Why just new "scrypt" coins and no new "SHA-256" coins ?

[rammy2k2]

Why ?

[markm]

Butt-hurt GPU-owners.

-MarkM-

[Wolf Rainer]

Why ?

Cause the alternative coins was a way to scape from the ASIC and BF miners in order to all be able of profit and not just the biggest fish. If you make a new alternative coin today using sha-256 it will survive till someone point his asic miners to they taking the 51% and killing it in the act.

[etbbtc]

sha256 coin will be crashed by asic miners soon!

[skyangel]

How about a SHA-512 (SHA3) coin?

[RustyShackleford1950]

Butt-hurt GPU-owners.

-MarkM-

 

SHA alts are vunerable to ASICs mining them temporarily, rapidly increasing difficulty, and then dumping them when profitability goes down. Once the ASICs leave, the network slows to a crawl, and effectively cannot function. You can watch this happen with many of the alt coins now. Just watch TRC to see it in action.

[Craftyman]

Doesn't that mean that ASICs are hindering the overall growth of crypto currencies in general? Does having more total hashing power have any intrinsic benefit for a network once difficulty adjustment's effectively weed out all the GPU miners?

[alex_fun]

Hahaha

Butt-hurt GPU-owners.

-MarkM-

[markm]

Butt-hurt GPU-owners.

-MarkM-

 

SHA alts are vunerable to ASICs mining them temporarily, rapidly increasing difficulty, and then dumping them when profitability goes down. Once the ASICs leave, the network slows to a crawl, and effectively cannot function. You can watch this happen with many of the alt coins now. Just watch TRC to see it in action.

That is really silly. Blame ASICs for what GPU miners have been doing themselves all along.

That problem was demonstrated on namecoin, long before ASICs, and was fixed, and only re-arose because pretend developers incompetently hacking out pretend cryptocurrences are so mindbogglingly incompetent that they somehow not only managed to fail to see it coming but also somehow managed to avoid the fixes, either by  hacking the fixes back out of the code in the course of their butchery or by carefully hunting down one of the only coins whose own developers were too incompetent to apply any of the fixes as the perfect coin to base their hack-jobs on.

-MarkM-

[Crystallas]

How about a SHA-512 (SHA3) coin?

SHA3.512 is also easily ASIC exploitable. Unless it uses a PBKDF2 stack, like scrypt.

The other issue, is not just designing cryptographically wild algorithms, but also being able to implement the functions. It's not as easy as plug-in-play algorithm and vola, the wallets, network, blockchain, and miners can dance together in harmony. (also a big reason for so many worthless copycat coins with tiny tweaks and a lot of con-games to flood the market with junk.)

[doublec]

SHA alts are vunerable to ASICs mining them temporarily, rapidly increasing difficulty, and then dumping them when profitability goes down. Once the ASICs leave, the network slows to a crawl, and effectively cannot function. You can watch this happen with many of the alt coins now. Just watch TRC to see it in action.

Coin designers should use a better difficulty adjustment algorithm. PPCoin and Devcoin seem to be handling asics coming and going well. My pool was mining devcoins and dropped from 5 THash/s to 1THash/s on devcoin and it barely caused a blip in block times. If  coin designers make their coins merge mineable then MM pools can mine it and help reduce the effect of asics causing havoc.

[jonytk]

Meh you are supossing the new alt-coin launcher have good programming skills, nmc was saved from asics by merged mining, yes, but it was not an easy fix. It will meant your coin will have to be merged mined with btc to be safe, hence profitability will drop down as diff skyrockets.
 
The fixes you are talking in TRC are: faster diff ajustment, and in PPC the proof of stake that meant that early adopters get to have more coins just by having more coins than others...

[jrlepage]

Was wondering this myself... now I know

[anderl]

Butt-hurt GPU-owners.

-MarkM-

rofl.  very true. 

But what is important is that at this stage asic chips can only be produced by wealthy backers who would rather mine (speculating) than actually deliver the products that they intended to (Avalon being somewhat an exception).

This goes against what the purpose of the network was supposed to be a distributed community based system.  It is why I'm against CPU based systems as they are easy to exploit by botnets who again are a form of centralization.

[digitalindustry]

Butt-hurt GPU-owners.

-MarkM-

rofl.  very true. 

But what is important is that at this stage asic chips can only be produced by wealthy backers who would rather mine (speculating) than actually deliver the products that they intended to (Avalon being somewhat an exception).

This goes against what the purpose of the network was supposed to be a distributed community based system.  It is why I'm against CPU based systems as they are easy to exploit by botnets who again are a form of centralization.

+1 - there are solutions, but,  i believe .

[Praxis]

Butt-hurt GPU-owners.

-MarkM-

Spoken like a true butt-hurt ASIC-owner!

[spartacus_]

Good question.

[MGUK]

For some reason, I feel Satoshi intended the mining process of Bitcoin to be "fair" as in "anyone can have a go and get somewhere"

SHA256 soon will mean only ASICs are worth mining with.

Scrypt is closer to the "anyone can have a go an get somewhere" idea for the time being at least.

[digitalindustry]

Butt-hurt GPU-owners.

-MarkM-

Spoken like a true butt-hurt ASIC-owner!

lol +1 !

[Walter Rothbard]

For some reason, I feel Satoshi intended the mining process of Bitcoin to be "fair" as in "anyone can have a go and get somewhere"

SHA256 soon will mean only ASICs are worth mining with.

Anyone can get an ASIC, though.  They aren't any more out of reach than a big GPU farm, or a big CPU farm.