Will we be able to mine Litecoin with ASIC's?

[420]

It's a great point I havne't heard discussed.

Litecoin was supposed to be designed so only CPU's could use it and not GPU's, then scripts were written to use GPU instead of CPU and get way better hashrates

what if same scripts can be utilized to mine litecoins on ASIC?! (or another script WRITTEN to do it)

[Starlightbreaker]

no.

/thread

[CoinHoarder]

no.

/thread

this.

And yes, it has been discussed many times.

[420]

no.

/thread

this.

And yes, it has been discussed many times.

whats the problem?

[heinz]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=116987.0

[420]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=116987.0

the word 'litecoin' does not exist on that page

[bitmar]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=116987.0

the word 'litecoin' does not exist on that page

so what. BTC algorithm is different from the LTC. So is there answer to your question.

NO !!!

[enmaku]

no.

/thread

this.

And yes, it has been discussed many times.

whats the problem?

Before there was LiteCoin there was TeneBrix (or maybe shortly after, I dunno they all sort of came at once these altcoins). They both use an algorithm called sCrypt rather than Bitcoin's use of SHA256. SHA256 is a series of outrageously simple integer operations that require practically no memory to perform. sCrypt on the other hand is explicitly designed to use quite a lot of memory. CPUs are a general purpose processing device with a pretty fair amount of memory on the chip. GPUs have quite a lot of memory available to them, but are designed to share that memory evenly between each of their several hundred processor cores so the idea was that sCrypt would be GPU resistant because GPU cores have a harder time getting their hands on a decent pool of working memory - I haven't looked over any code to see how exactly anyone has beaten that limitation, but it was sort of a soft limitation.

The TL;DR version, what you REALLY need to understand about LiteCoin to get this answer is this: The thing holding you back from mining faster isn't the bit of the processor that's doing actual math, it's the amount of RAM your processor has and how fast it can access that RAM. RAM that's on the CPU itself = crazy fast, the RAM clicked into slots on your motherboard = comparatively quite slow.

So now imagine you're building an sCrypt ASIC... You design a special purpose circuit that does the math and put it on a chip with a fair amount of RAM. Congratulations, you've just re-designed the CPU you already had, but at greater cost, worse power efficiency and it's only ever going to be good for one thing thus limiting its potential resale value. Woo.

In short, you already have LiteCoin ASICs - they're manufactured by Intel and AMD.

[dust]

You obviously cannot mine LTC with a bitcoin ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit), if that is what you are asking.

So now imagine you're building an sCrypt ASIC... You design a special purpose circuit that does the math and put it on a chip with a fair amount of RAM. Congratulations, you've just re-designed the CPU you already had, but at greater cost, worse power efficiency and it's only ever going to be good for one thing thus limiting its potential resale value. Woo.

In short, you already have LiteCoin ASICs - they're manufactured by Intel and AMD.

However, this just isn't true.  It would be possible to design a chip that only performed scrypt and pair it with exactly the right amount of ram, and it would crush generic hardware in terms of efficiency.  Specialized hardware is always going to be faster than general purpose CPUs and GPUs, especially for highly parallelizable  tasks such as mining.

Is it worth it at current LTC prices though? Of course not.

In short, you already have LiteCoin ASICs - they're manufactured by Intel and AMD.

No, neither Intel nor AMD make devices with the sole function of mining Litecoins.

[Bogart]

Maybe a better question would be:

Can I harvest FPGAs from existing BTC mining boards, and put them onto a new board alongside some fast memory and use that to mine LTC?

Harvesting SMT chips already soldered onto boards sounds somewhat difficult, but is probably practically doable.

[dust]

Maybe a better question would be:

Can I harvest FPGAs from existing BTC mining boards, and put them onto a new board alongside some fast memory and use that to mine LTC?

Harvesting SMT chips already soldered onto boards sounds somewhat difficult, but is probably practically doable.

Theoretically, you could.  I'm not sure if all FPGAs have the proper IO to interface with memory at a decent speed though.

[enmaku]

However, this just isn't true.  It would be possible to design a chip that only performed scrypt and pair it with exactly the right amount of ram, and it would crush generic hardware in terms of efficiency.  Specialized hardware is always going to be faster than general purpose CPUs and GPUs, especially for highly parallelizable  tasks such as mining.

Except that there's no "exactly right amount of ram" for sCrypt.

sCrypt, like bCrypt is defined over a largeish table which is constantly accessed and modified, both in size and content, during the algorithm's run. The amount of space this table will take up is effectively a pseudorandom value dependent on the message so each hash will take a different amount of RAM than the last.

That's the entire reason sCrypt based altcoins were supposed to be GPU resistant and should still remain ASIC resistant: their memory requirement is both large and random and the algorithm itself is designed to access that memory as much as possible, thus making performance of a brute force attack against it heavily reliant on memory latency.

Again, I haven't looked at code to say how the GPU miner actually works, but the theory was that since all but a very very tiny amount of GPU memory is "pooled" in such a way that only one core can access it at a time, any GPU miner would have most of its threads deadlocked for use of that one shared resource most of the time. I'm tempted to say that the miner probably uses a very clever workaround to solve the locking problem, but I sincerely doubt that they've found a way to sincerely perform brute force against sCrypt without maintaining and heavily utilizing that large table in shared RAM.

I'm not arguing that an ASIC couldn't be built, just that it's unlikely any ASIC will have significant performance gains over mass-produced and readily-available CPUs. CPUs are already very close to ideal for this application and any optimizations gained by building a custom one-use-only chip are unlikely to be economically meaningful, regardless of whether such an increase is technically meaningful. If you produce a miner that is twice as fast as a CPU but costs 4 times as much, I don't see people lining up to buy it.

[dust]

There is an exactly right (optimal) amount of ram for a given set of computational units. CPUs and GPUs do not have their cache/memory specifically designed for scrypt, and therefore either have too much or too little of it.

I found this post on the subject: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=98535.msg1081219#msg1081219

[420]

well its making more sense...

if litecoin becomes succesful, only then would we look for litecoin ASIC's

if one thinks it would, litecoin may be a good long term investment right now

[pieppiep]

Another thing to keep in mind is the price of bitcoin and litecoin.
Amount of bitcoins mined in a year (with current 50BTC/block) is 2,628,000 at current (BTC-E) price = $ 31,793,544
Amount of litecoins mined in a year is 4 times more, 10,512,000 at current price (BTC-E) = $ 777,888
Difference of a factor of 40, so a lot less money to spend to make hardware to mine it.

[420]

Thanks for that

[DobZombie]

Thanks for that

Don't ask these questions about what an ASIC can do, you'll just get yelled at

 o.0

[Epicblood]

I have a few Xilinx ML605s coming my way soon, if I switch to lite coin, could I use those to mine?

[pieppiep]

Litecoin uses 128.5kB memory, I doubt the fpga itself has this memory, so you need some memory chip(s) besides it.
And even then, currently there is no litecoin bitfiles to load to the fpga, so those must be created also.

[420]

Litecoin uses 128.5kB memory, I doubt the fpga itself has this memory, so you need some memory chip(s) besides it.
And even then, currently there is no litecoin bitfiles to load to the fpga, so those must be created also.

eventually it will be created then. minimum of 1year