I am far from being a Real Programmer, but I have a sort of hunch that various "dynamic lockins" (be they timestamp-based or "magical transaction" based) could open a rather large can of net-scale DoS worms.

Just a bellyfeel, unsupported with code or evidence.

Your primary concerns at that point are the elements that define the economy (pools and exchanges, also goods & service providers but those tend to be joined to exchanges at the hip)

If the renegade chain has no way for miners to cash out, they will leave it.  




Given that there are about 7 nodes on Fbrix currently, you wouldn't even run a risk of some PoW feud

That would be awesome. Coder power is verily needed

Not exactly.

What you have, if one part of the net uses one PoW and the other uses another, is not a classic race for "51st percent" when both the attacker and the "lawful" nodes will accept each other's blocks as "valid", but  two forks that can not be reconciled - at this point 51% rule no longer applies because the "oldnet" just won't accept blocks of "newnet" and vice versa (Much like I couldn't make bitcoin net accept Lolcust-designed LOL-PoW blocks even if I had the terrorhashes needed to pull a 51 on BTC )

At this point, the important thing is what the pools and the exchanges consider "real tenebrix" (or for that matter real BTC, since it would be somewhat foolhardy to think that BTC won't need a PoW overhaul in a decade from now)

The "OldPOW" nodes will form a glorious net of their own, but if the pools and the exchanges don't consider them "proper net", they will have to mine their chain for sheer joy of it, compensation free.

Just you

If we are talking about new hardware appearing, it has a somewhat different dynamic than new programmatic solution for already known hardware appearing.


The investment required for both developing and mass-producing dedicated hardware is quite outrageous.

The only scenario in which I could remotely find that plausible is USA accepting Tenebrix as legal tender, which is a silly idea (and even then, building Tenebrix megacluster will be more of a national security than profiteering concern)




ASICs being more cost-effective seems to be a peculiar proposition, irrespective of GPU involvement.

Care to link to relevant calcs ?

Also, scrypt is somewhat hostile to ASICs, too (though the current implementation probably less so than it can be made) making them far less competitive than they are for bitcoin

P.S.:
Generally, I could imagine some exotic hardware hitting the "sweet spot" of price vs performance boost that will let it compete effectively with "equal-cost pile of CPU boxen", but so far, none such is readily available.

Someone launching an R&D and mass-production enterprise for Scrypt crunchers and getting enough traction to effectively "overrun" the cpu adoption-vote before PoW update is implemented does not strike me as very realistic.

Though of course, finding and switching to more hardware-optimization hostile PoWs as times goes by is an interesting challenge onto itself (Scrypt itself is a product of a similar design challenge)

Um, adoption dynamics of tenebrix are such that majority of miners are, for various reasons, riding a general purpose computation device which is either unfit for installation of custom hardware or would require some overhaul to do so

Of course they will accept something that will keep an annoying - and potentially game-changing - competitor out.

If you are a cpu-centric miner mining a decidedly cpu-centric chain, you have a vested interest of keeping as much "exotica" out as possible (I wonder tho whether APU systems are "exotica" - they are essentially beefy CPUs)




ASICs are just stupidly un-economical and carry additional bonus of being (Unlike GPUs and FPGAs) pretty truly dedicated


You forget economics.

There's no point of deploying an application-specific system unless the factor by which it accelerates mining makes it economically viable, and dedicated custom solutions suffer from this far more than semi-dedicated such as GPUs or FPGAs (which have apparent uses outside mining and can be, worst come to worst, re-sold on general market unlike Hypothetical Custom Tenebrix Supercruncher that can only plow through scrypt)

You could crunch TBX very fast on, I dunno, a non-uniform memory access system, but it would be prohibitively economically unsound unless you know a way to get one for free (in which case I love you and want to get to know you closer )


Ten years down the line, I fully expect TBX to undergo no less than two major PoW updates (assuming it survives)


Again, this assumes that economics of producing totally-custom TBX-crunchers render them competitive economically against CPUs which, through benefit of being among most common and mass-produced computational systems, have vast economies of scale driving their price down.

Doesn't matter how good your million-dollar supercooled Tenebrix-cruncher is, if I can achieve same performance at a fraction of the cost by just "buying moar CPU-centric boxen", you will lose.

Throwing monkey-wrenches into various hardware optimization attempts seems like a fun field, perhaps a science unto itself.

P.S.:
Not to mention the opportunistic-mining implications of having an algo specifically tailored to be most economically sound on the most common computation substrate available

You can download win-pak with r3 in it from www.tenebrix.org

Minerd before r3 has a longpoll glitch

P.S.:
I know TBX offsite is a rather ugly mofo (will work on it), but that hardly justifies not checking it out

But I didn't steal them from some third party - feel the difference  (since TBX has no upper limit on coin mining, you can't even say I squatted them from future generations of minerdom )

Hmmmmmm... windows or linux ? Are you sure that you are running the most recent ("r3") minerd ?

Eeee, simplecoin already has TBX if I recall correctly...

Limit, as in "how many drips per google account" ? IIRC, one, but terrytibbs is the person behind the faucet, I just slowly fuel it with batches of 500 brixes.

Well, I do think he can introduce licensed mining and call that "solution" to the "51" problem.

But I am reasonably certain he will forget to [exploitation prevention advice redacted in order to maximize lulz]  

Errrr... max out != mine at idle priority, no ?

Aren't energy costs covered by the "GPU" part of the operation ?

ArtForz is  strict and realistic, as usual.

Still, you have to admit, the minor buy-in we have today is heartwarming in a way

1) PoW will be updated as hardware grows bigger...cache.

2) The point is not to make implementation of hardware-accelerated solution impossible (You can implement TBX miner in OpenCL, ArtForz already tested it, see the "Tenebrix scaling questions" thread), but to make it uneconomical (If your wonderful hardware-cruncher costs 700$ and only marginally outperforms a cpu  which costs $100, you loose the race)

Scrypt was specifically designed to be uneconomical and painful in GPU and FPGA and, amazingly, it really is

It's not so much "discuss among ourselves" as "A girl in Brazil is reorging the blockchain! SHUT ! DOWN ! EVERYTHING !!!"

Basically, they watch out for reorgs that affect more than their "confirmation horizon" and shut trades down. Recent fairly cunning i0coin run-in managed to get around that, though (don't recall the details) so those mechanisms might need some refining.

For all practical intents and purposes that is "kinda lock-in"

Exchanges already have just such a mechanism (though timestamp-based locking holds promise too... anyone willing to try thing out on GeistGeld ?)

I wonder when people will start raiding the faucet