the block reward must be known before the block is solved, then any attempt to obfuscate said reward is inherently flawed. Again, I don't know nearly enough about how this works to know if this is possible without coming up with a completely new system, but is it in any way possible to rewrite the code to eliminate that restriction? Because, barring some sort of insanely clever idea, that's the only way we're gonna get rid of this exploit.

Aww... I was so excited that I had an idea, I forgot to read everyone else's suggestions. Also, I'm not good at reading C++ and I don't know enough about the existing CGA code to know exactly what the hell you're talking about, so can you tell me if your code is determining the reward before or after the block is hashed? Sorry if that's a stupid question, but that's the only possible problem I can see right now-- if the reward outcome of block 2 is based on the hash of block 1, it's just as easy to predict whether block 2 will pay out as it was before.

The problem, if I'm understanding this correctly, is that there isn't any known good way to figure out which blocks are anomalies or not without making the process predictable or easily exploited. I've got an idea for a new block reward equation that I think avoids being either one of those: Just take the original equation, Height % Difficulty, and replace height with the newly found hash of the block you are determining the reward of. This way, no one knows which blocks will be anomalies until after someone mines a block and it gets accepted by the network, and every client on the network will agree with each other since the network difficulty and the block hash in question are already agreed upon in the first place. And because the scrypt hashing algorithm has been proven to be completely unpredictable, there's no way to ensure that the next block you mine will pay out, and there's no way to exploit the system that is more efficient or profitable than just mining legitimately.

The current consensus for the price the coin will have when it gets more discovered and the exchange dumpers run out of supply seems to be .1 BTC. From where the price is now, that does seem optimistic, but time will tell. As far as the max, some have said as much as 1 BTC, to as little as .2 BTC. Honestly, I have no idea, but it will certainly be much higher than it is now. All I know is, if it falls anywhere within that range, I'll be extremely happy.

Christ, people like this exist? A month ago, a dude I know stole 2 wallets, my ADHD meds, and a Nintendo Wii out of my car while we were at a music festival I drove him to. Somehow, Hazard is still the biggest douchebag I've ever heard of.

That's amazing. And it gives me an idea: If we get this coin listed on Coinwarz.com, which hosts a mining profitability calculator that a lot of people (including me before CGA) use to determine what to mine next, this coin's popularity would grow immensely.

I really want to correct you in depth, but I just took a bunch of melatonin, so time is a factor. Here's the light/badly edited version of what I was going to say:

The coin is predictable in every way that it needs to be in order to be a useful currency. Confirmations will still work as normal, and it's not like there's some sort of weird code in the client that will suddenly just make the market jump around for no reason. The only thing that's changed is the relationship between supply and demand; the more demand the coin gets, the less supply will be distributed to the miners.

There's nothing random about any part of the coin either- at most, you could call it chaotic, but even that's pushing it. Determining whether a block pays out is based upon taking the block number modulo the current difficulty and seeing if the result is between 1 and 0. Yes, the actual result may be difficult or impossible to predict exactly every time, but if you knew anything about the network, you could accurately guess the frequency of non-paying blocks pretty easily.

I hope I got my point across there, because, tbh, at this point I can't even tell if I'm typing coherent sentences at this point. Feel free correct me if I didn't.

It's been mentioned, but you're right, changing the design of the website to focus more on advertising to potential investors/miners could help the coin quite a bit. However, it's probably got a few items above it on the to-do list for right now- the coin only got on it's first exchange like 10 hours ago, after all.

I gotta explain something to you guys: with only 100 kh/s at my disposal, from the time I first assembled my rig to the time I first heard about this coin (about 45 days or so), I had only made around .042 BTC in total (and half of that was from mining XPM on my laptop)- a little less than a dollar a day. Contrast that to three hours ago, when I sold 1.1 CGA - just 12 hours of mining profits - for about .023 BTC. I now have 20 CGA left, and the world is my oyster.

This is awesome.

I swear to god, I was kidding. I'm only refreshing the page every 15-30 minutes, so that's not my fault.

Dude, awesome! The day has finally come!

I can't wait until it goes live! Trust me when I say, it'll take a lot of willpower to avoid F5-ing the server to death and/or driving myself insane in the meantime.

One more thing, this is a good enough time as any to say this, but I've never seen a more dedicated or honest coin developer since the days of Satoshi. Thanks for everything you've done, s4w3d0ff. And thanks to the pool ops, the volunteer devs, and everyone else who helped him. This is a great coin, I'm sure it'll go far, and I can't wait to see it do that.

I have no idea, but I'd be very interested to find out, and not just because I have 16 of them. This new block reward system makes the coin, by design, rarer as popularity increases, so I really don't know what will happen to the prices when it gets more popular. I'll try to shine a light on the issue at hand: Let's look at how the traditional altcoin economy works: the popularity of a coin increases as price increases, and price increases as supply decreases. Now, since the supply of CGA goes down as popularity increases, that means the price will also increase, then popularity will increase, then supply will decrease, then price will increase, then popularity will increase, then supply will decrease, then price will increase.... And so on, and so on. Cryptographic Anomaly turns out to be a more fitting name than everyone thought- this coin, itself, is an anomaly in the cryptographic and economic world. Should it gain any substantial popularity, I predict that the economy will act like a feedback loop, and the price will increase exponentially, almost like what happens to the sound level coming out of a speaker when you put a microphone next to it.

I'm not saying I'm completely sure I'm right, but, regardless of whether I am or not, I do think this will be interesting and that you should avoid selling all your coins for a while. Sell some and keep the rest as a nest egg, at the very least.