Litecoin IMMUNE to Bitcoin ASICs

[smoothie]

I've never followed the logic of:

Step 1. Be rich

Step 2. Spend Obscene amounts of money on sufficient technology to threaten network

Step 3. Leverage technology to destroy network thus making all coins worth effectively zero

Step 4. Show me the profit ffs.

Yup I agree it is unlikely. Just like it is unlikely that a botnet will bother with "attacking" the litecoin network. Thanks for making my other point.

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[whitenight639]

I've never followed the logic of:

Step 1. Be rich

Step 2. Spend Obscene amounts of money on sufficient technology to threaten network

Step 3. Leverage technology to destroy network thus making all coins worth effectively zero

Step 4. Show me the profit ffs.

Yup I agree it is unlikely. Just like it is unlikely that a botnet will bother with "attacking" the litecoin network. Thanks for making my other point.

You forget that as popularity in bitcoin grows so does its threat to existing financial institutions and government agencies, some of which have large rooms full of hardware they could afford to turn to the task for a while, this could be the biggest threat to bitcoin, If you think that many big banks like JP Morgan use computer trading extensively, this is not even considering government agencies, They say that military tech is 20-50 years ahead, so who knows what the NSA is packing.

[John (John K.)]

Meh. It just means that Litecoin isn't significant enough to be taken seriously yet. That's not something proud or good for Litecoin.

See my point above to D&T.

Litecoin being segregated in the mining business from bitcoin is healthy.

ASIC's are an unstoppable part of any cryptographic 'coin' as it gets more accepted and widespread. It would seem that at the moment Litecoin is 'safe' from ASIC's and can only be mined by GPU's, but an ASIC is sure to come if Litecoin gains fame and widespread acceptance like Bitcoin does.

[tacotime]

ASICs will come no doubt, but there is a significant barrier to entry with litecoin due to the cost to develop and produce an ASIC for litecoin and the currently low value of the coin.  The configuration of GPU memory and ALUs is nearly ideal for LTC mining, making the likelihood of extreme efficiency gains seen for BTC (100x) unlikely.  I would guess we will see possibly a 10-fold improvement in efficiency, if that.

Probably an optimization for running on ASICs will be diminishing the memory requirement size while enhancing the number of ALU calls, which would then be trimmed down to a circuit and put on die.  But even cutting the memory requirement by 10x to ~10kb would enhance the number of ALU calls 10-20 fold.  The net effect is ending up with a slower but more efficient scrypt processor, if I had to guess how many cores you'd be able to fit on a 100 cm^2 die I'd wager it'd be in the hundreds and not a big improvement over GPUs in terms of speed.

The other thing to do would be to add memory and a fast memory interface... but GPU memory and GPU cores are so fast that it's difficult to compete.  If you could get GDDR5 and make a fast interface for it and make <45 nm dies (yeah, right), you'd really be moving fast and efficiently (way beyond a 10x increase in efficiency), but there's such a huge barrier of entry to that that it's probably a long ways off.

[makomk]

ASIC's are an unstoppable part of any cryptographic 'coin' as it gets more accepted and widespread. It would seem that at the moment Litecoin is 'safe' from ASIC's and can only be mined by GPU's, but an ASIC is sure to come if Litecoin gains fame and widespread acceptance like Bitcoin does.

Not really. The hashing algorithm Bitcoin uses was designed for efficient ASIC implementation, whereas litecoin uses scrypt which is structured to reduce the advantage an ASIC has over general-purpose hardware.

[Monster Tent]

ASIC's  might not 51% attack litecoin but all the GPU's that become redundant for mining bitcoin will probably "attack" litecoin 

[smoothie]

ASIC's  might not 51% attack litecoin but all the GPU's that become redundant for mining bitcoin will probably "attack" litecoin 

If the rate at which ASICs are released is slow...as it has been i can see GPU miners being forced to mine elsewhere.