The type of new alt-coin we really need

[mg27341]

Basically something like litecoin, but with the following two characteristics:

1. GPUs should be no better at it than CPUs and hopefully worse.
2. It has to be absolutely FPGA and ASIC proof.

Litecoin had the right idea, but didn't go far enough. The way to really make this happen is to use something like scrypt, but have it access far more memory than is used by litecoin, by tweaking the scrypt params. That way GPUs will not be able to run a gazillion threads, because at least for the foreseeable future video cards will not have enough memory to support them.

Let me know what you guys think...

[Peleus]

Why.

[speeder]

Why.

[mg27341]

Why.

At the very least to even the playing field. Everybody has a computer or two in their house and chances are they are not an order of magnitude apart in performance, as is true of video cards. Also, there will be less "cheating" by pros, because the playing field will consist of only one type of player - the CPU.

Also, you can do more interesting stuff like SHA-3-1024 for example as the hash (but still using an scrypt like scheme).

[str4wm4n]

I think this is a good idea

[iamrickrock]

If it can be done I would like to see it at least tried.

[relm9]

Why.

At the very least to even the playing field. Everybody has a computer or two in their house and chances are they are not an order of magnitude apart in performance, as is true of video cards. Also, there will be less "cheating" by pros, because the playing field will consist of only one type of player - the CPU.

Also, you can do more interesting stuff like SHA3 for example as the hash (but still using an scrypt like scheme).

Don't see how it levels the playing field. People with access to server farms would have a huge advantage, for one.

[Quix]

It would have to sigificantly different from bitcoin because the whole hashing idea doesn't work within your requirements.

[Peleus]

Why.

At the very least to even the playing field. Everybody has a computer or two in their house and chances are they are not an order of magnitude apart in performance, as is true of video cards. Also, there will be less "cheating" by pros, because the playing field will consist of only one type of player - the CPU.

It's not an even playing field.

- What about those who have 2 computers in a house instead of 1?
- What about those who have access to a network of computer (100's) instead of your home?
- What about those with thousands of computers on a botnet?

- How is it currently not an even playing field when you can currently go and buy a graphics card?
- Why is requiring you to buy a graphics card more unfair that requiring you to buy a CPU?
- How are pro's "cheating"?
- How are pro's prevented from cheating if limiting it to only CPU?

Your notion of fairness is retarded.

[mg27341]

In a nutshell it's more fair, because people are more likely to have 2-3 computers vs 2-3 video cards per computer. As for server farms and the like, I'm afraid that that would be difficult to get around with any scheme.

[dreamwatcher]

This has been discussed many times before:

For example a post I did very recently:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=177972.msg1854935#msg1854935

As for the reason for a cpu coin quoted from above post:

Yes, I believe there is need for a CPU bound coin to allow new users without either the knowledge or equipment investment to start using crypto coins.

Face it, getting started is not easy. It is not easy to trade cash, use credit cards or any conventional means to buy coins. The process often involves using expensive wire services to send cash to small companies one has never heard of who often charge their own fees. I doubt any of us has the capital to start a business that would be capable of absorbing the cost of reversed transactions on non-reversible crypto-coins to solve the issue.

A CPU bound coin would allow easy entry as mining would be easier and could be as simple hitting a button in the client.

Also, there is more going on with this type of project then most know....        

[markm]

There isn't really any need for this yet because so far we still have several coins that the GPU miners are basically ignoring, so for many many months now they have been mined by CPU miners quite nicely. As long as there are always coins the GPU miners ignore there is plenty to keep your CPUs busy. I0coin, GRouPcoin, GeistGeld, Tenebrix are all still mine-able using CPUs right now I think.

Also, see http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=cpu_mining for what has turned out to be a quite popular method of automatically making money with CPUs.

-MarkM-

[Kevlar]

Why.

At the very least to even the playing field. Everybody has a computer or two in their house and chances are they are not an order of magnitude apart in performance, as is true of video cards. Also, there will be less "cheating" by pros, because the playing field will consist of only one type of player - the CPU.

Also, you can do more interesting stuff like SHA3 for example as the hash (but still using an scrypt like scheme).

I fear you've not actually made an argument there. "It should be easy to make" isn't actually a good property of a currency, and you'd face the same problem you face now: Everyone and their toaster getting into the business, making difficulty shoot up and your mining efforts worthless. That's why they started investigating alternate forms of value creation besides proof of work, like proof of stake (PPC), and consensus with verification (XRP).

[dreamwatcher]

There isn't really any need for this yet because so far we still have several coins that the GPU miners are basically ignoring, so for many many months now they have been mined by CPU miners quite nicely. As long as there are always coins the GPU miners ignore there is plenty to keep your CPUs busy. I0coin, GRouPcoin, GeistGeld, Tenebrix are all still mine-able using CPUs right now I think.

-MarkM-

And as we have sparred about, that is fine for long term investors.

However as soon as those coins start to gain value or get noticed, GPUS will jump on those chains knocking CPU miners out.

The introduction coin needs to be CPU friendly/GPU hostile period, or else it will become useless as an entry coin rather quickly.

[markm]

That doesn't matter, at least not so far, because so far the GPUs etc have always left some other coin to the CPU miners when they jumped ship.

Also, the stuff the Devtome wiki page talks about is totally not do-able with GPUs etc, it is very very much a CPU-only approach.

-MarkM-

[mg27341]

There isn't really any need for this yet because so far we still have several coins that the GPU miners are basically ignoring, so for many many months now they have been mined by CPU miners quite nicely. As long as there are always coins the GPU miners ignore there is plenty to keep your CPUs busy. I0coin, GRouPcoin, GeistGeld, Tenebrix are all still mine-able using CPUs right now I think.

-MarkM-

And as we have sparred about, that is fine for long term investors.

However as soon as those coins start to gain value or get noticed, GPUS will jump on those chains knocking CPU miners out.

The introduction coin needs to be CPU friendly/GPU hostile period, or else it will become useless as an entry coin rather quickly.

GPUs will never jump on the bandwagen if your use of scrypt requires 256MB per thread. GPUs have many threads, but they're dead slow (each) compared to CPU threads, especially if the per thread memory requirements are enormous, limiting GPU parallelism.

[markm]

So we make a litecoin-type coin but set scrypt parameters to where they will need two or three gigs of RAM per thread? So even a 3 gig GPU will only be able to fit one thread? Of course all those cheap old pentiums with only 1 or 2 gigs of RAM you see on kijiji/craigslist type sites will be out of the running too but thats necessary to keep the GPUs out I guess... Even old ones usually have motherboards that can take at least 4 gigs of RAM though so throw some extra RAM in them and they could be used...

-MarkM-

[meebs]

Basically something like litecoin, but with the following two characteristics:

1. GPUs should be no better at it than CPUs and hopefully worse.
2. It has to be absolutely FPGA and ASIC proof.

Litecoin had the right idea, but didn't go far enough. The way to really make this happen is to use something like scrypt, but have it access far more memory than is used by litecoin, by tweaking the scrypt params. That way GPUs will not be able to run a gazillion threads, because at least for the foreseeable future video cards will not have enough memory to support them.

Let me know what you guys think...

Lets call it BotnetCoin

[mg27341]

So we make a litecoin-type coin but set scrypt parameters to where they will need two or three gigs of RAM per thread? So even a 3 gig GPU will only be able to fit one thread? Of course all those cheap old pentiums with only 1 or 2 gigs of RAM you see on kijiji/craigslist type sites will be out of the running too but thats necessary to keep the GPUs out I guess... Even old ones usually have motherboards that can take at least 4 gigs of RAM though so throw some extra RAM in them and they could be used...

-MarkM-

It doesn't have to be 2GB per thread, it could be 256 MB per thread. That supports old computers and new CPUs will still win out over GPU threads.

Michael

[mg27341]

Lets call it BotnetCoin

I get your joke, but I was actually thinking more along the lines of Faircoin, as in something anybody with a computer or tablet could generate.

Michael