I tend to like this idea, but the lack of addressing "shady backroom going-ons" seems to limit its usefulness in my opinion. Frankly, the only surefire way of addressing this issue is not only with public accountability, but with a robust ability to audit these exchanges independently. That said, it's a start (although I'm surprised more people aren't taken aback from your inclusion of BTC-e in the untrusted section).

Yes, take BBQCoin as an example. It's now technically more "dead" than alive, but it shows what can happen when someone silently mines a coin for a very long time and then strategically cashes out.

This thread has given me a really good laugh.

I will say as a counterpoint that LTC has more established infrastructure in it's pinky finger than all of those other coins you quote. And regarding ASICs, why do you think it was being worked on for over the last year and a half? Clearly because of DOGE right?

Sure its primary reason for existence was to be an alt that provided resistance to GPU/FPGA/ASIC (kinda going hand-in-hand with the idea of being the silver to Bitcoins gold as stated numerous times); and also as a response to the whole Brix situation. But let's face it; that has transformed over the last year and it got solidified when their community decided to embrace the impending ASICs for sCrypt. It's slowly turning its primary use as a secondary secured chain ledger; whether it complements BTC in the long-term is another issue altogether.

Uh, FTFY.

Don't get me wrong, I love Primecoin (I still have a bunch after mining during the launch weeks). The primary downside in terms of mining is how it quickly got swarmed by CPU hash clouds and farms after the opening few weeks.

On your other point, it's usefulness is a slight bit limited. After all, Primecoin's scope is for Cunningham chains. Note, that I'm not saying it's "useless," rather that it is significantly limited.

I do agree, the SHA-256 chips sold for ridiculous prices when the Avalons cut their batch three around this time last year. There was also the whole Klondike chip thing, and the PCB board set. That on top of BFL and the immense amount of hashrate that came from the success of KNC (although there is the whole issue with their second batch Jupiters). But if you look at the SHA-256 mining scene, ASICs was one of the driving factors that pushed their caps from ~$350M to ~$3.25B (the original Avalons and initial BFLs), and then a second push from ~$1.5B to ~$14B (in line with the KNC Jupiters, wave 3 of BFLs, PCB Klondikes). Frankly, I expect the same type of trend as sCrypt ASICs are propagated more and more; the only difference is that it will not be to the same magnitude and at most a handful of coins will get to ride the upswing while the rest are crushed.

The funny thing is that as scary as it is right now with a conservative maximum total amount of hash put into sCrypt being around 750 GH/s, that should be just a fraction of what the first few waves of major ASICs will be pushing. If KNC and Fibonacci stick to their roadmap, we'll be looking at a possible 5+ TH/s in sCrypt.

That's not necessarily a comforting thought for the GPU scene, but it'll do a hell of a lot for network security for whichever coins stick as sCrypt. That and the residual

As a note, I apologize if I came off as brash or anything like that. I was just trying to be more direct than anything.

Yeah, you're talking about FPGAs; it'd be practically impossible to repurpose an ASIC. I'll admit FPGAs pose a threat but, you'd need a lot more of them to mount the same type of attack than you could try to do with an ASIC. Once again, in terms of capital and space, it'd be the same (if not a bit more expensive) than a GPU farms, the only difference being the cost in electricity (which isn't necessarily trivial).

I'm not entirely convinced he was talking about FPGAs; after all the aggregate hashrate of one is going to be roughly equivalent to a GPU. Usually one FPGA chipboard outputs around the same amount as a GPU with similar geometries. So you'll need a farm of FPGAs to "rape" just the small crypto markets (such as Noblecoin).

That said, even modding an FPGA isn't that easy, but I wouldn't be overwhelmingly surprised if those sort of things already exist for some of the other algorithms (although they are very likely not made by "kids"). After all, it only took a few days for a few people to get a significant mine out of YAC after it came out (by adjusting the hashing n-factor in the software and making a simple wire switch on the FPGAs they had).

Whoa, ASICs aren't made that way. Maybe a loosely efficient processing mod, sure.

If a "kid" really is designing ASICs in their "bedroom," he/she can easily be a multi-millionaire working on actual design projects not in the crypto-currency realm.

Since DeathandTaxes did the math for the frequency of the OPs post, I couldn't help but do the comparison of this during one of my breaks at work. Hehe.

With ideal block propagation averages:

6 blocks in 10 minutes (i.e. P[X=6] for λ=1) once every ~13.6 days.
0 blocks in 60 minutes (i.e. P[X=0] for λ=6) once every ~16.8 days.

As a note the chances of 6 or more blocks in 10 minutes (i.e. 1-P[X<6] for λ=1) is once every ~11.6 days.

So it seems that 6 blocks in 10 minutes is a bit more common than no blocks in the expected time for 6 blocks.

Well, I'm glad to hear that. I personally didn't mean to jump to any brash conclusions. From what I gathered, it seemed more profit motive rather than faith in the protocol.

Just take this wrenching loss as is and hopefully in the mean time, you've just sat on that one bitcoin and maybe you've been buying smaller amounts on some sort of basis. If you do that, you can set more stable prices to enter and exit some of your money.

To be young and to have a substantive amount of money. Maybe he'll realize that it is still beneficial to buy some back (but probably should have done it sooner).

After all, $100k is nice, but let's face it, based on average costs of living in the U.S., the average person needs to "receive" around $1.2 million in their lifetime. He's still not 10% the way there.

Hopefully, he doesn't blow it all on "luxuries," but he should treat himself to something nice.

Probably not too much of an impact with price in all honesty, at least in the immediate-term. But this does help push the prong along nicely in regards to furthering merchant acceptance; now it's a matter of getting the other prong of mainstream users to increase.

I know what I'm doing when I plan my next vacation.

You got swept up in the "mania" and put your entire life savings into 1 BTC; that's the problem. [The fact that you have a "family to feed" and your entire life savings is at $1,000 is another issue for some other time.] Clearly you did this out of a pure profit motive (i.e. easy money) and got burned. It should have occurred to you that mixing a "mania" with "all my savings" wasn't a good idea. Just let this be a lesson about how to divest your money in the future.

I'll be honest though, I've made some stupid mistakes with Bitcoin in the past. But I've learned from them and that's why I'm still here.

You, good sir, deserve a cookie.

I think you're also ignoring the utility that has been developed around LTC though. Speculators will be drawn to the quick money that alts attempt to "promise" (i.e. scams).

Some crypto-currencies are taking the steps to shed the speculative label and developing the needed infrastructure to be considered transactable just like BTC. [Of course though, let's be honest, even BTC is still considered as a speculative tool by the mainstream and frankly a lot of holders of BTC.] Sure they could still be "scams," but frankly the amount of effort for possible payoff tends to scale towards not being worth it.

For some reason, this seems like the most lucid stream of thought.

As for me though, I'll be selling a portion of my holdings at around 900-1250 and an even greater portion if it gets to 1500-2000. If it dips after getting to those powers, great! If it keeps going up, I fine with that also. After all, if you want more money, you should make the money you currently have work for you.

If you're saying we'll dip to that number momentarily, I could see that happening in a panic (if there was some sort of news sparking that type of panic). If you're saying we'll stay on that floor for a while, I wouldn't have such strong hopes for the going higher part of your statement.

That's about a 1% spread, which is pretty standard in a trading market. These sort of spreads represent a few factors that impact trading price such as fees.

As for the relative lack of volatility, things are definitely pretty quiet. But that's not necessarily a bad thing, especially with the amount of action in the last few weeks.

The truth is that multipools are always going to exist unless a coin has a crushing majority (in terms of market penetration and hashrate). Remember, there have been SHA-256 and sCrypt multipools for a quite a while already. I think the multipool abuse is more of a systemic issue rather than an algorithm issue. People want to convert coins into what is easily usable (i.e. greed to a certain extent); that's why so many people dump for BTC and/or fiat.

I'm not sure how you can substantively make this conclusion, but how is Groestl directly an enhancement? The only "enhancement" of these algorithms is the cooler temperatures (but even this is severely negligible). ASICs still win the battle in regards to electricity efficiency.

I apologize if you felt like I ignored this question. But yes, the only sCrypt coin that can reasonably do this is Litecoin. Other sCrypt coins can exist, but they either have to have a substantive share of hash rate to make attacks nontrivial (kinda like the 72/12.5/1.5 spilt between LTC/DOGE/WDC) or have to be merge-mined under a parent chain (which would most likely have to be LTC). Reasonably speaking, we can state that non-triviality occurs at a few percent of total hash rate (the point at which it costs "significant" resources to attack).

As for continuing the cycle, yes, either funds would need to be reallocated or external financing would need to continuously flow in. But this sort of issue is not only staying ahead of the ASIC "game" but also towards making a secure ledger.

When you really think about it, the most PoW coins that we "should" have lies at about 3 times the number of non-intersecting algorithms (or about 20 coins at the moment) which is way less than the number of substantive competing coins out there.