What exactly does a perfect Bitcoin upgrade look like? Obviously some form of Anonymizing tech would be required, something to help speed up transactions and yet another upgrade to help spread out miners in a more decentralized fashion...

don't think anyone has any use for sha256 hashes of random data.

Hi everybody,
What i really don't like about bitcoin is the waste of computing power (= waste of resources) it needs to secure the network, and how things would get worse the more bitcoin becomes successful.

Because of this I was wandering which are, actually, alternative mining alghoritms that you are aware of, and possibly their pros/cons.
I'd mantain such list in this OP and maybe group them up in a website if it could be useful, and discuss about mining alghoritms here to maybe come out with a new greener mining alghoritm or best block generation approach

If a post like this already exists (or website links) then please point me to it
thanks

As you can see, this system would preserve most of the current Proof Of Work characteristics of bitcoin mining but with a twist that allow the mining pools to put their system to rest for a significant period of time, thus saving energy and money. I've chosen the duration of the two phases in an arbitrary manner, so that, for every day of competition we'd 10 have days of minimal energy consumption.

While I can't see any major drawbacks to this system, I know how tricky game theory can be, so I'd love to hear your feedback on the idea.

By then, the slow start period would have ended

ASICs are good at number crunching, not number fetching

I still have some work to do before I write my own miner from scratch.  I like to *really* understand the problem before I start writing code, and there's still some parts of the GCN architecture that I'm figuring out.

Why are you spending all this money on proof-of-work when I plan to soon make it obsolete?

Wouldn't it better to invest that $5000 in something with a future that can appreciate in value?

Or do you see uses for that outside of blockchains?

I went down that rabbit hole with you and I concluded there can never be a stable CPU proof-of-work.

Something seems to be wrong.

https://explorer.zcha.in/accounts/t3Vz22vK5z2LcKEdg16Yv4FFneEL1zg9ojd   22.257749999999994 ZEC

CPU solving us highly memory and clock frequency bound and doesn't scale with cores well at all.

Even so, QCs cannot do preimage attacks on hashes, they can only brute force them faster. For mining, that just means that the difficulty will increase and blocks will stay the same. For addresses, that means that they still cannot find the associated public key because they still can't find the preimage.

That is good. More information.

Crowdfund for open-sourcing tromp’s solvers / funding Cuckoo Cycle
...

Why aren't you joining the open source miner contest?

I would gladly pay a dev fee to have access to a gpu miner. The sooner the better.

also why this coin is not known?

I'm guessing that with the sprint towards October 28th you don't have a whole lot of bandwidth to think hard about this, but if you do come across a reason why waiting until the end to prune duplicates doesn't work, or conclude that it does, a quick post here would be much appreciated.

Maybe when @tromp becomes a ZEC-billionaire next month he'll publish one

Hello folks, this thread appears to be the place with the highest concentration of zECQuihash optimization gurus.  May I trouble you with a stupid question?


I'm trying to correlate that with the zcashd implementation, since it's the only available working cross-checker (too bad it is written for speed instead of readability).  The only part that has me confused is the need to eliminate entries whose index sets contain duplicate/repeated entries after EVERY one of the k collision steps.  There is no mention of this in the algorithm given in the Equihash paper.

I understand why these can't be part of the final solution (the X_i's must use distinct i's).  But why not wait until the end to drop these superfluous solutions?  Why check for duplicates k times?  I did some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations and I'm having a hard time believing that leaving these entries in the table would significantly increase memory consumption.  If you had a duplicate X_a in the second level of the collision, it would have to be a result of (X_a*X_b) colliding with (X_a*X_c) on the first 40 bits (where X_a collides with each of X_b and X_c on the first 20 bits).  If this is true then

 ((X_a*X_b)*(X_a*X_c)) = 00000000000000000000 00000000000000000000

and therefore

 (X_a*X_a*X_b*X_c) = 00000000000000000000 00000000000000000000

so

 (X_b*X_c) = 00000000000000000000 00000000000000000000

and moreover

 (X_a*X_b) = 00000000000000000000 ....................

 (X_a*X_c) = 00000000000000000000 ....................

In general it seems like repeated indices arise in the Equihash-constrained variant of Wagners algorithm as a result of an "overcollision" -- when two rows of the table collide not just on the current column but the next one as well.  When this happens the members of the overcollided set will generate one suprious entry in the next round for every entry they collide with in the current round.  It seems like that would happen on average twice per column.  Is that really enough to bloat the memory usage in a noticable way for k=10?  Surely for something like k=100 we'd be talking about serious combinatorial explosion, but for k=10 there just aren't that many steps compared to the size of the table.