Will fund ASIC board for mining community. Need Hardware devs.

[Raize]

Did interest for this just kind of die out or something? I have an investor that was asking me how easily someone could come up with an ASIC farm and why I wasn't running one myself recently.

[ttul]

Did interest for this just kind of die out or something? I have an investor that was asking me how easily someone could come up with an ASIC farm and why I wasn't running one myself recently.

The idea of the community doing this has pretty much died. But other groups are moving ahead. If you are interested in keeping up with LargeCoin, visit http://largecoin.com.

[jetmine]

I think it is now evident that the mining algorithm probably should have been memory hard, not just processing hard. That is, the mining algorithm should have been designed to require at least 128MB of RAM. That would have made CPU and GPU mining practical and on a roughly even footing, and it would have made ASIC/FPGA mining impractical.

Why?  We're only seeing ongoing optimization towards what has been asked for.

We would see exactly the same thing happening with a "memory hard" algorithm.  Probably the trend would be to use big physical footprint chips with few logic resources, interfacing to many high density DRAM chips simultanously.  Memory octopuses so to say, keeping all DRAM busy at all times.  CPUs and GPUs would look pale against those, too, and you could THEN argue that a "CPU hard" algorithm should have been chosen instead ........ (?!)

[NF6X]

Requiring more RAM would have no negative impact on the practicality of FPGA or ASIC mining. It's not terribly difficult to hang RAM off of an FPGA or ASIC. For that matter, the chip's memory bus architecture could be optimized for whatever the mining algorithm required, in contrast with a PC that has a general-purpose memory bus architecture.

No matter what algorithm you devise, a special-purpose machine can be designed which does it better than a general-purpose machine. It may or may not be cost-effective to design and produce that machine, but I don't think it's generally possible to devise an algorithm that is efficient on some CPU family but could not be done better with specialized hardware.

[ElectricMucus]

Posting in a necrobumped thread.