Why Have CPU-Only Coins Died?

[BitJunkie556]

So admittedly, a lot of the CPU-only mineable coins are shitcoins. Things like Hodlcoin are fun to play around with, in fact I mine some myself just for fun, and Riecoin for example, sounds like a good project that just happened to die. I've also mined a little GunCoin here and there, again, for the hell of it.

I know that in the beginning, things like Quark, etc were only mineable via CPU, in fact that was the case with BTC many years ago as far as I know.

But again, going back to coins like Hodlcoin, Riecoin, and some others that use similar CPU-only encryption-type algorithms, why have people given up on that whole concept? Plenty of coins are cpu-mineable, but it seems like the concept of a cpu-ONLY coin as a whole hasn't really caught on.

I mean there already several benefits to cpu-only coins. For example, CPU's with the horsepower needed to mine large amounts of currency are expensive, so very few will be willing to shell out that kind of cash, which would tend to make things more fair for the average computer user, being able to use their i3 laptop to mine a decent amount of coins. And compared to GPU-mining, again, high-end CPU's are expensive and it's harder to get, let's say 20 CPU mining rigs setup, than it is to stick 20 GPU's onto a few mining motherboards.

It seems like these things would serve to increase the value of mining said coins because they're generally harder to obtain for everyone, yet everyone also has a miner built right into their PC, so it seems like a win-win, if done right.

Maybe one of the biggest problems, going back to the beginning of my thread, is that most of the CPU-only coins have ended up being shitcoins. Some like Hodlcoin are fun to play around with, just like DOGE was for example, but they don't really offer anything useful or serious to the crypto world. Are the masses going to take a coin with a squirrel on it, as a serious currency to use in their day-to-day life? Doubtful.

Do you guys think CPU-only coins could make a comeback, should they actually offer real-world value? Or will they always stay dead? I'd love to hear your guys thoughts.

[ahmedjamal1998]

I don't think it's possible. It's much easier to mine those coins on GPUs since they have much higher computing power.
So cpu-only coins don't grab much if not any attention.

When miners are attracted to a coin, investors are so it gets some value. But if no one is hooked up to it, errrr dead.

[bathrobehero]

No. What you can CPU mine can almost always be mined on GPUs much more efficiently.

Look at it this way: CPUs have a few strong cores, generally between 2-16 while GPUs have thousands of smaller cores.

Now imagine each CPU core being like a strong weightlifter and GPU cores being small childs.

Now imagine mining being the task of picking berries in a forest; thousands of kids are much better suited than a few strong adults.

[BitJunkie556]

I guess I was referring to something like AES-NI like Hodlcoin, or... Well, I can't really find a name for the algo for RieCoin, but it mines with prime numbers or something like that. Apparently GPU's aren't very good at either of these, but then again, algorithms that only CPU's are good at are few and far between, and that might be part of it too...

But then again, yeah, big investors just may not get excited about CPU coins because the huge investment wont make sense, and then another issue is that the GPU's they have already been running for years won't help them. That doesn't help matters, I guess.

[Vivisector999]

The problem with CPU minable coins is that everyone has a CPU. 

This might not sounds like a problem, unless your looking at it in terms of security instead of a bunch of people wanting a piece of the action in mining.  Here lies the problem.  Back when CPU coins, heck even BTC back in the day was mined with CPU's, people would create botnets that would download the code to tens of thousands of computers around the world, and they could 51% a coin, or just take the majority of the coins quite easily, and not costing them a penny to do so.  Thus paying them to create more malware/viruses to create even more botnets. 

Creating a botnet trying to single out particular GPU's is a lot more difficult, and creating ones to pick off the few people with ASIC's is almost impossible. 

[solarrobot]

There are still different attempts at creating CPU friendly algorithms. One promising coin is Verium a pair to Vericoin. Verium's algorithm creates RAM as it's bottleneck, which makes it so CPUs are more affordable/practical than GPU, and an ASIC is basically impossible (or the price would have to be insanely high before it was worth creating and ASIC for this algorithm that was more efficient than CPU).